Where I live, we have been on “lockdown” for four weeks. It’s gonna be a lot longer. We are all very tired.
In my old life, I was a child psychologist. I specialized in diagnostic assessment and therapy for kids with anxiety, autism, ADHD, behavior problems, learning disabilities, you name it. I liked working with the under 10 set; the younger the better.
In my new life, I work/earn about 30% of what I was doing before, spend all day trying to do therapy over videoconferencing, finally getting around to listening to Harry Potter while doing housework, and spending a hell of a lot of “thoughts and prayers” hoping that my wife (who is “essential” and is still leaving the house every day) does not get sick.
Another thing I do is sarcastically mutter “What a time to be alive” about 234980934587923 times per day.
For those of you who do therapy, or are in therapy (and yay!!! for you; that is awesome 🙂 ), you’ve likely discovered that “telehealth” is a little weird and awkward. You may even hate it. But as you can also probably imagine, “doing telehealth” with the 8 and under crowd is pretty much impossible. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I do my best to try to emulate the “YouTubers” that my clients all love, and come up with creative ways to “play” via videochat. (Spoiler alert: I am not good at this.)
Despite my best efforts, I often feel useless.
It rarely feels like I’m helping much these days. (It’s a nice throwback to grad school when I felt incompetent about 85% of the time.) It feels like I just woke up and there are four moons and the sky is on fire and I just learned that I am a talking pineapple but I just keep trying to do therapy like everything is normal.
I will be honest, one of my therapeutic strengths is being a “fixer”. I know therapists are not supposed to do that. Or so the experts say (what do they know). But I work in a specialized subset of child psychology, with a very clear science-based approach to therapy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m empathetic, friendly, personable, and playful. I couldn’t do what I do without human connection, compassion, and a heavy dose of creativity. But what I *do* is solve problems. I take decades and decades of research and other science-y stuff, and I use it to fix things. I solve problems and I answer questions. (“That’s what I do. I drink and I know things.”)
….so this is a hard time for me.
Here are the sum total of questions I can answer right now:
- your insurance will cover telehealth.
- school will not be back in session until next year.
- here is a list of the places in town which are well-stocked in wine and relatively free from crowds.
Questions I cannot answer:
- Everything else.
Outside of the obvious (disease ecology, epidemiology, politics, economics) which everyone and their mom seems to have an opinion about now, I also cannot answer the questions I’m used to being able to answer:
- What is the likely outcome of this stressful situation?
- How will this impact my child’s learning? Their social development? Emotional development?
- How should I parent them best right now?
- Will my child be okay? Will we be okay?
- What do I do now?
Bypassing the fact that no one can ever really have the answers to these questions (existential life stuff, human existence, blah, blah blah), we are living in a time of no answers.
This is a real bummer for someone who is a fixer.
We are living in a broken time with no answers. And we are being asked to act as if life is normal, like some sort of macabre HBO drama (I’m talking the newer ones with dystopian or supernatural element).
But I know this is an act of denial. I hear the strain in the families I work with; I hear the strain my own voice.
Three weeks ago, I listened to Brene Brown’s new podcast Unlocking Us about “FFTs” (or “fucking first times”) and how horrible they are for all of us. On that day, I was at the end of my first “work from home” week. I was walking through the woods with my dog, feeling kinda peaceful about it in spite of everything. It felt like if we could just get through this FFT, things would be normal again.
Last week, I noticed people starting to drop the phrase “when we go back to normal” from their sentences.
There will be no “normal” again.
Three weeks ago, when I started “doing telehealth”, I believed what I told people– This is temporary. This is a band aid. (And because I’m a narcissist, I reminded myself that I’ve done telehealth before and I’m excellently talented, so I jumped into it with no anxiety whatsoever, aka: denial.)
Four weeks in, and it has been some of the hardest four weeks of my career. I had brutalizing weeks of predoctoral internship, exams that I failed and retook, a board exam that I took the week that my grandfather died when I felt like a zombie. I humblebrag about times I worked internationally and scooped up 3-inch long cockroaches with my bare hands, rode crammed in a shit-sack of a truck that kept breaking down for 37 hours to get to a place where I hoped I could help, held a woman’s hand as she let her 9th child die rather than have another C-section.
But this– this is hard.
It’s hard because when I sit in my blissfully climate-controlled and infection-free (knock on wood) home office talking to people on video all day, I’m looking at myself. My face looms large in the video screen. And outside of wondering why Zoom makes me look like I have so many chins, I look into the face of someone who can’t fix anything. Who has no answers.
I’m suddenly a fixer who can’t fix.
I want to say, oh, this is a lesson because all of those other times, I wasn’t really able to “fix” anything either. But it’s not really true. Yeah, it’s about gaining perspective, and realizing that all those times I was using my fancy tools and techniques to help people, I didn’t really need them. I was just helping by being human.
In all honesty, that’s bullshit.
Not that being human isn’t important. In fact, I think it is the single most important thing we can do in this life. But let’s face it, if all you needed was to talk to a good, kind, present human to fix your problems, your BFF should work just fine.
So now I’m left feeling helpless and unhelpful a lot of the time, without an anchor or a compass. But it occurs to me that for those of us in the helping profession, the most important thing we can do is just hold space. That’s what I do these days. I hold space and I provide some consistency for kids and I provide some sense of normalcy. And maybe 5 minutes of stress-free work time for their parents. And I have to believe that’s something. That it’s more than just playing hangman on Zoom for an hour. I have to believe that it helps, even if just a little bit.
That when a 13-year-old spends a full hour staring at me without saying much, but types
“i miss you”
in the chat box before we sign off, that’s something.
So whether you’re a parent or a therapist or a human of any kind, I have sad news: you can’t fix it. And you probably feel terrible about that. Which is okay. All we can do is be present, and hold space.
“Let everything happen to you. Beauty and Terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” -Rainer Maria Rilke
Some Supervision Required. 