Week 8, (5/4 to 5/8), is it week 8 into the COVID-19 State of the Emergency in the State of Massachusetts?
It seems that everyone is adjusting to the new normal. All the training scheduled are all online. I jsut signed up another 5-day training online in the end of June. Most of my clients are getting into the routines of the Telehealth.
Positives, a few clients who have been working with me for over a year, actually started to feel much better than they can decrease the frequency of therapy to every other week. I was really happy for them because they have gradually moved out of their childhood trauma as the pandemic is slowly getting under control. When this pandemic is over, they will be ready to face the new world with their new self as they have worked through their childhood trauma with a new sense of identity.
The interesting observation is the number of calls I received for the couple’s therapy. I think, this week along, I have received at least five inquiries for the couple’s therapy. Many people, over the phone, told me that the conflicts have been increasing. Similar to my observations on some of the clients from the early weeks, it seems that one of the conflicts among all the regular topics is “safety vs. risk,” meaning, the partners have different ideas considering what’s safe and what’s a risk.
I found this interesting and sad. The conflicts between the couples about “what’s safe” made me feel interesting because the friction of safety wasn’t the focus in the past. Or, let me rephrase it, security is often not the focus of the conflict but hidden with some other topics. For example, some couples’ might fight about the savings for future retirement. The sense of security is hidden in the financial dispute. The other example is parents often fight about what’s the safety of their children. In this case, safety is hidden in the parenting issues. I live alone, and I have been single for many years.
I often envy people who have family members living with them during this period. I have not seen my mother and brother for three years. I just saw my sister right before the pandemic breaks out in early January in Taiwan. So, it’s been five months since I saw my sister. I feel sad when I heard people saying: “I can’t wait to go back to work so that I don’t have to see my partner 24-7.” It made me sad when I heard statements like this because I can’t help but wonder: “what happened? This was not how you feel when you walked down the aisle.”
In the past few years, I have found a group of close friends who live very close to me. We checked on each other during this period. One of them always asked if I needed anything when she went to the grocery store. She worked from home and didn’t have to check Clorox or Lysol, but she checked them for me whenever she went to the grocery store. When she dropped those supplies to me, if she was lucky enough to find a bottle, I savored the moment when we can be each other’s presence with the masks on and standing 6 feet apart.
I can’t imagine living with a significant other but wanting to get out of there. Maybe I am wrong, but it made me sad and wondered how did a happy couple walking down the aisle become a couple who just wanted to get away from each other.
So, notes to myself is to figure out how to help those couples communicate their sense of security of unsafely during this period and to build a new meaning of safety within the couple’s relationship.
