Posted on 11/17/2021
There are many voices out there discussing and suggesting ways that governments and society at large should respond to COVID-19. There are others offering advice for physically recovering from the virus if you have had it. But that's not the topic of this series. Whether or not your family or your child has been directly affected by the virus itself, and regardless of your political affiliations or opinions on how well it has been handled or what precautions and restrictions you take or think others should take, we can all agree on something: it's been traumatic. And even if you aren't in a place to control or influence how your community responds, you will play a significant role in helping your own family recover from this storm. In our first 2 posts in this series on Responding and Recovering from a Pandemic (see Parts 1 & 2), we established the fact that the past year has created for all our children, to varying degrees, an adverse childhood experience, or ACE.
Considering Individual Experiences
If your family has lost family members or friends due to COVID-19 (or anything else, for that matter) or had other extraordinarily upsetting circumstances due to the pandemic, such as loss of job or housing, this reality may be intensified; it can also be more extreme if your child already had other ACEs or special needs such as Autism, which heighten the body's sensitivity to situations and increase the prominence of the fight-or-flight response. Even if your child has not been formally diagnosed or identified as having a specific mental health struggle or any documented special needs, if your child already has a deficit of executive skills (which we discussed in this series, responding to difficult emotions and dealing with change can contribute to the effects of certain circumstances as well. While any of those factors will cause the trauma of the past year to have even more significance, they will still benefit from the following emotional health basics.
Validating Your Child's Experiences and Emotions
Communicating to your children that their experiences or emotions are not accurate or valid is entirely unhelpful. Doing that, regardless of your motivation, can be described as "gas lighting," often revealing our own emotional unhealthiness. When we refuse to acknowledge loss and grief, they become no less real. Maybe we're uncomfortable with big emotions - those of ourselves and others. This can be because we were brought up in a way that promoted unhealthy habits of "emotional stuffing" - or in a home where extreme emotions and abuse have made us swing to the opposite extreme as a form of coping and keeping the peace (at least on the surface). But these stuffed emotions can actually cause more harm than giving voice to them.
Modeling Emotionally Healthy Processing
As messy as it seems, the process of helping our children deal with their difficult emotions starts with dealing with our own "stuff." Once we've at least named our difficulties, we can model this kind of healthy emotional processing. It starts with identifying or naming difficulties and expressing them in some way - whether in art, via journaling, or simply talking. Sometimes we can effectively work through this on our own, and other times we get stuck and need to ask for help from a trusted friend or professional counselor. But no matter how small, remember that every step we take will also be a step we can help our children to take - putting them further ahead than we were yesterday. We'll talk about some specific ways to productively discuss your own emotions, and those of your kids, in our next post.
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