What are we doing with all our COVID trauma?

The subtle and insidious ways that trauma lives on

Image by Mitch on Unsplash

This month, my social media ‘memories’ have been transporting me back to March 2020. That crazy moment in time when the world turned on its head, planes were grounded, borders closed, and we entered into a global lockdown. Anniversaries always bring moments of pause and reflection for me. This year, the therapist in me is wondering – what are we doing with all our unprocessed trauma from those years?

Unprocessed trauma has an uncanny way of replaying itself in our lives until we address it and heal it.

In Western culture, we are not good at tending to our wounds. We get busy, distract, avoid, self-medicate with an array of different substances, and turn away from what needs healing in our psyches.

The distraction may help us cope for a little while, but I’ve learned that unprocessed trauma always comes back to haunt us, hanging around the periphery of our lives like a ghostly presence that drains the life force from our days.

When we make these hurts conscious, when they can be held and witnessed and met with a compassionate loving presence, they start to move and heal and integrate and release their grip on our daily lives.

If we don’t do this work, we will continue to bear the weight of that trauma and ultimately it may be passed on to the next generation.

I’ve witnessed many people of my generation carrying the traumas of parents and grandparents who lived through World War II. (I’ve written about this here).

After the war, there was a tendency to try to quickly move on with day-to-day living, for people to throw themselves into life, and as a part of this, those memories, those experiences, were shut away in a box, tucked towards the back of the mental closet, never to fully be spoken about again. I never heard any of my grandparents discuss their wartime experiences, yet, looking back, I felt the effects of these experiences on their lives. I witnessed the quick tempers, anxious minds, drinking and smoking habits that I can now appreciate were likely after-effects of what they had lived through.

Of course, a pandemic is different from a war. But over the last 4 years, we lived through some intensely challenging times.

Everyone’s experiences were different, but it’s a rare person who was not faced with some level of heightened fear during the pandemic years. For some, this was a fear of illness, death, and loss. For others financial fears, empty supermarket shelves, and the instability created by daily life being upended. Some feared vaccines, government-imposed mandates, and personal choices being taken away, while many feared other people, steering a 2-metre distance from friends and neighbours as they walked the streets. Wherever you found yourself in this picture, it likely activated survival fears, impacted your nervous system, and triggered your body’s threat responses.

Piled on top of our fears, were varying degrees of loss – loss of loved ones, opportunities to say goodbye or attend funerals, loss of businesses, livelihoods, freedoms. Isolation, loneliness, relationship breakdowns, and the fall out of this - despair and depression.

I could go on but I think you get the picture, and I imagine most of us can find ourselves somewhere in this list. And these traumas landed on top of and compounded the many different shades of trauma that already existed in our lives.

But what have we done with these experiences? Just like in the aftermath of World War II, I get the impression we have collectively decided to put all these experiences in a box, high on a shelf where we don’t peak at it too often.

The research studies I have seen on this, point towards increased levels of anxiety and depression in the aftermath of the pandemic years¹.

In my practice room, I see the ripple effects of these years extending their tendrils into the present in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Dysregulated nervous systems, poor sleep, anxieties about money and the future, grief and loss, and ongoing feelings of displacement.

Unprocessed trauma tends to go underground and comes out sideways. It can show up as physical health issues, driven by heightened inflammation in our systems from the body’s stress response. It can show up as mood issues, anxiety, or addiction issues, as we ‘self-medicate’ to suppress that which we don’t want to feel. It can show up as a short temper, a sensitised nervous system, poor concentration, exhaustion. It can spill its contents into our relationships, our parenting, and our day-to-day lives.

Carl Jung taught us:

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‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate’

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Nowhere is this more true than in the field of trauma. Our unprocessed, undigested traumas have a habit of revisiting us in different forms, forcing us to re-face what we have been avoiding.

I noticed this in my own life, just before Christmas, when a fire at my clinic filled the building with toxic smoke and displaced us from our work spaces. As I tried to quickly pivot my client work to new spaces or working online, and pondered the invisible toxic ‘threat’ that lurked in the very air we breathe, I watched the way my nervous system was responding (over-responding) and recognised the echoes of unprocessed COVID-era trauma my body was still carrying. I wasn’t one of the worst affected by the pandemic, so I can only imagine what lives in the nervous systems of others.

It's tempting to try to sweep the past under the carpet and ‘move on’, but I encourage you to take time to revisit what you carry from those recent years.

We heal in community, by telling our stories, being witnessed and met with compassion. We heal through having the courage to be vulnerable, to acknowledge what has been hard. We heal by grieving our losses, by settling our fractious nervous systems, by finding safe and stable ground in our lives. We heal by moving towards that which hurts, bringing it out of the shadows and into the light, by talking about and integrating what we have lived through.

Perhaps because everyone went through it in some shape or form, we see it as less important than our individual traumas. There is a sense that shared suffering can make something more tolerable. However, what we experienced was shocking, significant and prolonged, and I think it may take years, decades, or even generations to truly conceptualise what the fallout has been.

I’d love to hear your perceptions of this and how you see the impact of the pandemic years on yourself and those around you. Join me in the comments to add your thoughts. (If you’re reading this in an email, click through to the website to join the conversation).

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1. Here is a sample of the research data on this subject:

2022 data from the WHO show a 25% increase in rates of depression and anxiety

Kathrirvel, N (2020) Post COVID-19 pandemic mental health challenges. Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 53: 102430

Murphy, E. et al (2021) The effects of the pandemic on mental health in persons with and without a psychiatric history. Psychological Medicine, 53: 6

Laskaweic, D; Grajek, M; Szlacheta, P; & Korzonek-Szlacheta, I. (2022) Post-Pandemic Stress Disorder as an effect of the epidemiological situation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare, 10 (6), 975