Half a year has passed since everything started. We have experienced strangeness, fear and anguish, anger, love, solidarity and grief. Now, at the beginning of autumn – and without the summer light – sadness appears strongly. Its signs are clear: silence between friends, without the bustle of WhatsApp groups or face-to-face encounters ; exhaustion and disaffection from creative or professional activities; sleeping problems; restlessness in the body; and an intimate sense of loss of meaning in many of the things we do, no longer having a clear objective or perspective.
L. expressed it – a patient who spends a lot of time with screens – with these words: “It’s like going by train and seeing how your life goes by, but you are out.” This phrase reflects well the feeling of exile that each of us has experienced at some time in all this time. Exile from his own life.
Everyone has their own reasons, but we all share some of them. Among them the disappointment of what does not come after the expectations of the de-escalation. Or the losses that accumulate (lives, jobs, ties, resources). To which is added a growing social crisis with more and more evicted lives, mistrust in leaders , the rejection of confusing and contradictory measures, and the exhaustion of so much uncertainty and changes that stop us in an endless stand-by.
Space and time coordinates
People are guided by two basic axes, the coordinates of modernity. I mean space, which includes the link to others, and time. It is enough to see the techniques of psychological torture to understand their importance. When a detainee is isolated and all temporal references are removed (through sealed rooms or drugs), the immediate psychological impact is a confused state, with signs of depression and paralysis, after an incipient rage. Some of that, to a lesser extent of course, is happening to us.
There is something unreal in the landscape of masks in which we live that sometimes makes us not recognize the acquaintance who passes by, that we cannot understand the page of the book that we have just read (even if it is an easy text). Or that kisses and hugs from a movie surprise us, as if that were already another time.
Distance from others also distances us from ourselves. We also find it difficult to imagine the future post-COVID-19, and we resort more easily to feeding nostalgia. Some young people – not all – and a few adults, as we have seen, deny this present from the outset and demand that everything be as if nothing had happened. It is another defense against losses.
Sadness is not depression
What is happening to us is COVID sadness. And it should not be confused with depression or any other mental disorder, as some are quick to predict whenever there is a crisis. “There are depressed people but I come to find out more about why,” M. explains to me in the consultation.
Sadness is a problem when it saves us the questions and whys, distancing us from knowing. For this reason, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan opposed him, as an antidote, the gay savoir (the “joyful knowledge”), the result of the daring of each one to express what makes him sad. And to say it in such a way that, without aspiring to fully understand its causes, it opens up new questions about his joyful desire to live.
The key is to go from powerlessness –the feeling that overwhelms us for what we cannot do– to impossibility –the recognition that there are impossible things–, without a programmed solution. A father or mother cannot explain the mysteries of sexuality to their children, not because they are incapable or ignorant, but because sexuality is not taught, it is experienced subjectively.
The same occurs in psychological therapy, where not everything is ‘curable’ because, beyond the capabilities and powers of the clinician, what counts is the consent of the patient. He decides the limit of what is possible. Hitting the wall of powerlessness leads to grief. Accepting the limits allows, instead, to do what is possible in each case.
It takes time and effort to shake off sadness, and the litany of self-help is useless. Rather, it is about not remaining in the paralysis of the act or in the self-absorption of the virtual, rejecting nostalgia –always misleading– and favoring face-to-face encounters. All this without giving up everyday pleasures or planned projects (even if we adjust the initial objectives), applying the necessary preventive measures.
Sadness pushes us to separate ourselves from life, like that train that L. fantasized about. And, although it seemed to the great Antonio Carlos Jobim, one of the bossa nova fathers, that, unlike Happiness, sadness did not it had an end, the truth is that he found a good and poetic way to translate it. That’s what it’s all about, doing something with her in the time we have until the end of the COVID nightmare.
José Ramón Ubieto Pardo, Associate Professor of the Studies of Psychology and Educational Sciences. Psychoanalyst, UOC – Open University of Catalonia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.
