By Tamara M. Wright
As a psychotherapist, I know that I watch my clients try to make sense of the world around them as a profession. I do that normally as a job in the field regardless of what is going on in the world. Usually mental health problems have to do with one’s sense of perception of the world, and how individuals deal with this and react.
I am currently working with clients from other states as well as my own state I am licensed to work in, due to the emergency status that we have due to the pandemic and other things happening in the country, due to a shortage of mental health therapists and people in dire need of help. But it isn’t only the pandemic that is causing this to happen. It is the world as people know it falling apart. It is the current government in what many consider to be a dire circumstance of disconnect that are all feeling it as it trickles down and becomes part of their reality, this unreal sense of “how can this be happening to our constitution”, “How can this be done? I thought there were checks and balances for this”. We sit in horror watching other parts of our society show hate and intolerance to others, children in cages taken from their parents, while people literally fight in the streets for equal rights we thought were fought for and won during the late 1960s. We watch fires purposely set and destruction of fellow citizen’s businesses and homes while people are shot in the streets with guns by other citizens, this happening in our proud American cities that were in the past a show place for the rest of the civilized world. We are watching as something as beloved as our Postal Service and other institutions like education are attacked and gutted by corrupt politicians running them, our wild lands are pillaged.
My life partner is a postal worker, so on top of other things going on there are those problems we worry about not only our future as home owners, but even the possibility that our elections will be tampered with in the bigger picture that is incredibly disturbing to think about. While all of that is going on, we watch as endangered animals continue to be killed and are dying from environmental changes, this is while our beautiful forests throughout the world are burned down to ashes. We are seeing the whole western part of our country burn down to the ground. We are so divided that it makes many of us that were trained to be sensitive to understand people, cry on a daily basis when we really think about this. This is a disconnect between reality, a cognitive dissonance. We are all trying to figure out what is happening. We are hit with so many unreal situations at once that we don’t know how to react in some kind of fashion except to ask “why is this happening to the country that I love?” I feel my client’s pain and confusion along with my own.
As a therapist, I am in a unique place to feel other people’s pain and confusion. Each and every natural disaster that happens, death from pandemic, city that is burned out, those questioning those that would take the rights away from others, those that question an sociopathic leader that literally has no concern or empathy for his people and those that follow him. I feel such anger towards him.
Still as all of this takes place, people follow a leader that can’t lead, that is taking them down a terrifying road, like a child being taken away by a predator being told false promises of taking them to Disneyland. Except Disneyland is a world of dictatorship, with air you can’t breathe, no animals or forests left. Water with Mercury in it. Having no freedoms at all in the promise of freedom and the terrifying fact we can’t even get these people to see there is no Disneyland at the end of the road. That people are so disenfranchised that they would follow a false prophet. I don’t know about anyone else, but at first I felt disdain for them. “They are stupid as mud” I thought. Now I pity them, as they are following this road much like those happily followed other leaders like him, namely Hitler down a road that ruined them later.
The United States used to be a country that led the world. We were seen as a hero by many. A light at the end of the tunnel. A place immigrants came to try and have a new life with more opportunities, not all of that has been perfect and we aren’t a perfect country, but we did have some things to be proud of.
I am truly afraid for the upcoming election. For whatever outcome that may happen. Due to the fact I believe that there will be civil unrest that may be damaging to us even further, to the point we can’t recover in this lifetime. I pray for the lives of my children and my grandchildren to come they can half of the good life that I have had. I have lived in the late 1960s and 70s to have seen a different life they will never see and people took this for granted. It is this that I mourn. The fact my children and even their children will be having to try to fix everything and they won’t know the times from the past. They won’t understand what changed.
We are watching the fall of Rome. Our civilization is crumbling it is devastating to watch to those of us that have been around for a long time. I am 55 and a "tweener", someone between generations, that of the Boomers and the Millennials, there are fewer of us and we are mainly observers of everything, as we are between generations. I find myself a lot in my nostalgic thoughts which is where I find myself escaping when I am not feeling clinical depression creeping up on me that is purely situational. I watch old television shows, look up old addresses and look them up on Google maps to remember living there or the neighborhoods. I think of my life as a child and the kind and loving people that have passed that used to be in it, a lot of those being family members. I wonder if life will be as I knew it at that time in my life, ever again. I am mourning the passing of my country and of better times.
I hope and even pray lately, which is something I haven’t done in a long time that things will change for the better for everyone. Yes, I said pray (anyone that knows me, knows this is something profound). I found myself inadvertently doing that this week to whatever deity would listen to me.
I guess time will only tell how this will all come out. So as we see pictures of the orange sky of San Francisco that literally looks like someone living in hell and know that all of those animals and forests are burning down, as we wait. We only have the power to pray and literally have no control over what is coming in the future.