Feeling Safe in the Wake of…This

I want to stop wearing my mask outdoors as much as the next person. The science is clear: the park, the sidewalk in front of my apartment, the hiking trail? It’s risking very little to wander around maskless. And like other internet commenters, I’m somehow irritated by the persistence of mask-wearing by others in situations where it’s unnecessary.

However, I’ve been finding it easier to feel sympathy when I think of mask wearing and isolation as safety behaviors in the context of trauma.

I am, after all, a trauma therapist and perhaps this is a hammer in search of a trauma-adjacent nail.

***

I feel a bit like my own patients when I think about my own reactions to the pandemic. Sure, COVID ripped through my hospital. Sure, I spent a terrifying week at work reading a manual on rationing care, reading scripts for how to tell family we were not offering ventilators, had run out of room, were sending their loved ones home instead. I spent months tracking which of my patients had COVID, trying to cross-tabulate their pre-existing conditions with the research and make guesses. Sure, they didn’t all survive.

But.

I didn’t work on the positive wards. I wasn’t responsible for facilitating all those goodbyes—ipads in lieu of hand-holding at the end. I made it through a global pandemic with a single exposure, followed quickly by two negative tests. Bored at home, but bored and in a home.

I gently poke fun at my clients who tell me that they didn’t have it the worst. Of course you didn’t, and when I meet the One Survivor To Rule Them All, I’ll be sure to let everyone I’ve ever treated know, I say. But in the interim, could we perhaps agree that you, the person here in my office, have suffered?

***

Safety behaviors are the other side of the coin that has triggers on its face. The things that feel like the keep the danger at bay: the veteran who checks the exits, sits with her back to the wall, the former policeman who carries a sidearm to a family picnic. Safety behaviors feel safe, even as they make at best, a marginal difference.

They’re the actions, the patterns, we do to make ourselves feel like we have control after a traumatic event. Trauma is this intrusion of chaotic suffering into our lives, and we both hate it and want to make sure it—and the things that remind us of it, aka triggers—never happen again. So, we check the locks for the fifth time, change our route home again, re-pack to the go bag. Maybe we keep our masks on for longer than we need to.