Dealing with Effects of the Lockdowns

Dealing with Effects of the Lockdowns

Being an astrologer, paying attention to the issues that people bring to a reading can give me a sense of the sorts of issues that are common in our culture at this point in time.

Based on what I am seeing, I think it is time that we start to address the problems caused by the lockdowns and other measures being taken to deal with the covid pandemic.

Let me be very clear here: I am not making ANY statement about covid-19, or how dangerous it is, or what treatments or preventive measures do or do not work.

I want to look at the psychological and spiritual effects of the measures that our cultures have put in place to deal with the disease.

So how does it affect people, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, when you do these things?

• Wearing masks and other facial coverings when around others.
• Being around other people who are all masked.
• Keeping outside of the range of touch. Essentially forbidding touch.
• Avoiding visiting with people outside of your household.
• Frequently washing, disinfecting, taking other measures to deal with an invisible threat.
• Constantly testing to see if you have an illness you may not be able to detect.
• Constantly monitoring disease statistics; focusing on that one subject.
• Having news and other media that is constantly reminding you how horribly dangerous the situation is.
• Shutting down “non-essential” businesses and gathering places.
• Replacing face-to-face, in-person meetings and activities with online virtual connections.
• Effectively shutting down churches. If you are Christian, shutting down communion, sharing the common bread and cup.

We have been so focused on the disease, that we have neglected to pay attention to the effects of what we are doing to ourselves, individually and as a culture, to deal with the disease.

And remember, the majority of us have been dealing with these measures for over a year now. It takes about a month to establish a new and permanent habit. That means the effects of the lockdown measures on us are now our regular routine, our way of life. They permanently affect how we think, how we feel, how we function.

From what I am experiencing myself, and seeing around me, the effects are severe, detrimental, and very stressful.

This is the first of a series of essays. In this first essay I want to look at some of the problems I am seeing people having, and I include myself.

I am convinced that, in order to deal with our current situation, we need to have a way of thinking about our lives that accepts and makes sense of the centrality of suffering and bad fortune in the human condition. We need a philosophy, or a religion, or a spiritual path, that gives us a way to deal with this. In future essays I will be looking at some ways of doing that.

What follows is here is a near first draft version of some writing I did where I was trying to look at what is happening and begin to make sense of it. It’s pretty raw, but I want to keep that, to keep some of the emotional impact this had on me while I was thinking my way through this. I originally titled this essay, Dealing with Despair, but the more I looked at it the more the focus widened.

Take a deep breath and hang on to your hats; it’s going to be a rough ride.

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This has been a common theme in a series of astrology readings I did for clients in the last few months – dealing with sustained and extreme bad fortune and ongoing pain and suffering, physical, emotional and spiritual.

Bad events happen to pretty much everyone at one time or another, and that is not what I’m talking about. I am talking extreme and ongoing. This is also the sort of suffering where there is no sign it will end or that things will turn out well.

Accepting the unacceptable. Enduring the unendurable.

I think this is a common theme with many people these days, with what we are going through collectively. I know for me the past two years, and especially the last six months, have been the most horrible in my life. I mean the word ‘horrible’ in a very strong and literal sense as in dealing with horror, the feeling you want to close your eyes and grab your head because you’re trying to face something that is just too much to be faced, to think about something that is just unthinkable.

It occurs to me, as I started writing this, that the problem I am seeing goes deeper than suffering. A deeper part of the problem is despair, the loss of hope.

Despair.

The feeling you have when you’re dealing with chronic physical pain and disability that overwhelms you, and you have lost hope that it will ever improve.

The feeling you have when your children are drug addicts, or violent or self-harming, and you feel helpless because they won’t listen to you and there’s nothing you can do.

The feeling you have when you’ve been jobless too long, your finances are collapsing and you’re in danger of losing your home and ending up out in the street.

The feeling you get when you are in some sort of ongoing situation you find unendurable, and you see no sign that it will end.

In doing my astrology work, I am convinced that people have a need for a way of dealing with life where suffering is a central fact – not peripheral, not occasional, not an aberration to be gotten past, but a central and enduring fact of human existence.

I am speaking here of what I am observing, and also what I am feeling and going through personally. Everything I am talking about here is touchy, sensitive stuff that can have a strong emotional charge. If anything here hits a hot button for you and you feel you want to lash out at me, please take a deep breath and grant me a basic good intent here. The online environment has deteriorated to the point that violent, visceral and hostile attacks can come out of nowhere on the slightest provocation.

Once I started writing this, all kinds of things came to mind. I decided to leave this essay close to first draft form so that I can share how the ideas occurred to me. I’m casting a pretty wide net here, so this may meander a bit. I am discussing aspects of my own experience, and of others I know, that are reactions to the events of the last couple of years. These events and our reactions are creating some very ugly emotional and spiritual states that are hard to deal with and that threaten our sanity and well being – and, possibly, our lives, if it gets too bad or continues too long. (It has already continued too long, and I suspect that a lot of the effects of the lockdown period will be permanent in a bad way.)

Despair and Loss of Purpose

These thoughts were stimulated by a quote I saw from Jordan Peterson – “No valuable and valued goal, no positive emotion.”

There is a similar thought in Nietzsche – “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”

We need a purpose to make life worth living. We need to feel like we have something to look forward to. Most important, I think we need a sense that there is something useful we can be doing, some way we can contribute in a positive way to people’s lives.

Think of the astounding physical handicaps that scientist Stephen Hawking had to deal with. As far as I can tell he managed to live a long and meaningful life.

Think of what Viktor Frankl had to deal with in the Nazi concentration camps. He came through and did pioneering work in astrology, and wrote the classic, Man’s Search for Meaning.

What I am seeing in the world today, in my own life and that of a lot of my friends, is a loss of this sense of purpose. Many people, including me, seem to have a feeling of the world being out of control and deteriorating quickly, while having a helpless sort of feeling that there is nothing they can do one way or another to affect things.

That brings to mind a memory of mine about loss of meaning.

After my wife Cindy’s death I lost all desire to live, all joy of living. Something in me was cold and dead. I felt like I had nothing to look forward to, no reason to get myself out of bed in the morning.

I knew enough about the grief process to know that that is a common reaction after a death. Every morning I would force myself to get up out of bed regardless of how numb I felt, and force myself to get washed, get dressed, brew tea and so on. Day after day I told myself that this would pass, that eventually the joy of living would return and I would start to look forward to life again.

Cindy’s death was twelve years ago, and that feeling did lessen, but it never completely went away. The last year or so, with the ongoing lockdowns plus the riots and increasing violence and deterioration where I live (Minneapolis, Minnesota), that feeling of deadness and hopelessness has returned.

What do I have to look forward to? I don’t know.

What am I living for? I don’t know.

How much longer before things get better? I don’t know.

That is what it feels like to me now. I do not think I am alone in feeling this.

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Part of what makes this worse for very many people these days, is the fact that there are some common human interactions that have been taken away from us.

One of them is community, being around other people. The other is touch, real physical touch. Both have been taken from us. (Note: I live alone.)

I saw a picture of two people – an old man, and a younger woman who I would guess is his daughter. They are reaching out to touch each other, and there is a pane of glass between them. I am sure you can imagine the expressions on their faces – I can feel the ache as I recall it.

That is a picture of despair. Part of that despair is dealing with isolation and a literal lack of touch. We are out of touch with each other in more than one sense.

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This next section is about my personal experience.

For over a year now I have spent something like 95% of my waking hours alone in my house. There has been constant ongoing construction work right outside my front door for that whole period, and the net result of that has been to make my neighborhood ugly, ripped up and noisy, so that I am even more motivated to stay inside with windows shut and curtains drawn tight to shut out what I can of the noise.

That’s isolation. When that continues, day after day and week after week with no end in sight, it gets very wearying. That is what I am fighting.

Breakdown of Civil Discourse

As I was writing this I realized there is another aspect to the isolation and loss of hope that I am feeling, that I suspect many others are dealing with also.

There has been a very nasty and uncivil tone in much online discourse I see on sites like Twitter and Facebook. After the vicious political and social fights of the last couple of years I have seen a drastic drop in any kind of serious discourse or candid discussion. There was far too much crowd bullying, name-calling, slandering and verbal abuse, and I think a lot of people just quit talking about any subject that might draw an attack. From my point of view it seems like the range of subjects that I see in my Facebook feeds has narrowed drastically, and people are sticking to safe and innocuous subjects. There are way more pictures of cats and fields of flowers, and inspirational quotes over inspiring background photos of sunsets. It’s all pure vanilla, all innocuous, all harmless – all empty.

Having the feeling that you can’t freely talk, that you have no voice and you don’t dare speak up, is a really good way to intensify a sense of isolation, of helplessness and of worthlessness. Your voice doesn’t matter, which ultimately means, you don’t matter.

Speaking is part of how we keep in touch. Muzzle our speech and we are isolated in another very powerful way, a way that rots you inside if you keep silent.

This feeling of a sense of worthlessness, a lack of meaning, a feeling you have nothing to contribute or your contribution isn’t wanted, can be a big part of the feeling of despair and hopelessness.

Out of Touch – Trauma

The long period of lockdown has the effect of making us out of touch with our feelings. Most people have been so focused on the fear of the virus, on the masks and antiseptics and distancing, that they are neglecting how that affects us psychologically. That social distancing and masking and isolation also tends to cut you off from your own body and your own feelings.

Getting out of touch with your feelings, having a sense of deadness and unreality, a feeling like you’re not all here not completely “in touch” with yourself, an abstracted feeling and sense of distance – that is part of trauma and part of despair.

Trauma is from a word meaning dream – in response to stress it’s like the mind detaches from itself and steps back from full engagement with the body and feelings as a defense mechanism against an unbearable situation. The measures that are part of the lockdown for many if not most parts of the world are designed to create a state of detachment, isolation, deadness of feeling and trauma, whether they are intended that way or not, whether we notice their effect or not.

Masks isolate us; they cut off much of our expression of feelings. Masks are worn by doctors (think of lying helpless in an operating room) or criminals (think of threatening figures wanting to be anonymous). From day one of the mandates I have been creeped out by being in a room full of people wearing masks, and I avoid them when I can. I am very aware of my emotional reaction to masks, and from looking around I suspect that many people have been caught up enough in the lockdown fear to not notice the emotional impact of being surrounded by masked people.

Social distancing sends exactly the same sort of message: Stay away; don’t come too close; don’t touch, you’re a threat, you’re dangerous, you’re not wanted.

The Digital World

Our digital world contributes to a lot of the same effects.

Spending a large portion of your time on cell phones, laptops and other digital devices has a similar effect of detaching you from your body and your feelings. It has an addictive, hypnotic, tunnel-vision kind of effect on consciousness. It creates a kind of a fixation on a single idea, and for many, many people in the world that fixation is one of fear on an invisible, undetectable, omnipresent and deadly threat – covid. Regardless of your opinions on covid and how threatening it is, it has created a sustained state of paranoia – fixation on an invisible, omipresent, hostile and deadly threat that can strike at any time and anywhere.

(Before you trash me as a “covid denier”, remember the words of Henry Kissinger – Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. I am NOT SAYING ANYTHING AT ALL about covid here, or how serious it is. As far as the effect on emotional state goes, how real the covid threat is, is completely beside the point. If you are paranoid it really doesn’t matter if they are out to get you or not.)

We’ve been so fixated in fear of the covid threat that we are mostly oblivious to how what we’re doing is seriously impacting our consciousness, our emotional and spiritual health.

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Now put this all together.

Suffering – Hopelessness – Despair – Trauma and a sense of Unreality – Fear and Paranoia – Tunnel Vision, lack of awareness of our feelings – that is a really ugly combination, and our way of life under the lockdown is custom designed to create and maintain it, and it has gone on long enough to effectively make it a pretty much permanent part of our emotional and psychological makeup.

That’s ugly. I also think it is very dangerous.

I deal with this in my own life. I do astrology readings, so I deal with this in the lives of people I talk to and work with.

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I want to end this piece talking about something I find very helpful and necessary. I do this in the context of prayer; you may have another way of thinking about this.

Something that is a common denominator in the problems we have been looking at here, is that they all tend to disconnect you – from yourself, from your body, from your immediate feelings and sensations.

I wrestle a lot with a sense of despair, hopelessness, deadness, a feeling I just can’t go on through another empty day of isolation with nothing to look forward to.

Interestingly, in order to deal with that, I find I need to take time to go very deeply within myself, into what I am feeling, and to feel it very intensely. It sounds contradictory, but I find I need to go thoroughly into it in order to go beyond and past it.

As I said, I do this in the context of prayer, so I am in a deep, inward focused kind of meditative state. I allow myself to thoroughly feel it, let go and let it take over – in some ways I almost intensify it. I completely own it, I am completely there with it, and I just stay there with it for as long as I need to.

I am bringing all of what I am feeling into the presence of God. It feels like I am presenting all of who I am and what I am experiencing to the altar of God’s presence. I am praying for mercy, for acceptance, for healing. I am also praying to be accepted as I am, in this broken condition.

Not always, but often, I come out the other side feeling more peaceful, grounded and relaxed, like I’ve just been through a severe thunderstorm. When it doesn’t work, and I come out feeling just as despairing as I did when I started, I go lie down and do a short repetitive prayer, over and over – I like to pray with beads – and I stay with it until I calm down. Having the prayer and the beads is like clutching a lifeline – I run the beads through my fingers as I pray, so just holding the beads is comforting.

This essay you are now reading is part of how I am dealing with this issue myself, and the idea for this series of essays came out of a prayer session. Putting my thoughts down in print helps me get a handle on the situation – it helps me to name it. It also occurs to me that other people may be able to identify with what I am talking about here, so maybe sharing this will be helpful to some.

As I mentioned, this is the first in the series of essays. The next ones will be about specific kinds of philosophical and religious frameworks and how they give us tools to help us deal with these debilitating emotional states. We need to deal with them ourselves, and as astrologers we need to be ready to deal with clients who are wrestling with these problems.

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