AIBU to think we're all a bit bloody traumatised?

[FarmerXmas]

Not sure what the solution is, but AIBU to think we've all had a sustained period of uncertainty, difficulty and grief?

Maybe considering where we go from here, politics wise, society wise, education wise etc, if people just think that to themselves first, quietly, it would be a good thing.

I think it's been a long, seemingly relentless grind. It's much easier to cope with something that has a defined end point, which we don't have. Then to add into the mix is the media with their incessant foghorn of doom: fuel crisis, food crisis, Christmas is cancelled, the NHS will be overwhelmed (as it is every Winter) and the spiralling costs of food. energy and everything else. I don't feel trauma but heavy shouldered and that this is just how life is at the moment.

@ancientgran
I'm nearly 70, maybe my memory is going but I don't remember the 70s and 80s being as bloody miserable and depressing as now.

That's because we didn't have social media, and digital and 24 hrs news ramping everything up to get clicks. In the 70s, huddled round those candles, everyone moaned but we just got on with it. We weren't been wound up about it when the electricity came back on. I took a step away from the news and social media during second lockdown and my mental health immediately started to improve.

Thank God our parents/grandparents/great grandparents were a little more resilient and just got on with things following WW1/WW2.

There were a LOT of traumatised people after the wars, but no-one cared and there was no treatment. Mental ill health was perceived as weakness.

What a thing to aspire to

Yes OP , teacher here and our staff are definitely talking about/coping with what we are calling collective trauma. We are all sensitive, lacking resilience etc
Agree strongly with a PP who called themselves politically homeless. That is me as well!

Trauma is often not so much about the experience(s) on some sliding scale but about how people’s central nervous systems react to those experiences. A series of events that are very stressful for some can be traumatic for others and yet others get through with a keep calm and carry on type feeling.

I don’t think we can generalise tbh. I know that as someone with clinically diagnosed and treated trauma, my COVID experience has been tricky but really at a low level in comparison to what i’m being treated for. However other people have had worse experiences during COVID like difficult bereavements, relationship breakdowns, financial difficulties, extreme isolation, etc. And of those, some are able to get through without their CNS going wonky and others not. So an attitude of it’s either nothing compared to ‘real trauma’ OR people just need to grit their teeth and carry is pretty unhelpful.

I think most people have been negatively impacted by COVID, but perhaps a much smaller percentage actually traumatised, however those people should not be told the equivalent of ‘pull yourself together’. A bit of nuance and understanding we are all different with different vulnerabilities and protective factors is probably a good thing.

I think you’re spot on OP but I never realised how prevalent responding to trauma with anger is. Shouldn’t really be a surprise when the stages of grief are so well known, but I think it’s a disadvantage that we’re clearly all processing at different speeds. And that the hits just keep on coming with shortages, price hikes etc.

Although I recognise many peoples response to adversity is to plough through I don’t think we can ignore the fact that we have(are) living through the largest crisis we’ve experienced in living memory. We’re of generations and citizens of countries that aren’t used to living with the constant threat of communicable diseases and it’s been a shock to be in such a vulnerable position for many.

Thank God our parents/grandparents/great grandparents were a little more resilient and just got on with things following WW1/WW2.

Well I don't think they "just got on with it" like nothing happened.
I would compare this more to the great depression rather than war. Interestingly, wconomic depression seemed to always cause more suicides than any other event.

@MakingM

YANBU

It doesn't help that we have a PM who seems to think it is job to constantly "Save everything". It's a really bad vibe and he doesn't even seem to be that good at saving things. He had to save Christmas last year and now he's back. Remember those times when everything didn't need to be saved at the last minute? In fact, nothing needed saving at all? Those were the days.

It's deeply disappointing that Labour have nothing big on housing as far as I can see in the news. The one issue that would actually improve everyone's lives.

I'd like to be more helpful and positive but if such a basic issue has made both parties too fearful to touch it then it seems unavoidable that we'll have to go to a very bad place before we can make things better. I hope that's not the case but I'm all out of jollies atm.

They're building new housing estates everywhere you look around here.

In particular, south of our city, there are proposals/plans to build 9,000 now homes, with 3,500 in just one super-sized development alone.

10-15 miles down the road, there are several large developments built over the past few years with another huge development currently having the groundsworks done.

I don't know where you live, but there is no shortage of new build housing in our area - thousands and thousands of them.

Looking through covid case data this time last year we tested 33k in a week this last rolling 7 days 144k. We're sticking things up our noses willy nilly now.

My DIL had covid Xmas 2019 she had catered for Chinese visitors, hospital baffled. Took her weeks to recover then first lockdown. The children suffering from the yo-yo education, now a sniffle school sends them home insisting on yet another PCR test before they can return.

Add in store shortages, energy supplier going bump and trying to find fuel. She's pretty down.

I feel so sorry for younger people . I remember the Three day week it was doable but stressful for my parents. But they didn't have to cope with all the other things as parents today are having to do

The icing on the cake will be when interest rates go up

[quote Porridgealert]@ancientgran
I'm nearly 70, maybe my memory is going but I don't remember the 70s and 80s being as bloody miserable and depressing as now.

That's because we didn't have social media, and digital and 24 hrs news ramping everything up to get clicks. In the 70s, huddled round those candles, everyone moaned but we just got on with it. We weren't been wound up about it when the electricity came back on. I took a step away from the news and social media during second lockdown and my mental health immediately started to improve.[/quote]
Exactly, the problem IS 24/7 rolling news, social media etc. Things that didn't directly effect us didn't worry us a couple of decades ago. Now, we're bombarded with tails of woe and it all makes things look worse than they really are. It's like we get depressed/anxious by proxy by things that we're not suffering from!

A few years ago, we were badly hit by Storm Desmond, no power for 2/3 days. What should have been a nightmare was actually bliss. No rolling news, no social media. We didn't know what was happening elsewhere, so we couldn't worry/stress about it. It concentrated our own minds on how it was affecting us, and our nearest & dearest. Suddenly we were all talking to our neighbours, talking to our household members rather than grunting to eachother engrossed on our phones, playing board games and reading books, sharing candles with neighbours etc. It helped us understand what people used to say about the "wartime spirit". There's a lot to be said about ignorance being bliss.

"Thank God our parents/grandparents/great grandparents were a little more resilient and just got on with things following WW1/WW2.

There were a LOT of traumatised people after the wars, but no-one cared and there was no treatment. Mental ill health was perceived as weakness."

This. I once saw a programme about how traumatised victims of bombing raids on Hull were treated - offered sweets and told to pull themselves together! Callous beyond belief.

I agree that we're all traumatised. Maybe all the behavioural psychos who've spent the past 18 or so months terrifying us could start focussing on a way to reverse that, do something kind and useful. Constant fearmongering doesn't help anyone's mental or physical health.

LOL people definitely didn't just "get on with" anything after either world war.

Way back in the 20s, before anyone really thought of labelling any generation the way we do now with chat about boomers etc, Ernest Hemingway and his fellows were designated 'the lost generation' due to their nebulous response to the trauma they'd experienced, when they drifted aimlessly across Europe "drinking to forget" and so on.

Similarly when I was a wee girl in the 70s nobody talked about world war 2. Like literally nobody. It was a horrible fucking thing that people couldn't cope with calling to mind. It was only in the 90s when the major government wanted to rally national pride to counter their own difficulties that we first heard this inaccurate picture of brave heroes at home battling against the odds.

People in general do not do well when they experience trauma.

I'm nearly 70, maybe my memory is going but I don't remember the 70s and 80s being as bloody miserable and depressing as now

I’m your age. You have to remember those were our golden years. We were young and resilient. I have to say that my memory of the three day week, no electricity for days, rampant inflation and shops constantly running out of things isn’t a pleasant one.

I think so. Separation in itself is a form of torture. We all had to live with it for a damn good reason of course, but it’s still traumatic. Add to that the fear of losing livelihoods, the fear of losing our lives or our loved ones lives, definitely!

Uncertainty is very traumatic too I think. It’s a very testing period to live through.

@HarrietsChariot

Life is trauma.

😂😂😂 It's true!

Gotta laugh about it though!

OP you're right we have all been through the ringer, have to remind myself sometimes to get things in perspective.

I think we're experiencing collective stress and depression. The news is all bad, we are lurching from one crisis to another with no sign of life looking up. Everything feels so hard we are in limbo at the moment - Covid is still rumbling on with the threat of a hard winter, plus all the other things going on, women's rights going backwards throughout the world, environmental disasters, shitty internal politics in the UK. There's a lot to be dealing with emotionally.

I'm waiting for Boris to announce that aliens are amongst us and launching a takeover, just in time to fuck Christmas up completely

Mining towns in the 1980s were no barrel of laughs. I remember watching the news and every evening there seemed to be announcements of reducancies.

I lost both my lovely parents just before Covid (one pretty awful and one very unexpected) and was just starting to maybe maybe come to terms with that when Covid hit. Honestly I feel battered and bruised mentally.
But it does astonish me what we cope with. For me I just have to find the things which are meaningful to me now. Oddly have given up on politics - completely sick and tired of it all. I’m in a period of music, birds, playing music etc. Feels like therapy. Keeps me keep going with full on job and relationship etc. May return to ‘the world’ and bigger issues in a different way but not just yet.

Many healthcare workers are literally traumatised by what they have seen and had to cope with.

@MyPatronusIsACat

Being an old fart in my mid 50s, and having lived through several recessions, and through the 1970s and 1980s, I have seen/been through worse. So have many others. People have been through wars, recessions, depressions, bankruptcy, home loss, the works.... This is no worse than what many older people have been though.

I'm not traumatised, and think honestly, it is only going to be the young (under 30,) who are going to be badly affected/traumatised.

Not because they're weak or anything, but because they haven't been through the same stuff as us oldies have.

I agree. I remember the 70s/80s being pretty miserable at times, with power cuts, the 3 day week, bodies not buried, rubbish not collected, IRA bombings in London, Manchester and Birmingham, the Falklands War, high interest rates, high inflation, various other financial disasters such as leaving the European exchange rate system, then ending the 80s' was a serious recession which led to mass unemployment, reposessions, business failures, etc. It definitely wasn't a walk in the park.

@MrsHuntGeneNotJeremyObviously aliens would be a safer pair of hands than Boris, I think. Even the Xenomorphs.

@Hdhdjejdj

Mining towns in the 1980s were no barrel of laughs. I remember watching the news and every evening there seemed to be announcements of reducancies.

Yes, just remembered how the TV evening news programs used to have statistics and reports of which firms had announced redundancies/closed that day, a bit like today's Covid infection/death statistics. Pretty sobering to see huge industrial plants, such as car plants, steel works, etc being closed down, almost on a daily basis.

@Badbadbunny. Exactly. The power cuts hit and my parents would say, this is the way it is for now so we have to get on with it. So we did. At school it was the same for everyone so just accepted it. Which doesn't mean that we liked it. It wasn't traumatic mainly, I think, because everyone around me was phlegmatic about it. If, however, I'd been with parents who were howling about the injustice etc, maybe that would have made it more traumatic. Thinking about it, maybe I owe a lot to my parents and their attitude which taught me to be practical in a crisis rather than hysterical. (Not implying anyone here is hysterical!)

I'm sure it's being traumatic for many people - those who have suffered bereavements or been very ill themselves, frontline workers especially NHS, people with health problems or suffering financial hardships, and so on.
Personally I don't consider myself traumatised at all. I've found it quite interesting for the most part, following the development of the vaccines, increasing scientific knowledge. I'm not miserable at all at the moment though I realise it may be a difficult winter for many of us.

I don’t trust Boris with any thing - he can’t even organise a decent haircut for himself!