Dear friends and colleagues,
First of all, I hope this finds you and your loved ones safe and healthy during these difficult times. If you are like me, you are on overload these days. Anxiety, worry, physical and emotional fatigue – even exhaustion – seem to be the current global norm. As we know, the degree to which each of us feels these things varies according to personal history, socioeconomic and cultural factors, geographic region and moment in time.
For some of us and our patients, there is a significant amount of retraumatization to contend with. For others, we have “merely” to face the daily existential concerns around worry for our safety and survival, that of our loved ones, the planet and our way of life. When I find myself at a loss for how to make sense of the changes we are experiencing, it sometimes helps me to remember that this is not just due to my own inability to grasp all that has happened. Rather, by definition, this is an impossible task to accomplish.
I hope you will bear with me for a moment as I state the rather obvious, in order to highlight a point. A relatively sudden and unprecedented shock has occurred. Practically overnight – barely weeks, now months ago – we all learned the previously unimaginable. By simply contemplating, not to mention actually, exiting our homes, accidentally breathing or touching the “wrong” air or surfaces, making physical or even proximal contact with another human being, we now risk the possibility of serious disease, fatal decline or, at best, becoming unknown carriers of a deadly contagion. Some have drawn a comparison to science fiction or horror films, and indeed those images are replaying for some of us as a backdrop for early, otherwise “primitive” fears that so many are experiencing.
But to get back to the impossibility of grasping what has happened – how difficult it can be to accept that we are still in the middle (beginning?!) of this pandemic, and therefore simply don’t have the necessary perspective/hindsight to process and more fully make sense of what we are experiencing. We know from trauma studies and basic psychoanalytic principles that this hindsight is a required element of creating a healing narrative: in treatment, an integral component of therapeutic action. As mentioned above, I find some sort of comfort in this fact. Just naming the impossibility of what we are experiencing – that we are operating in the midst of an ongoing crisis rather than living on the other side of the finish line, and reminding ourselves that, by definition, we therefore cannot fully process what we are enduring – may have some explanatory benefit for others as well.
As psychotherapists, of course, there are additional challenges to contend with. First, though – how fortunate we are to be able to work at this time, even with the complications of converting our practices to telemedicine. Still, experiencing these life events and disorienting changes in lifestyle at the very same time our patients are – for some, “shared trauma” – can be debilitating. I wonder if others have found as I have that in the beginning weeks, similar to what happened in the US after 9/11 (perhaps especially here in NYC, as well as DC and Pennsylvania), sessions were at times almost only depleting. While we might desperately need occasional breaks from thinking and conversing about the situation, we can hardly ask our patients to refrain from discussing what they need to. And so, when patient-analyst lives converge as they did back in 2001 and at other times in other parts of the world, and as they most certainly overlap during this present moment in time, we find ourselves (over)exposed to that which we must be able to sometimes dissociate from if we are to remain grounded and functional enough. Much more recently, at times I find not only pain or depletion but sometimes also comfort, perhaps camaraderie, in sharing and surviving alongside my patients and supervisees.
As for this president’s letter, I might need to offer an apology of sorts. I just mentioned the value of dissociation during this period. Being well aware of how many Covid-related listserv posts and other email communications we are all receiving and the extent to which these threaten to break through that much-needed defense, I hesitated to write about these matters. But I hope some of my words might resonate in ways that are useful, and help our members – as this helps me in writing – to feel less alone and, on the contrary, perhaps even companioned.
So along those very same lines, let me say what we are planning as an organization. As you have likely read by now, the Board and Colloquium co-chairs, in consultation with Steven Stern, made a decision to postpone our upcoming Colloquium based on Stern’s paper, “Airless Worlds.” We felt that while keeping to our normal yearly routine of presenting a colloquium in May might offer comfort to some, we were concerned about (and heard from some members about) the greater likelihood that author, panelists and colleagues might find it difficult to focus on “business as usual.” And so, we have rescheduled this Colloquium for November 11th-22nd, with our same excellent panel, moderators and, of course, author in place.
Aware that a number of you have requested that we reopen the Forum, this will occur when the Colloquium would have taken place, from May 13th-24th. Colloquium co-chairs Cathy and Amy have generously agreed to again moderate this for us. We know that many of you might have been counting on the scheduled Colloquium as a way to earn CEs. We are therefore currently in the process of working to make this possible during the Forum – details will follow shortly if they haven’t already been sent out before you read this letter. In the coming days and weeks, we hope to be able to announce additional programming we are developing in order to get us through these unchartered waters.
In closing, I wish you safety, health and strength, and as always I invite you to be in touch if I can be of help in any way.
Warm regards,
Steven Kuchuck
New York City
