The Things We Mask
Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central task of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.
This passage is from my most marked up trauma book. It opens the chapter titled Safety in the book Trauma and Recovery by Dr. Judith Herman.
Now that we have finally, finally, gotten the vaccines into our bodies and/or those around us - I can more clearly see where we have been, where we are, and where we must go. I can finally begin to see the year during which we lost the feeling of what safety meant to us. Or, at least, we saw our ability to feel safe altered to some degree.
I hope and believe we are currently in the last days of the first stage - we are continuing to establish safety.
As I briefly mentioned before, the time many of us will feel the most negative effects of our individual and collective trauma will come well after this first stage.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, it will likely come after the second stage of remembrance and mourning which will feel a lot like processing what we’ve been through for the first time.
The hard part may very well be the third stage, the reconnection with ordinary life that sends the traumatized into the clutches of Post Traumatic Stress. I often explain to people that when a veteran is in the combat theatre their brain knows exactly what to do to survive. But when taken out of that place and circumstance the brain cannot simply switch back to where it was before the trauma. Therefore, the veteran comes home and finds themselves in a grocery store with a brain still looking for threats among people in no such mode of thinking and being. And it only gets more complex from there.
In the next installment we will go deeper into these stages in order to understand how best to mitigate the detrimental effects which might catch us literally and metaphorically off guard.
I want to leave this week with something I’ve been thinking a lot about as the length of my isolation begins to feel like it could break me. When I go out I find I am craving a smile, to give one or to have one directed at me. But we are still deprived of this incredibly important aspect of human psychology. The human need for connection - for validation in the most basic forms. The need to read faces.
It all made me think of this experiment called the still face experiment.
It will always be difficult for me to watch this because the abusers in my childhood often used a lack of facial expression, an avoidance of recognition, a refusal even to make eye contact, as a form of torturous control of a child desperate to read their faces and to feel a sense of reality and safety.
I believe a year in masks has had this same, although likely lesser, effect on all of us both children and adults.
Here is an article with more on the still face experiment.
This is a good piece on the risks of masks to our mental health.
And finally: Are you happy or sad? How wearing face masks can impact children’s ability to read emotions
Our young children have spent a year without the full experience of facial expressions for their critical brain development. The good news is they (hopefully) have their safe spaces - where there were no masks only reassuring and teaching facial expressions by loving adults.
But in truth we don’t know how masks will affect any of us yet. We can read history or use scientific studies to draw conclusions but the only thing that will reveal our truth is an ability to reflect and study our experience in our own context after we have come out of the pandemic.
What we do know, however, is that the surest and most swift way to help children with healthy brain development is to make them feel safe again. All our children need to live in a world that feels like a watchful and loving parent, and one giant universal hug of reassurance and validation.
And by the way, that’s what adults need most, too.