A Year In: Counseling People through the Pandemic
The first session I did after March 13, 2020, when we went into lockdown in Los Angeles, was under a weighted blanket in my empty office. On March 14, I wrote to all my clients, saying that we needed to hold off on in-person sessions for the next week while I moved my practice to telehealth. That first day under my blanket, I was grateful to be able to see my clients. They were all healthy, I was healthy, and we would learn together how to survive this global crisis. I didn’t know then that a year later, I would still be waiting to see them in person. I didn’t know I would close up my office and move it first to storage and then to a small town in the high desert of the Mojave. I had no idea that my son would never return to his preschool or that my husband would not yet have stepped back onto a photography set.
I, like all of us, didn’t know how my life would transform or how difficult and laborious it would be to give birth to a new way of being in the world. Nor did I know that all of my clients and colleagues would be panting in labor as well. My colleagues and I have been sharing feverishly on social media message boards about primal screams, screen fatigue, the glories of doing therapy in sweats, but our posts also reflect our own helplessness, confusion, grief, emptiness, and uncertainty — many of the same themes we hear from our clients. Some of my colleagues have reported feeling more fatigued and drained than ever before, and several have openly considered quitting the profession altogether.
After 10 years of working with clients, I can report that this last year has been uncompromising in its difficulty. I am just now beginning to find the words to express why.
First there is the practical. Working through a screen can be challenging due, for example, to connection errors. Not to mention that I have yet to figure out how to hand a client a tissue via Zoom. But the difficulty is so much deeper than “I’m getting burned out staring at a screen all day.” It’s existential. The extent of collective grief and existential loneliness unleashed by the pandemic, and experienced daily in each 50-minute hour, is beyond anything I have worked with before.
I miss sharing the same air and visual landscape as my clients. I miss being in the same room with them so much that sometimes my heart lurches in pain. A few weeks ago, a client told me she is dying. Dying. I couldn’t reach out and touch her hand. All I could do was bear witness to this, the greatness of all great pains, via Zoom. Not that being in the same room would have changed the outcome of her crisis — someday soon I will have to say goodbye to this woman I love — but at least I could have hugged her before she left.
This last year of work, of listening and bearing witness to illness and death, lost jobs, struggling marriages, and existential crises has taken a toll on my heart. In addition to the level of crisis in my clients’ lives this work has been particularly challenging because I have found myself going through an existential crisis too.
It began four months into the pandemic, when I realized Los Angeles, my home for the past 15 years, was becoming a place of loss for me. My daily runs had morphed into sob fests on the move. I even experimented with screaming as I ran down the LA River as a way to release the pain in my heart. It worked, and I could feel my body thanking me for letting it go. But the rest of each day continued to be stressful. Without an office, without childcare, I was sequestered in a corner of my bedroom working with my clients over Zoom. I knew I couldn’t sustain it.
Obviously the problem wasn’t Los Angeles per se, and it wasn’t unique to me. But all of the grief I was experiencing there opened up a door. And I decided to walk through it. So, when my son’s preschool had a COVID-19 case the Saturday before he was set to begin again in July, I called it. I said to my husband, “I can’t live here anymore.”
Luckily, we were able to move. We chose to settle in Pioneertown, population 422. I stopped sobbing on my runs and the need to scream or cry lifted almost instantly in this new rural environment. The giant skies were soothing, and the acres upon acres of wild nature provided a balm for stress.
But then something else awoke inside of me. The existential crisis that had begun in LA moved deeper. I began to think about death and life, often. On a run, I would see a dead snake or hawk and I paused to study them. They did not die from humans or cars, as they might in the city. Here, it appeared that they died because it was their time. This made me wonder about time. Specifically, my time. And my clients’ time. How can we use the cold hard facts of death to help us live a soulful life?
I find myself often waking at 3 am and feeling called by some force to go outdoors under the moonlit sky. Leaving the safety and warmth of my bed, I bundle up in my robe and slippers and head out into the cold darkness to lie in our hammock and look up at the ink-black sky and search for clues. As I lie there alone, staring up at Orion’s belt, I feel comforted. I am able to sense my place in the universe, as well as sense the presence of every other person, like myself, who has looked up at the sky for answers.
Before my client with terminal cancer received her diagnosis, she talked about how much she wanted to live la dolce vita in Italy. She has family there, and having spent much of her life caring for others, she felt that now was her time. Then came the diagnosis and pain. Faced with this crisis, I’m helping her forge life plans with a focus on joy and connection. We’re exploring ways for her to find her Italy locally. I think it’s time for us to all find our Italy, with its green pastures and farms made of stone.
I know that none of us — not myself nor my colleagues nor my clients — are alone. Yet it seems as if almost every person on the planet right now is simultaneously experiencing some sort of existential crisis. On the one hand, this collective crisis is disorienting, as we’re lonely within the walls of our homes, at a loss for language to describe to one another what is happening. On the other hand, I see all of us as standing on a fertile field of what we can create now that the forest has been cleared. We are all in this together, naked with our vulnerabilities and unable to hide. All of us.
Ram Dass famously said, “We’re all just walking each other home.” Never have I found this to be more true. I am not a step ahead of my clients’ existential crises, as I may have believed myself to be in the past; I know now that I am right there alongside them. Listening to them is helping me find language for this unprecedented individual and collective happening. It’s helping me to form my own questions, find my own answers, create my own Italy. And I love being human with my clients — even when doing so is incredibly difficult and I have no answers, no adequate language.
Sometimes it feels as if the only tool left in my therapist toolkit is my heart. And it breaks several times a day. Yet, a year in, in March 2021, I have come to trust that it is breaking only to grow bigger, and that the language will come. It is.
