Covid-19 Intro

Time to resurrect the blog. There's a pandemic going on. People are anxious, not that anyone can blame them. What would a therapist have to say about it?

We could go into the various types of anxiety disorders, agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder. There's the fear of contagion, health obsessions. Hypochondriasis. Easily suggestible disorder (made that up).

Obviously obsessive-compulsive disorder. 

But let's talk about me. 

Let's say a person is still going to the health club or swims every day. Does she have a gambling disorder? The virus hasn't yet hit Chicago, but it is in Illinois. Just saying.

In my family no one would argue that we have genetic and experiential programming to lean toward anxiety. We're set up. We catch it from anything. 

So really I should be flipping out about the coronavirus, Covid-19, but I’m not. And it helps that FD is not. He had a patient with another type of Coronavirus, not 19,  who was very sick. We're hoping because of that we are both immune.

He treated it like he treats sick people and the patient is fine. 

Strangely enough, perhaps the most anxious/OCD person that I know isn’t flipping out either. I saw him yesterday and we talked about everything but coronavirus and it was liberating, at least for me. Him, too, one can hope.  (There's much to be learned from his therapy and why he is not freaking out. We'll get to that in another post).

Everyone at my office is talking about this, at least right now, no matter what the presenting problem: depression, anger, grief, anything. My mix is quite concerned about coronavirus, if not particularly freaked. We could talk about this phenomenon the entire visit. 

What is there that someone like me could add to the conversation that hasn’t been said already? Because frankly everything has been said. Am I right? 

Fact is, there is a lot to talk about. We want to know about the progression of the disease; we want to know if we are at risk; we want to know if we can travel; we want to know if we can send our children to school, if we should go to work, if we can go to work. Must we disinfect every doorknob, and on, and on, and on. Because of all of that, we do need to listen to the news; we have to get updates from television, email and social media. 

Every mention Covid 19 is triggering whatever latent fears. Our anxiety is triggered, if only a tad more. 

You would think that all this flooding would help, but it doesn’t! So what does?

I can't go into it now. They're picking me up downstairs and it isn't nice to keep people waiting. But let's say this. Let's stay present. And make the present good, happy. Do those kinds of things. 

And breathe. Any old way. More on that later.

Wow, it's good to be back. 

therapydoc