Some thoughts on the social psychological impact of 2020: emotional dehydration and collective trauma

I've been on something of a rollercoaster of experiences the past several months and it's given me pause to think about the social psychological impact of 2020. Given the breadth of impact I think just about anyone can find something to relate to in these ideas.

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Earlier this summer, after spending several months already in a form of lockdown, it struck me that I was feeling a sense of illusion. I recall discussing this with my immediate family. They too echoed similar sentiments. “Things just seem weird.” 

For all intents and purposes I’ve been a professional Sociologist for almost 25 years. I’ve spent that time doing research and in academia. I have a good eye for understanding social experiences and how they impact the sense of self. This sense of “feeling weird” was a sensation, if you will, I found unique. I found it to be beyond a similar term in the field, “anomie.”

Particularly since March 2020, there has been so much for mindful people to absorb. I say “mindful people” because I believe the psychological impact of the many stressors experienced as a result of covid-19, social unrest, and matters related to the presidential election has hit mindful people more deeply than those that live life largely with blinders. Given the limitations of my willingness to explore that in depth in this piece, let’s throw all of these largely external stressors into one bag. Now, let’s set that bag to the side knowing there is much in that bag that affects who we are. It indeed has been a very tough year for everyone.

Memory and sense of self

So much of our sense of self, even our own reality, is anchored by our memories and the patterns of our behavior. Our actions and behaviors in everyday life serve to establish the pattern of our self. In sociological social psychology there is much to be said about social experiences that impact and sustain the self. It is amidst this process of socialization where I began to find answers to why “things just seem weird.” The impact of all the stressors “in that bag” has been to chip away at the memories rooted in our psyche. While this December the holiday season will result in a sadness we have not experienced, it is also a very common experience. Mindful people will adhere to public health guidance, and many of us will not see family in our common place of gathering for the first time in our lives. The holidays this year will seem quite “weird.” They will feel that way because how we will celebrate will be far different than what our memories will remind. 

Guardrails for life

Over time our everyday habits serve to establish guardrails for our lives. These everyday experiences serve to give us perspective into our own reality. Thus the life I live over the course of a day, of several days, of a week, of several weeks, and so on firmly establish my guardrails and sense of reality. For most people this makes life comfortable. Life is predictable. It’s a stability of living. 

When guardrails fall apart nearly overnight this can be characterized as an experience of trauma. Allow me to explore this further. Before covid-19 hit, I was going into work daily. I did this generally five days a week. For a moment though, consider the varied experiences I would engage in a given work day. I would wake up, get myself prepared for work, drive to work, park in the parking lot, walk into my building, go to my office, and go to class two to three times a day. Let us not underestimate the significance of the mundane, small things we do everyday and what that means for who we are. Now, magnify that everyday experience by five days a week, by four weeks a month, by a year. One can begin to see how this predictability of daily behavior could serve to establish my guardrails of everyday life. So when the impact of covid-19 hit, daily life changed in an instant. As of writing this piece, I’ve not been in a classroom since March 2020. I’ve been onsite at my workplace for a total of 20 minutes since that time. But, my work did not stop. I did not shut down. Instead I began to install new guardrails for work, this time in the comfort of my own home. I used to go to work to work. I used to go home for comfort. Since March my home has also served as my worksite. And my home has also served as the place of schooling for three children. My home has also served as our church. The comfort of home has not much served as the comfort of home. And I think this is a reality for a lot of people. This experience has been so profound that I have begun to consider the abrupt changes in everyday life as a form of trauma. 

So what does this experience, this trauma look like for a 6 year old? For a 13 year old? For an adult? For older folks? 

I do not use this word lightly. Trauma is an extremely powerful term. Trauma is generally defined as: “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience,” and “emotional shock following a stressful event or a physical injury, which may be associated with physical shock and sometimes leads to long-term neurosis.” One way to address trauma is to remove oneself from the situation, to relocate, to seek out a different environment. The difficulty doing that is regardless of where you go a similar trauma you're likely to find. The trauma I allude to above is not just my experience. It’s the experience of a lot of people. In fact some people have more experiences since March that provide even greater significance to the trauma. There’s a general collective experience going on here. Perhaps we should begin to consider the idea of a collective trauma. And, how does a society address collective trauma?

So consider the predictability of the guardrails of life. Prior to March of this year I had spent years on “building” my guardrails for work, for home, for church, for recreation, for my side business as a DJ, for how I relate to my spouse, to my children, to my family, to my friends. Each set of these guardrails was fundamentally changed in the matter of the month of March. How are we to live life without guardrails? Well, we adapt. With family and friends I’ve spoken much about the need to thrive during this crisis. Those words of advice included moving forward in one’s own way with what we are given to work with. I believe thriving requires realizing the catastrophe of the disruption of everyday life, and moving forward in ways of adaptation. This means adapting your home for work. It means doing your gatherings much more differently until it’s safe. For us that has meant using Zoom for gatherings. Adapting and thriving means building and establishing new guardrails. Adapting and thriving means doing the best you can. But it’s tiring. It’s exhausting. More recently I’ve been thinking about emotional dehydration.

In conclusion, this emotional dehydration and trauma can get better with time. A major obstacle of identifying and treating these “conditions” is the importance of time and space. The guardrails of life I mentioned earlier are anchored in our memory enhanced by time and space. So, it will get better once my work is back at work. Once my religious practice is back in a church. Once my “normal activities” can once again be resumed in normal context. Unless work, church, and my other activities completely change to a new normal, my guardrails will continue to be reduced to suggestions. So until things get back to normal, things will “just feel weird.” And we might be feeling weird for a little while longer.

Who Are You?

Posted over at the Social Lens blog.

In a previous post (Facebook and Connection) I introduced some concepts related to Georg Simmel’s work around associations and sociability. One of the more popular self help gurus of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been Stephen Covey. An extension of Covey’s work “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” involves a retreat and an examination of one’s circles.

Each of us as individuals can gain great depth of understanding of who we are by examining the positions we hold in society (status) and the expectations of those positions (role). These are philosophical and questions of meaning that have been explored for quite sometime.

Let me provide a brief introduction to the video below. This is a studio snapshot of The Who, you know, that band that played at halftime of the 2010 Super Bowl? For most Who fans, this is The Who that we would rather you come to know and love. This is a song of theirs, not part of the Super Bowl medley, called “Who Are You”.

So let’s explore the question, posed by Simmel, Covey, The Who, and thousands over time, “Who Are You”?

Considering the social institutions (particularly the Family, Education, and the Economy), what social positions do you occupy in society? Social positions in this regard are not necessarily paid work. For example, within the institution of the Family I am a father, a husband, a son, a brother, a cousin, an uncle, amongst other status positions I hold in the social institution of the Family. With each of those positions, I hold a role or a variety of roles: social expectations for any given social status. What is expected of me as a father, a husband, etc..?

Take a few minutes to list all of your social statuses (think about your social position in relation to the Family, Education, and the Economy). Then list your roles for your various positions. As you begin working through this you can to see the variety of “persons” you are in the world. As you list roles, you can begin to see the variety of expectations that you have of yourself and the expectations that others have of you. To add another layer, what is it that defines the social positions we occupy, and the expectations of those positions? How do we learn our “roles”?

So….Who Are You?

Facebook and Connection

Posted Facebook and Connection over at the Social Lens blog.

All the world is Facebooked, Twittered, MySpaced, Googled….connected.

I have been particularly interested in themes related to connection in my physical community since around the year 2000. One of my areas of focus as a Sociologist is the Sociology of Community. Among German Sociologist Georg Simmel’s many contributions is his work examining group size and relationships. What is integral to the study of community are relationships and connection.

In the year 2000 a major work in the social sciences was published by Robert Putnam, a book entitled “Bowling Alone“. This book was a national bestseller and spent time on the New York Times bestseller list. Putnam’s work spoke to the loss of attachment and connection that people had with one another and how the sense of community had declined over the period of the 1970s-1990s.

A basic level research question that I have examined over the past several years is how does the role of internet technology, particularly social networking sites and services, impact relationships and connections? On a practical level, have Facebook and other social networking services played an important role in meeting the needs of connection and interaction of people not only in the United States, but the world? Is the void that Putnam highlighted now being filled through the internet?

Let’s examine Facebook a little more closely. Literally. Let’s look at my “connections”.

Below is a Facebook application I used back in February of 2008 to map my connections.

I decided to take another snapshot of my friends one year later in February of 2009. That’s it below.

Notice in the friend wheel above that you can now barely see my name. I’m literally “covered up with friends”. This makes me feel loved, connected, friended when I look at this.

Then this month, I took another snapshot of my friends list. Check this out.

When I first looked at this, it reminded of the sun, or the Earth. Have my friends and me transcended something extraordinary?

I absolutely love the Friend Wheel application. It’s striking to see my visual connections. My “connections” have grown to nearly 300 “friends” over the past three years. Sure, I have a large quantity of friends, but do I have quality relationships too? If you are on Facebook, look at your friends list. How would you characterize your friends? Are they from high school, former boyfriends/girlfriends? Family? Neighbors?

After characterizing your friends, now think about those you maintain contact with, whether physically or visually, on a regular basis. Some of these may also be Facebook friends. What is the difference between “real life friends” and “Facebook friends”? Do you consider the Facebook friends real? What is the purpose of Facebook?

Social Interaction and Technology

Due to broken links, the following post has been updated in November 2019.

Just made this post over at The Social Lens: Social Interaction and Technology.

I authored a blog post in early January entitled Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. That post addressed the influence of technology on the current generation, using terms to identify the younger generation such as “Wired, Wireless, Mobile, Open, Participatory, and Empowered”.

We tend to have informal conversations in my department from time to time around the use of web 2.0 technologies, particularly Facebook and Twitter. It is obvious, as was reflected in the the Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants post, that there is a very large gap regarding the use of information technology and devices between the younger and older generations in the United States.

Part of those informal discussions we have around our department involve the environment of the classroom versus the environment of the virtual classroom. Does online learning (learning through the internet, using Facebook and Twitter) meet the same standards and achieve the same results as the traditional classroom setting? There are a variety of issues to be addressed regarding online learning, some of which can be found here.

This is a topic of much consideration of faculty and students at varies institutions across the United States, and the world. Taking that notion one step further, if young people are using the internet so frequently, along with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (see this report providing indication that teens don’t tend to use Twitter that much), then we begin to need to address this fundamental change in a new form of social interaction, forming new communities.

This is the basis of social networking sites: networking through interaction, encouraging negotiation, communication, and collaboration.

During our informal discussion today, I mentioned the community or personal learning network I had established through my use of Facebook and Twitter. A colleague replied, “But that’s not community.”

Can we have meaningful social interactions without physical appearance? How does current internet technology facilitate better social interaction? Does the technology hinder social relationships? How do the changes wrought by recent technologies differ than say the invention of the telephone? In your opinion, do our relationships benefit or suffer as a result of the use of technology? Can we have community through online interaction?

Strangers, Presentation of Self, Private and Public Spaces

This week in Intro to Soc we have been discussing Georg Simmel's "The Stranger".

We've also been discussing the tenets of Erving Goffman's Dramaturgical Analysis.

I was pleasantly surprised....wait, THRILLED when Ricky Lax sent me an article from the Las Vegas Weekly about a little "experiment" he conducted at the Town Square.

Too funny!

Social Networking and Connection

Came across this article today, and was quite intrigued by the suggestion of division of social networking tool use based on social class and possibly race.

Does Social Networking Breed Social Division? - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com