Legacy burdens— when not properly addressed- can manifest out of loyalty to our family members and the feeling that there is a wrong we now have the responsibility to right. While this is a form of love in and of itself, it perpetuates intergenerational grief.
Read MoreWe often think of hope as an emotion, something like sadness or disappointment or joy that comes and goes, ebbs and flows, with our lived experiences. This warm sense of possibility and optimism can kind of feel like an emotion because we often experience it in sporadic intervals rather than having it embedded in our cognitive processes as a useful coping tool.
But did you know that hope is actually a learned skill? While it does have affective (a.k.a. emotional) elements, too, it is largely motivated by cognition.
Read MoreEver since the pandemic hit back in March 2020, we’ve resorted to using the word ‘unprecedented’ to describe just about everything — unprecedented times, unprecedented emotional experiences, unprecedented grief. This word has become a failsafe in the absence of any other remotely sensical language to describe this terrible period of time that we’ve been caught in for going on two years.
But I don’t think we’ve truly stopped to recognize just how traumatizing an effect COVID has had on us— both collectively and individually— and our respective worldviews. We haven’t examined how hard a pandemic has been and continues to be on our mental health.
We expect ourselves to carry on as usual, to put on a brave face, to deny ourselves our own internal experiences because our external experience has become significantly more pressing. We only have so much energy to spare, so we’ve turned it towards what feels most important, denying ourselves in the process.
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