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Family Life During the Pandemic (4/5): Unhelpful and Helpful Coping Strategies

Many pathological defence mechanisms are being activated in family members at the moment in response to feelings of loss and being under attack. Psychotherapist and author Annette Byford continues her blog series on the family system during the coronavirus crisis by considering our role in helping clients develop alternative ways of coping – including the importance of hitting the pause button.

 

One of the peculiar features of family life under the virus is that we are all encouraged to commit to behaviours that under normal circumstances would be classed as indicative of poor mental health.

Isolation from social contact is normally associated with depression, anxiety disorders and paranoid thinking. Observation of hygiene rules resembles OCD rituals. Constantly checking any contact with the outside world for potential danger is part of paranoid thinking.

As psychotherapists, we know that the sense of danger out there and the feeling of being under attack fosters specific emotional and cognitive responses, as does the prospect of loss. The dangerous threat at the moment is the virus. For some, it is also those who now tell us what we can and cannot do.

Loss is there in the potential of losing loved ones or losing one’s own life. Immediately, though, the biggest loss is the loss of control over our own lives. We can no longer do what we took for granted: go out, see friends and relatives, shop, travel. We may be experiencing the well-known stages of grief, as well as feelings engendered by a sense of being under attack.

Pathological defence mechanisms

Our clients may cope with these feelings by adopting specific mental manoeuvres in order to fend off despair and hopelessness: trying to find manic solutions, to control, to engage in denial and escapism, in black and white thinking, to name few.

In a family context, each member of the family and the family as a system will engage in their particular combination of such responses, and they will do so at an increased level. We may see:

  • Escape through increased substance abuse
  • Manic busyness and overly tight activity schedules
  • Obsessive checking of every aspect of life
  • Triumphant and competitive displays of happy family togetherness
  • Eruptions of anger at those who are identified with controlling authority, whether they are outside or inside the family group
  • Depressive passivity and abdication from any attempt to influence one’s life under these reduced circumstances

Developing helpful coping strategies

To look for the anxiety behind these behaviours is something that we are used to as psychotherapists, and we need to help our clients learn to do that too.

In addition, any strategies that increase a sense of appropriate control and defuse external and internal pressure are useful. There is an increasing amount of sensible advice available for families now: structuring the day, exercise, having together times and apart times are all extremely helpful.

Beyond that, however, the more a family can at least at times acknowledge their anxiety in the face of attack and loss, the better. The more they can tolerate that not everybody will emotionally be in the same place, the better. The more they accept that they will not always get it right – but can stop, and think and adjust – the more they are likely to get through this time in a helpful way.

In fact, helping our clients to regularly and frequently press the pause button and stand back may be the most important thing we can do to interrupt dysfunctional responses.

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Annette Byford

 Annette grew up in Germany where she taught at a secondary school, before going on to study psychology and train as a psychodynamic psychotherapist in the UK. For the past 25 years, she has worked as a psychologist and psychotherapist in private practice and as a lecturer and supervisor in various settings, including universities, the NHS and within the voluntary sector.

Annette is a chartered counselling psychologist and a senior practitioner on the Register of Psychologists Specialising in Psychotherapy. ​She is a contributor to a book edited by Anne-Marie Sclösser, A Psychoanalytic Exploration on Sameness and Otherness and the author of A Wedding in the Family, which looks at weddings as rites of passage in the family life cycle. Annette is married and has two adult children and a grandchild.

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