As we roll on through the second month of social distancing and Stay At Home protocols, I’m hearing mixed reviews about how this is actually going. For my clients with secure employment, staying home has often gone better than they thought. They were the majority in the first days. However, as days have turned into weeks, I’m hearing more anxiety about jobs remaining stable. Pay cuts, furloughs, and suspended contributions to retirement benefits seem to be common themes.
For Gen Z and Millennials, the idea of having to stay home was not exactly thrilling from the beginning. Then graduations were cancelled. Despite this, my younger, single clients seem to be adjusting fairly well to this new way of working or going to school. Some feel they spending more actual hours glued to their screens doing work or school projects. Perhaps since many are on the lower rungs of the career ladder or have not yet entered the job market, these clients tend to report less impact than others from the economic downturn. Adjusting to new ways of working with technology has always been a part of their world, so taking the leap to Zoom calls is nearly seamless. What I hear about, though, is relationship concerns. Now, finally, my young, single clients can disappear for hours at a time into their devices without any suggestion that they should be doing anything different. And the comparisons to others mount.
My separated and divorced clients who have not found new partners are the next cluster of clients that I’m talking to frequently online these days. These clients are generally not faring so well. The center piece of their lives – their primary relationship – is in shambles. Many talk about loneliness. They feel even more strongly the quiet of the house during the days when the kids are at the other parent’s residence. There are more concerns about finances and unemployment. Court cases are stalled. The lack of opportunity for diversion leaves little refuge from uncertainty, sadness and anger as the bleakness of the future hovers overhead. As the weeks pass, depression is rising.
Parents form the third cluster of clients whom I’m seeing frequently online. If new moms are lucky, spouses are working from home and are occasionally able to jump in with an assist. This help is welcome, since new moms seem as lost in the haze of daily survival as ever. COVID and its trail of after effects seem distant on the outside with so much going on every minute inside. Parents who have not been working outside the home tell me that social distancing feels like their “normal.” They still have their established routines. Many admit to yearning for those brief moments of daily connection: speaking to other people at the park, bumping into a pal at the carpool line, and talking – rather than shouting – to a neighbor while the kids are playing outside. Parents who work outside the home – and who are now trying to work remotely with children needing supervision surrounding them – are becoming increasingly frazzled as the weeks pass. Relationships are showing the strain of trying to keep it all going.
As concerns like those that I have described grow and the economy continues to flail, the chorus of voices calling to re-open the country grows louder. That said, I do think that many of us will take away from these Stay At Home days a new awareness of our capacity to do our work from home (as long as the kids go off to school!). Maybe we will be spending less time running to the office and classes in the future. Possibly we’ll find that there was an unexpected lesson in all of this.