Does Your Identity Need Coronavirus Protection?

The last few weeks have been challenging for all of us. After a period of decreasing cases the Coronavirus has rebounded, leading to ballooning infection rates and increased restrictions on our social interactions, our work and our college studies. Those who’d anticipated a return to “life as normal” have once again had to indefinitely delay their plans. All of these restrictions and delays are causing many of us to struggle with depression and feelings of hopelessness. But what, exactly, is at the heart of our struggles?
 
As someone who has struggled with my own feelings of hopelessness and depression from time to time, I want to share some of the insights that have helped me protect myself and speed my recovery. This isn’t a scientific paper, just some ideas that have proved helpful over the years.
 
In the Mental Health field professionals typically categorize the challenges of depression and hopelessness as Acute or Chronic. Acute challenges are usually time or event-specific, coming and going as we move through life. Chronic challenges are longer lived and may be with us for months or years of our lives. The event of the Coronavirus and its related Covid-19 restrictions may fall into one or both categories – evoking feelings we’ve rarely experienced or exacerbating our long-term struggles.
 
In my experience the most powerful of these feelings is our sense of impotence to change the situation and the impact that has on our sense of the meaning and impact our lives have in the world. In his pivotal work, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl spoke about the tension between what we have made of our lives and what we long to become or achieve. He posited that we human beings actually need this tension as motivation toward a higher purpose or meaning that we should attain. In short, we are driven to attain or become more than our present selves.
 
If life’s circumstances impede or prevent our moving toward that higher purpose and meaning then we struggle. In the case of Covid-19 restrictions our ability to take action and move toward our goals has been dramatically reduced and perhaps even eliminated as we wait for the infection rates to drop and life to return to normal. In the face of this many of us are experiencing a situational depression caused by an imposed paralysis – we want (and perhaps need) to feel our lives are moving forward but we are being restrained.
 
A major source of our depression is the emphasis we place on our work to tell us who we are and that our lives have significance and meaning. In other words, we confuse what we do (our work) with who we are (our identity).
 
For example, my friend Adam was once forced to take ninety days off from his job because he’d developed an Intracranial Hemorrhage, more commonly known as a “Brain Bleed”. While he was undergoing treatment for this life-threatening event he had to reduce stress in his life, including his work in commercial heat and air sales. When he finally returned to work he found his sales leads severely diminished because he’d been unable to cultivate them during his absence. In words tinged with real pain he told me and several friends that he no longer knew who he was because he “wasn’t a great salesperson anymore”. Adam’s inability to do his work had initiated a full-blown identity crisis. Without his work he was unsure of his place and meaning in the world. (I was quick to point out that he was still Adam. Yes, he worked in commercial HV/AC sales, but that was how he chose to apply his vocational gifts, not the totality of who he is.)
 
Although you and I may intellectually understand that the meaning of our lives isn’t directly tied to our productivity or our ability to achieve or attain our goals, it’s likely that the unwanted and externally imposed limits of the Coronavirus pandemic are causing feelings very similar to those of my friend Adam. Because we cannot act in the same ways or move at the same pace toward those things we hold onto as markers of our identity, we may have questions about our own meaning and purpose.
 
So, if you are experiencing feelings of frustration, hopelessness or depression as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown, what can you do about it?
 
First, try to reframe your self-worth as a matter of existence rather than productivity. One significant loss incurred by our society in its movement away from Judeo-Christian ethics is our abandonment of the idea that our lives have meaning because we are created beings; created for relationship with our creator and the other created lives around us.
 
In other words, we have meaning (and dignity and worth) because someone far greater than us values us and desires relationship with us on an individual basis. Without this concept the meaning and significance of our lives is left to transient things over which we have little or no control, such as our productivity, our ability to achieve and our ability to maintain high esteem in the eyes of our peers or family. With it, we can have unproductive periods and lives that appear trivial and inconsequential to the world around us and, yet, still know there is purpose and meaning to our existence.
 
Second, view your responses to life as a marker of who you are and why you’re here. Ultimately, you only have power over your own actions and reactions in this life. You also have a choice about how you will respond to your circumstances. Do you use your free will to choose proactive options and your power to act to take proactive steps or will you choose to be acted upon?
 
How we choose to respond is a hot topic in my work with people who are trying to make career transitions. In fact, I often counsel clients that their best evaluation of a day of job seeking is to ask themselves, “Did I do the best I knew how, given the wisdom I was given in that moment?” If their answer is “Yes” then I tell them they should sleep well that night and if their answer was “No” then I tell them to write down what they think they should do differently the next time, and still go sleep well.
 
If the Coronavirus is severely restricting your ability to take action, then act on those things that are still within your power to change or impact but relax about the things over which you have no control (such as the responses of other people). The job market will eventually open up again, but until it does you have the choice to take what’s available or make the most of your current-but-less-than-ideal job. Either way you are still taking action and moving toward something, rather than simply being acted-upon by your life.
 
Of course, the ultimate challenge to your identity will be the “voices” to whom you listen regarding the value and meaning of your life. Unconditional love and acceptance are near-impossible to find in this world, and too many of us have our own harsh critics living within our hearts. I’m not talking about moral authorities we choose to recognize or rebel against as we make our choices of right or wrong, but the internalized “voices” that we listen to regarding the value or importance of our lives and our work.
 
That leads to the Third action point that frees our identity from the restraints and impediments things like Covid-19 can impose on us: Can you love yourself and others well during this crisis?
 
Frankl recognized that external love (from others) and internal love (from ourselves) has the power to lift us above our circumstances and can even promote us to become more than we are. He wrote, “By love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized… [then] enables the person to actualize these potentialities.” Surrounding ourselves with people who are healthy enough in themselves to not just seek their own good but to actually see and encourage us to actualize our potentialities is a great start.
 
If you are surrounded by people who encourage you to maximize your potential, then your greatest challenge is to become your own best cheerleader. I’m not talking about having an empty mantra of “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough and doggone it, people like me” like Stuart Smalley, on Saturday Night Live (Google it) to get you through your day, but truly knowing and genuinely embracing the positive qualities and potential that you were given by design. Your identity cannot be dismantled by passing circumstances if you have built it on things that have factual substance. And, as I said earlier, so often our root problem is that we haven’t built our sense of self on things that are immutable and unchanging – that can stand up to life’s trials and challenges.
 
This pandemic is taking on the trappings of a real-life “Groundhog Day” where the news never changes and opportunities appear to be indefinitely postponed. Still, these are only passing circumstances and not the final evaluation of what our lives will be in this world. Base your identity on the fact of being designed and brought into being for a purpose, take action on those things that are within your ability to change, never stop listening to the voice of loving encouragement spoken to you, and learn to speak it to yourself and your authentic self will survive and (perhaps, even) thrive during this passing crisis.

 
To learn more, please contact me by clicking here.
 
Dr. Jim