I considered myself a very strong and resilient person. Been doing covid duties for over an year and I was able to manage it well in first wave. But second covid wave in india has just broken my spirits so badly. Being a doctor and having to see so many people die in succession.
The only feelings I am Left with are helplessness , guilty , frustration and exhaustion. It’s really taking a toll on every doctors mental health. Sigh.
jay @jay12
Thank you for your service doctor
If you don’t stay strong what will happen to us
Hey there. You are only responsible for your efforts and not the fruits of your actions.
Please do not equate what’s going in the outer world to who you are and your competency. You cannot know why the world works a certain way and justify the deaths of people as good or bad. When you have a moral viewpoint on how things should be, you start to emotionally identify with it. Being a doctor you have a responsibility, first towards yourself and the world - to be emotionally non-attached towards your patients. Who else can we count upon?! Maybe you’d do well by reading the accounts of doctors and nurses who served during the past wars and plagues. There you can gather some information on how they first rationally calmed themselves down. This will help you to emotionally relieve yourself from taking on the burden of guilt, helplessness, etc.
This situation is unprecedented in your lifetime. The sudden difficulty of it is what is overwhelming you and masking your competency with doubt and uncertainty.
Don’t worry about it. Death is freedom, the dead don’t grieve about the dead. Only the living do. To consider death as a “bad” thing is the fault here. Pain is another thing, but death is only a cessation of experiencing. If you think about it, we die daily when we sleep. Only when we wake up our memories keep us remain relevant to the story of staying alive.
Does this make sense? How are you holding up? Are you doing anything for yourself right now? It’s easy to get carried away in wanting to help others. Help yourself too with some self-love. You are the most important person in your life. Take care :)
Ps. Thank you for being there for those in need of your service. You are doing great.
It’s not just about deaths…at this point
It’s the trauma…on a number of events. And also after doing 10hour shifts where you can’t even sit for a second , all you can do as self care is take a shower and go to sleep.
Hey. Thanks for sharing that too. That must be really hard for you and your peers. I guess it takes one to know one. The daily intense struggle must have caught on an all-time high with Doctors, Nurses, and everyone else involved. What do you think about the idea of therapy? Do you do inner work yourself? It’s easy to see that time may not allow you to take breaks and ground yourself as it used to be previously. I can see the energy behind traumas building up. And it’s not going away unless you do something about it. The more you let go of it daily, the lighter you’d feel. The lighter you feel, the better you’d be able to adapt to the situation.
Do you write a journal? Do you pen down your daily thoughts? They do start to get stagnant if there’s no outlet. That’s why therapists come in handy. The good news is that one can do it themselves partially as a start.
I don’t know how it is for doctors, but if time permits, you could use journal apps to type your thoughts every few hours and rate your experience and mood. That simple observation about yourself is transformative based on the Observer Effect and Heisenberg Principle. Whatever you become aware of dissolves sooner than later, and takes on the quality of awareness itself. So you don’t allow it to settle.
You could also practice letting go of suppressed and repressed feelings daily. Even a 5-10 minute session is more than enough if done frequently. Whenever you are triggered by feelings, allow them to rise up in you. Let them be there without trying to modify and control them. It helps if there are no judgments and labeling them as good or bad. Relax your body and let those feeling run their course. Focus on the feelings more than the thoughts. Thoughts are an endless projection of the feelings one is having.
One another brilliant practice is to ask yourself periodically - “What is it that is aware of my experience?” What is it that knows my experience? Allow this question to invite the mind to relax the focus of its attention from the objective content of the experience. To sink back into its essence. Affirm by knowing that I am not my thoughts, I am that which knows my thoughts. I am not my feelings and sensations, I am that which is aware of my feelings and sensations. I am not the world, I am that which perceives the world. In these 3 cases “I” is the name that we give to the knowing, or perceiving element in all experience. It’s not objective. Be the presence of awareness knowingly. That is relief from suffering itself. Awareness recognize yourself instead of shining the light of your knowing on the content of your experience. It’s best to come back to yourself and be with yourself and as yourself.
These are some practices that have helped me deal with trauma. Hope I could be of some help to you. Have a good one :)
