We have a drive to heal each other, drawing on deep, evolved mechanisms to calm the storm, through attention, touch and care
Photo by Rémi Walle on Unsplash
A fascinating article from Psyche, from an anthropologist/psychiatrist who has seen how much we have a drive to heal and soothe each other, in states of distress. These evolved impulses need to be attended to, as much as the need to master our own emotions and conditions, as a route to well-being.
Some excerpts;
When I talk to my patients about emotion regulation, among the first things that come into their minds are usually deep breathing and meditation. Those who’ve gone through counselling might describe cognitive-behavioural approaches, where they follow set steps to challenge the assumptions underlying their emotional reactions.
With all the added distress, anxiety and depression associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, many of my patients, friends and family members also talk about using the many relaxation and mindfulness apps now available.
As a psychiatrist, I appreciate that these techniques have the potential to be helpful. Many have been validated in well-designed research studies. But there’s another aspect of my identity that makes me doubt whether emotional regulation is something we’re really supposed to do alone.
That side of me is the trained anthropologist. I’ve practised psychiatry for more than a decade, but I’ve been travelling around the world for much longer trying to understand how people face and respond to suffering.
Twenty-five years ago, I spent some months at a small concrete temple in southeastern Nepal. Families would bring their loved ones when they could no longer support them at home. The priests at the temple would listen as the families explained their problems.
The person in distress would stay a few weeks, months or even longer. Every morning, the residents would worship together, chanting and rocking as they sat cross-legged or kneeling on the floor.
While I was initially captivated by what was, to my eyes, this more unusual form of healing, I began to notice the people coming by, day by day, for a conversation with one of the priests. They’d describe the worries in their hearts and their minds, and the holy man would sit with them, never in a rush.
Sometimes, he would teach them a mantra or wipe their backs and shoulders with a feather brush. Then they would leave with more light in their faces. Some came back often, others I only saw once.
I’ve seen that style of interaction again and again:
In northern Uganda, a village health worker sat under a tree talking to a woman who had been shunned by her neighbours because she had a child with a rare neurological disorder
In Liberia, a police officer, whose daughter lived with a mental illness, sat listening to a colleague who was explaining how distressing it was to enforce quarantine during the Ebola outbreak
In Haiti, a houngan priest talked with a teacher about digging his way out of the rubble after buildings had crumbled around him in the 2010 earthquake.
If you listen closely, these conversations aren’t limited to people in helping professions. There’s a taxi driver and a passenger talking about the stress of raising teenagers. Or a woman sharing with her spouse about anger at her coworkers after a day at the office.
Emotion regulation to reduce distress appears to be a fundamental human behaviour that doesn’t just happen within us, but between us. We’re constantly consoling others and being consoled, from instances of forgettable disappointment to life-changing traumas.
Unfortunately, mainstream psychiatry and psychology, as well as the self-help movement, is burdened by the expectation that self-regulation skills must be mastered to achieve wellbeing.
And more on how helping each other is the opposite of a sign of weakness:
I’ve spent the past decade trying to understand how to foster the empathy that doctors, nurses and community health workers feel towards patients living with mental illness in places ranging from Nepal to Ethiopia to Liberia.
We train those living with mental illness to tell their stories, combined with photographs they take of their lives. These narratives follow an arc that brings health workers on an emotional journey, encouraging the flow of empathy and hopefully changing how they connect with patients.
They show how much doctors and health workers have in common with those they treat, and how they care about the same things: looking after children and family members, economic security, participating in collective activities, and seeing the beauty in everyday life.
If health workers feel this shared humanity – that they share some in-group qualities – then they’re better able to soothe their patients’ distress. The empathy and emotional contagion flow more swiftly, followed by consolation and resolution, and with the health workers getting the psychological reward from helping another person.
Each one of us could benefit from thinking in evolutionary terms about collective emotional regulation. One important step is to recall that being helped by others is not a sign of weakness: it is fundamental to what we do and who we are.
We should be willing to seek help when we need it, and to connect with others who are in distress. In hospitals and other workplaces around the world, we expect staff to be able to handle everything they’re going through with COVID-19, at work and at home.
And if you’re struggling, then it’s your responsibility to do some form of ‘self-care’. The medical practice where I work paid for all employees to have a subscription to a popular mindfulness app. But it’s equally important to make time to connect with others.
A colleague might be the person most likely to be able to sustain that flow of empathy because of a shared context and culture. We all need more confidence that we can be helpful simply by being there, listening, and sharing another’s emotion. It makes us stronger as a group.