Dear Teacher-Friends,
We are in it! As though the world of education isn’t already stressful enough, in March of 2020, we collectively entered a vortex of uncertainty. Now, here we are two years later, and our already increased stress has doubled. Many of us are experiencing heightened anxiety brought on by the directive to return to work amid an uncontrolled pandemic. With news broadcasts, press conferences, and social media platforms providing an endless bombardment of statistics and opinions, rubbing us raw with the mental strain of returning to a setting housed with hundreds of potential virus carriers, we worry about the unknowns and the what ifs. We are all in it. Maybe, I should say we are all under it, and it my friends is pre-traumatic stress. This is what we are facing head-on: Stress from the anticipation of waiting to see what will happen when forced back into a classroom setting.
Defined as intrusive involuntary images of possible future events, pre-traumatic stress is real. The words, “intrusive,” “involuntary” and “images” are our focus words. The notion that the images are both involuntary and intrusive means that we really have no power to avoid them, and an attempt to fight the images and what they make us feel will only deplete our energy. The absence of control is something we are all (government officials included) experiencing acutely in the U.S., right now. While we have always had very little control, we’ve never had to consciously compute living life without it. Let’s face it: Being forced to think about the amount of control or lack thereof strips us of our comfort.
So, if we have no full control over the negative images bombarding us with increased frequency, what are we to do? Because we are in this work together, I want to share what I have learned about pre-traumatic stress and how to manage it. My hope is to derail some of the current worries educators face while helping us all acknowledge what we are feeling at any given moment and reach a point of peace surpassing that feeling no matter how negative or overwhelming it may be.
