Hi, you're listening to About Progress, where we are about progress made practical.

Let me blow your mind right now. It's officially been four years since the early dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts on this and one of the things I found out is that studies are showing that the pandemic is now known as a collective trauma.

Were members of a group or a culture experience psychological distress thanks to a shared

experience. I think we may hear that and say one of my sister's favorite

sayings, no shiz Sherlock. Of course something is challenging, confusing, and

conflicting as that time was and in some ways still is would impact us so deeply. But I was thinking if I shoved a mic in someone's face and I asked,

did you experience trauma during the COVID-19 pandemic? Many, many people would hesitate to say yes. Why? It's not because they didn't.

It's because in general we downplay what feels traumatic to us as something we can

indeed define as trauma. We may say things like, well, I never

struggled to feed my family, or nobody I knew died, or it wasn't that bad where we lived. We tell ourselves that what we experienced

was as bad as others or bad enough to qualify as trauma. But science shows that to the brain trauma is trauma period.

Pandemics aside, we all go through survival periods.

Times where we feel we are barely treading water.

These periods of life can stem from trauma in ways that may be surprising to us,

especially because it can be from big T trauma to little T trauma. But these periods of

survival can also come due to circumstances that are largely outside of our

control. Maybe they're simply seasons of life that are more challenging than others, or we have just so many reasons that we are stressed out that it's impossible to name them all.

I can think of several seasons of my life where I was in a survival period, a deep depression in college, the first year or so recovering from eating disorders, my first year of teaching middle school, the early years of parenting, of course the

pandemic, and 2023 after I had my baby. And yet for some of those seasons, in the moment I would have hesitated to validate how hard things were,

like maybe things weren't bad enough for me to say that I was in survival mode.

And it would have felt an even bigger stretch for me to point back the survival

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