A vast majority of people may be tired of COVID-19, but that doesn’t mean they have recovered from the trauma of the pandemic. Those who got through it are exhausted, many still using the coping measures they used to survive or returning to old patterns instead of thinking about new ways to move forward.
Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer. (Courtesy photo)
These are the observations of licensed psychologist and author Gretchen Schmelzer, Ph.D., and they are the subject of her presentation at the Warner Free Lecture Friday, March 31, at 7 p.m. in Volunteers Hall at the library. “Emergence from COVID: Healing, Resilience, and Growth” is the last program in the Warner Free Lecture Series for this season.
In her “day job,” as Schmelzer called it in a recent conversation, she is a senior consultant with Teleos Leadership Institute, an international firm serving large businesses and not-for-profit organizations. She is currently working with physicians and teams at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In both her job and personal life, she sees people struggling with the expectations that they can still manage everything at once—a job that operates on a hybrid model, children, elderly parents. To move toward healing, they need to ask if the coping measures they used to get through the COVID trauma are working for them now, she says. It is important to stand back and figure out how to slow down and get back to doing one thing at a time, how to emerge from “hunkered down” mode to thinking about decision-making in this post-pandemic world and being open to ambiguity and new growth.
Schmelzer said it is a myth of COVID that it has been a collective experience. In reality, it affected individuals very differently. The government can say it’s over, but for many, it isn’t. To heal, she said, it is important for people to tell the story of what happened to them and how they were affected, but it is more important to understand what didn’t happen, what was lost in those three years. Whatever more it was, it was the loss of the way they thought they were going to be. People have to decide where they are now and ask, “What elements of my life do I need now?” Schmelzer said there is a big difference between just lowering stress and taking steps to healing and finding nourishment and new growth.
Schmelzer didn’t set out to be a psychologist. Growing up, she was “the kid who helped others” and the caretaker in her unstable family. At age 7 she read a book about Helen Keller, and she wanted to be Annie Sullivan. In the back of the book was an address for the Perkins Institute for the Blind, and she sent off her Easter money. But even in college, majoring in German literature, she didn’t have a career plan. She filled out a questionnaire, and the results matched her with a career in social work. But, of course, she needed experience to get a job. Working at a residential treatment center for children, she became enthralled with a psychologist who came to the center each week. She observed how wonderful he was with children, how understanding and helpful. And, she said, “I wanted to be him when I grew up.”
A mental scaffolding for healing
She was accepted into the sports psychology department at Northeastern, where she loved the program’s world-view approach that looked at the individual in relation to family, community, country. She did her clinical work in the “phenomenal” Boston area and worked with traumatized children and adolescents and their families. That work was interrupted when a friend recruited her to work with Teleos on a four-year, large-scale intervention for the UN. She and her colleagues worked with survivors of the Khmer Rouge in a leadership initiative to strengthen Cambodia’s response to HIV/AIDS.
Returning to Boston at the end of the project, she planned to resume her goal to become the chief psychologist at a children’s psychiatric unit. That changed when in 2002 Teleos offered her a permanent job. She did a lot of travel and saw how the healing steps that were needed in her clinical work and in her own therapy were the same on a larger scale. She was thinking more and more about the elements of a mental scaffolding that would help trauma victims see where they are and how to move forward to feel whole again. So many people “are in love with the trauma story, but that doesn’t help them heal.”
All this “convergence” resulted in the writing of a book. “Journey Through Trauma” (2018) began in 2005 when Schmelzer was jotting down her ideas on “the pieces of healing” in a notebook, sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Italy. Before long she had filled three notebooks. She worked on the book weekends and on vacations, and at the end of 2013 she took four months off work to finish it.
Schmelzer’s book is a “trail guide” for the cyclical journey through the five stages every trauma survivor must navigate in order to heal. Her voice throughout is personal, empathetic, encouraging, and hopeful; she gives assurances that she knows how hard it is to be on this journey. She uses examples from scholars, literature, and history, from clients she has had and from her own experience.
Metaphors of the hero journey, hiking, and rock climbing run through the book in addition to the overall idea of following a map to healing. The book is the guide, showing where one is on the map, what to expect, and exactly how to work through each stage of the process. She reminds readers that this journey is cyclical along the way—Beowulf may have killed Grendel, but then his vengeful mother appears.
Copies of “Journey Through Trauma” from The Silver Unicorn Bookstore will be for sale at the talk.
