Video Transcription

Ask a therapist: How to cope with distressing events and bad world news

In moments when we’re distressed, it’s so important to remember that you are not alone.

We are all experiencing this collective distress, which gives us the opportunity to also experience collective healing.

When there’s a lot of difficult things happening around us and in the world, it is perfectly normal to have strong emotional responses to that.

Those emotions might be anger, guilt, and sadness—perfectly normal responses to an abnormal situation.

What you might be experiencing is something called collective distress.

In moments where we are experiencing collective distress, it’s really important to lean into the collective hope that we can all have and shared spaces of collective healing.

So, collective healing is this beautiful space where we can all come together and heal together, whether it’s online or in person.

It could be engaging with online platforms and forums where people share the same views and perspectives as you, or meeting people in real life—through protests or other community gatherings—so that we can come together in shared spaces.

Vicarious trauma is typically talked about when professionals work in contexts where they’re repeatedly hearing stories about people’s lived experiences of trauma.

Secondary trauma is when we hear about, read about, or watch videos of traumatic incidents, and it leaves us feeling really upset.

Community trauma is when something traumatic happens to a particular community group, leaving that group feeling really vulnerable and distressed by the event.

Collective distress is when we all, as a collective, feel distressed by a traumatic event or incident that has happened in our society.

If you feel like you’re experiencing this, feel free to seek out support—talk to someone who’s a professional.

Advocacy work is incredible and can be so rewarding, but it can also be really exhausting.

Fatigue, and in particular advocacy fatigue, is really difficult because it’s complicated by feelings of guilt—wanting to do the work but feeling like you’re not doing enough.

So, how do we manage fatigue when we still want to keep going?

Make sure you’re not doing this work alone.

Find a collective of people that you can join with to do the advocacy work.

When it comes to advocacy, we want to be strategic about how we use our energy.

What’s the thing that we can do that has the highest impact and that we can actually deliver really well?

If we can do that thing and support others doing similar work in parallel, we are far more effective in the advocacy work that we choose to do.

We cannot know everything about everything, and that’s okay.

It’s like everything we experience in the world—if we see too much of anything, we start to view the world from that perspective.

So, if what we’re constantly viewing is distressing or upsetting, we start to see the world as unsafe, unsettled, and that impacts how we exist and move within the world.

We can do a couple of different things:

• Be kind to yourself about how you feel. It’s hard, but it’s not because there’s something wrong with you—it’s hard because it’s hard.
• Reach out to your support system.
  That might be a trusted adult, a good friend, or, in some cases, a therapist or mental health support person you’ve been working with.

I’m not going to tell you to stop engaging with what’s going on in the world because it’s important to be informed and gather stories.
Let’s talk instead about how you can engage with content with intention.

Set aside some time when you have the capacity to hear the news and see what’s going on in the world.

Then, after that, set aside some time to process the emotions that that news brings up for you.

If you feel like you want to take action, think about what’s the most impactful thing you can do within your sphere of influence and capacity.

It’s really difficult to stop and look after yourself because it might bring up feelings of guilt, but it’s okay to make sure that you’re okay.

Even if things didn’t happen directly to us, that does not mean we’re not impacted by it.

If you feel like you’re not able to do the things you want to do because of how distressed you are, that’s a sign to seek out external support.

Who are these supports?

They could be a trusted adult, online forums, helplines, therapists, counsellors—there are so many ways to seek support, whether in person, online, or over the phone.

I see people who talk about this all the time in therapy, so just reach out.

[Music fades out]