How to Get Back Into Society After a Pandemic, With Therapist Chamin Ajahn
Are you a little nervous about going back there? Do you have an ongoing pandemic-related anxiety that prevents you from communicating again? Fear not, because this week we will learn how we can begin to gradually reintegrate into society with the help of therapist Chamin Ajjan, Founder and Clinical Director of Chamin Ajjan Psychotherapy .
Chamin has over 20 years of psychotherapy experience and is a board-certified sex therapist and board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist. Hear how she answers Jordan and Meghan’s questions about how to set your own rules in the New Normal world, how to deal with the embarrassing problem of asking other people about their vaccine status, how to start dating again, and how to rekindle the relationship that could have suffered during a pandemic.
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Highlights from this week’s series
From an interview with Chamin Ajahn
How to determine your own comfort level in public:
One of the things I really encourage everyone to do is listen to what your body is telling you. And if you have to do it slowly and slowly, if you have to do it in stages, then that’s okay. You can try this and go outside wearing a mask and see what it feels like to put it on your chin … and if it’s not safe, put the mask back on. You can come back and try again another time. You don’t need to follow what is supposed to be the norm right now. You can create your own rules. And this is really the most wonderful thing that came of it. Everyone talks about this new norm that we are returning to, but we are not returning to it. We are in a place where we can create a new norm for ourselves. This means that we have to decide, we have to say what it looks like.
How to support and encourage a friend or family member who may still have intense anxiety about returning to “normal”:
I think you really need to determine first if you need it or not. Whether you need it or you are doing it because you want to support your friend or family member and then realize that your family member or friend may have some legitimate concerns that they need to address before they can get there before them. and put yourself in a position to see how you can support them in this. If they are ready and if they are not ready, then respect that too.
On how to gradually integrate children into larger community gatherings whose social development may have been interrupted during a pandemic:
[T] One thing we underestimate about kids is their resilience. Children are so tough. And so you want to approach it from a realistic point of view. You don’t want to suppress them. You don’t want to put them in a position where they are no longer in the store to take them to Walmart on Black Friday. But you really want to take these incremental steps of putting them in a new environment, where there might be a little more people, and see how they are, and then assess what you’re going to do next. And it’s really about creating a hierarchy of exposure, as we call it, in CBT, where you assess the risk and take it step by step. So maybe you can take them to the playground outside of office hours so that there are not too many children around. And then the next time you take them and they have a little more kids around, and then the next time you take them to another environment where there may be a few more people, you just play with it and check Communicating with the kids you pay attention to how they react to their environment. If they can express you in words, ask them, “How are you feeling?” You know: “What is it like to be on the street or to be around so many people?” And you give them the opportunity to participate in creating their own experience. Also, give them some leeway. And you guys are working together to help them reintegrate into this world as well, or fully, fully integrate into this world.
For more of Chamin’s great advice, we highly recommend listening to the entire episode.