Brené Brown and David Kessler discuss how the pandemic created collective grief beyond individual deaths. Kessler calls it 'the death of the world we knew' and explains why people feel heavy and disoriented even without personal loss.
Okay. So when I talk to people right now, since the pandemic, since COVID 19.
And I say, how are you doing? And they describe how they're doing. I hear grief, yes. But when I come back and say, God, yeah, there's a lot of grief. No, no, no, no. I'm not in grief. There's no grief here.
Tell me about what you see us experiencing right now.
We are all dealing with the collective loss of the world we knew. The world we knew is now gone forever. We talk about 9, 11. Do you remember what the airports were like before 9 11?
Yeah.
We are going to talk about, do you remember what the world was like before the pandemic? I don't know how this is going to change, but it will. We are going to find meaning. We're going to come out the other side of this.
And we're going to say things like, do you remember in the old days when we used to shake hands? How crazy was that? Or whatever it is. But this world that we've all been accustomed to is now gone. And we're collectively, just like you said, so many people are feeling heaviness. So many people are talking about, I woke up and cried. I went to bed and cried. And just like you, I'm like, it's grief. And yet there's a part of us that goes, grief. No one died yet. And we don't understand. When people say to me, what is grief? I'll say, it's the death of something. It's the death of a loved one. It's the death of a marriage. It's called a divorce. It's the death of a relationship. It's called a breakup. A job loss is the loss of that work world you had. This is a collective loss of the world we all lived in before the pandemic.
And we, like every other loss, didn't know what we had until it was gone. And so here we are. And just like you, we're all trying to find ways to virtually hold each other's hands. We're in this together. It is not going to be forever. It will end. There's not a dark night that stays. And yet we have to feel these feelings. We've got to feel the grief.
Sa.
