What awaits us in the post-quarantine future? The world will not be the same, people write. But our inner world will not be the same. Psychotherapist Grigory Gorshunin talks about this.
Anyone who thinks they are going crazy in quarantine is wrong — in fact, they are returning to their mind. How dolphins are now returning to the canals of Venice. It’s just that he, our inner world, now seems crazy to us, because we have avoided for too long a thousand and one ways to look inside ourselves.
The virus unites like any external threat. People project their anxiety onto the epidemic, the virus becomes the image of an unknown dark force. A lot of paranoid ideas about its origin are born, because it’s so scary to think that nature itself, with the words “nothing personal”, decided to take on the problem of overpopulation.
But the virus, driving people into quarantine, into itself, paradoxically invites us to think about the internal threat. Perhaps a threat not to live his true life. And then it does not matter when and from what to die.
Quarantine is an invitation to face emptiness and depression. Quarantine is like psychotherapy without a psychotherapist, without a guide to yourself, and that’s why it can be so unbearable. The problem is not loneliness and isolation. In the absence of an external picture, we begin to see the inner picture.
The world will no longer be the same — there is hope that we will not dismiss ourselves
It is hard, when turbidity settles in the channel, to finally hear and see what is happening at the bottom. Meet yourself. After a long fuss, and perhaps for the first time, really meet your spouse. And to find out something from which there are so many divorces in China now after quarantine.
It is difficult because death, loss, weakness and helplessness are not legalized in our inner world as part of the normal course of things. In a culture where thoughtful sadness is a bad commodity, strength and the illusion of infinite potency sell well.
In an ideal world where there are no viruses, grief and death, in a world of endless development and triumph, there is no place for life. In a world sometimes called perfectionism, there is no death because it is dead. Everything was frozen there, numb. The virus reminds us that we are alive and can lose it.
States, health systems reveal their helplessness as something shameful and unacceptable. Because everyone can and should be saved. We know that this is not true, but the fear of facing this truth does not allow us to think further.
The world will no longer be the same — there is hope that we will not dismiss ourselves. From the virus of death, which everyone is infected with and everyone will have their own personal end of the world. And therefore, genuine closeness and care become that necessary, without which it is impossible to breathe.