Emotions and Teams | Inverted mourning

YESTERDAY AN INVERTED SANDWICH gave name to my new post. We are living the INVERTED MOURNING.  

Why INVERTED? Because we started the first mourning in March in phases and we are coming out of it again in stages but inverting the steps. In any case a new mourning.  

Since March 12, when we entered the first mourning, as my much admired friend and physologist @Inma Puig describes, we had to live phases of anger, frustration, disappointment and acceptance that have lasted these 8 weeks …

… And to paraphrase, although the storm is the same, the boats are not, and as we can see, some have capsized along the way, unable to overcome the health and economic stress, others are limping and perhaps the largest have just sailed over the water…  

Since Monday, it seems to me that the pandemic is forgotten, ¿the one we entered with a coat and leaving behind in shorts? The flowers had not come out by then and now the rose bushes are broken by the weight of their flowers; it feels as if we had come out of a long lethargy and were gradually unraveling.  

But the storm, which has not passed yet, has left us a desert, which is filling up with figures like kid´s game: first vans, then trucks, then cars and now baby prams at all hours added to new walkers and athletes …and the desert is filling up with smoke, noise, busy terraces and young people looking for leisure.  

And it is today when I realized that we are living a second mourning, the INVERTED MOURNING.  

Why? until Sunday 17^th May, we had already adopted a new comfort zone… we had reached acceptance and were used to our new routine of confinement: sport, connectivity, comfortable clothing, schedule of videoconferences, and suddenly, another overturn to our comfort zone and again destabilized….  

The physical meetings begin to be scheduled and we are caught off guard: what clothes, what looks, as if we had forgotten the social protocol… ..and our dining room transformed into an office, needs to be a dining room again, and the exercise schedules can be normal, and the supermarkets have again “normal” hours and …  

And our LIFE changes again but it is a new normality that looks like the previous one, but it is not… more confusing, because it is freedom, yes, but it is still a desert that is populating with people and things that although they seem the same are not the same.  

Without gloves and mask we cannot access public places, the children are still at home, the noise has escalated, the cars too and the terraces are crowded, an incongruous and anachronistic situation as if we lived in timelessness… those of us who have children and the elderly at home …. (as schools and old people homes are still closed) how can we live the new normality?  

People who do not have work, and those who join work and find different situations, their forced distances, their transformed clients and their limping suppliers … this is clearly a second mourning and we must recognize it as such.   @Daniel Goleman in his book FOCUS describes very clearly what we are experiencing. In stressful situations, the limbic part of the brain is directed only by emotions, we lose vision and we only see the details.

According to him, what we need to do is: 1) recognize our emotion 2) give it a name: anger, rage, depression …. because by giving it a name the executive brain begins to manage the emotion 3) manage that emotion with an escape valve, sport, nature or a glass of wine. Cheer up! ¡Accept the situation without loosing the Vision!!  ¡¡Share your emotions, you will feel happier !!