Imagine the Next Normal -- Our Social & Emotional Health

Part #3 in a series focused on creating healthier and safer communities for all

I am pushing back HARD against the desire to return to normal.

Instead of wanting to return to what was pre-COVID, I am stepping into the future — the NEXT NORMAL — with the hope that we can create healthier and safer communities for all. Returning to 2019 normal is unacceptable. PERIOD. It is unacceptable because we have all changed, grown, and learned so much living through (read: surviving) a pandemic.

I invite you to explore this NEXT NORMAL with me in this 10-part blog series (yes, I am fired up, inspired, and really excited). If you are jumping in today, please go back and read my inspiration for the series as well as my posts on physical health & access to healthcare and mental health.

When I think of social and emotional health (which is defined as developing the capacity to form secure relationships, experience and regulate emotions, and explore and learn), I think of my grandmother. Affectionately known as Grandma Dot (short for Dorothy), my grandmother spent her lifetime (all 99 years of it) developing and sustaining deep and meaningful relationships.

She scheduled weekly phone calls with friends and family — seriously, I remember calling her once on a Saturday morning while in graduate school and she told me she couldn’t talk because she and her sweet friend, Betty, talked every Saturday morning, no exceptions. She would call me later; nothing got in the way of that weekly check-in with Betty.

She engaged with volunteer groups and was committed to getting to church every Sunday morning (it was a 45-minute drive each way). At her funeral, I learned that when she was 98 years old she was pulled over (yes, she was driving at 98) by the police for speeding on the way to church one morning (the officer gave her a warning). But she was committed to being with and doing life with her church community — even if it meant speeding! She had her “lunch bunch,” too. A group of friends that she got together regularly to enjoy a meal. And when snowy weather disrupted their plans, they would all get on the phone together, each with a glass of wine, and talk to each other for hours.

She invested in people. And those relationships sustained and supported her throughout her 99 years of life. She is the type of woman and friend we should all strive to be. She was also an amazing grandmother and great-grandmother!

Grandma Dot in June 2016 about a week after her 99th birthday. Her life may have been cut short by cancer, but she lived her life to the fullest. With sweet friendships, adoring children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

I have thought of Grandma Dot a lot throughout the pandemic (she was born in 1917 before the Great Influenza) — one of the things I took from her home after she passed away was a sweet note with instructions for what to do if you cannot sleep at night. I have read this note a lot throughout the pandemic (I have had too-many-to-count sleepless nights since the pandemic began) —

Love that this note is in her handwriting. It reads… “If worry has you awake @ night. Psalm 116:7”

I have also thought about her reaction to the term social distancing.

As the world shut down in March of 2020, we were all instructed by public health officials (myself included) to socially distance ourselves from one another. The term was used endlessly during the first six months of the pandemic.

Six months into the pandemic and “social distancing” was still a commonly used term. And though its use has decreased over time, the damage done by telling people to not be social or to distance/stay away from social interactions was damaging.

As I was settling into the 2020 lockdowns, I was socially distancing just like everyone else. Until I realized how damaging that term was —

“It is potentially alienating: after all, we are not actually advised to distance our social selves, only our bodies.” ~ The Guardian

In May 2020 I wrote what was (in essence) my first blog post — Guiding Principles in a COVID World through the Eyes of an Epidemiologist — that I shared with schools, colleges, businesses, law firms, and many others as we all were imagining life after two months in COVID lockdown. In this piece, I wrote specifically and passionately about the need to STOP USING the phrase social distancing —

“The phrase ‘social distancing’ is inaccurate and is destroying our emotional and mental health. What we need to be thinking about is ‘physical distancing.’ As humans, we are relational beings and we need one another now more than ever. This pandemic does not require us to cut social ties and decrease social interactions. What is required is physical space to decrease the transmission of disease.   

Our aim is to physically distance ourselves while maintaining and sustaining important relationships.”

As I imagine the next normal and our social/emotional health, I believe that an apology is necessary. As a member of the public health workforce, as an epidemiologist, as your epidemiologist mama, as a TV medical contributor, blogger, and public scholar, I want to apologize for the damage done by the phrase social distancing.

Public health was WRONG to use the phrase social distance/social distancing.

Our word choice was careless. And I am learning that considerable damage was done in an effort to create the physical distance necessary to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

In the midst of chaos and so much fear at the beginning of the pandemic, public health did a lot of harm by telling the world to socially isolate. What we should have been saying (and this is just one of many communications fails of the pandemic) was we need people to create and maintain physical space from one another so that this disease does not spread from person to person. Public health should have emphasized that being distant from each other in the midst of a national lockdown was going to be stressful and challenging, but this physical space/distance was needed until we knew how to prevent the spread of disease, had vaccines, and had established treatment protocols.

We should have encouraged social interactions. And been educating everyone about the importance of social, emotional, and mental health care in the midst of the lockdown.

We should have said, while you are physically apart from your families, friends, classmates, colleagues, and teammates, you are going to need to dig deep, be creative, and establish new ways of relating to one another because —

Physical distance does NOT mean social distance.

Those phrases are not synonymous.

We need to connect, be in community, and support each other through what is going to be a trying and difficult time. We should have encouraged zoom happy hours, virtual trivia games, front porch gathering times with friends, outdoor exercise together, and so much more.

In the midst of the spread of a new virus and a pandemic, we should have reminded the world that though we need to be physically apart, we need to be connected. We need to be heard, seen, and cared for by our friends. The public health community should have taken a note from our friends in neurobiology, psychiatry, and counseling who have long said —

Dr. Curt Thompson is a writer, podcaster, and psychiatrist. He’s written three amazing books, including his most recent “The Soul of Desire” (“The Soul of Shame - quoted here - and “Anatomy of the Soul”). In his most recent book, he explains “that underneath all of our longings in the desire to be known and that this fundamental yearning manifests itself in our deep need to make things of beauty, revealing who we are to others.” It is a great read. Curt also hosts a podcast called “Being Known,” which I highly recommend. Most importantly, Curt’s wife is responsible for me meeting David (my sweet husband)! Small world.

So as your epidemiologist (and someone who was using the phrase social distancing early in the pandemic), I am sorry.

I know the phrase social distancing was wrong. I know that instructing people to socially distance caused harm, confusion, and may have been the catalyst for the distrust of public health officials.

We never wanted anyone to stop engaging with your friends and families, but we did want to protect the public from the new virus. As a group, public health had amazing intentions when we began our spring 2020 lockdown. We needed time to figure out how to decrease disease spread and how to live through a pandemic. We also knew that drastic measures were needed to prevent our healthcare system from being overwhelmed. We wanted to prevent people from dying.

But we messed up. And using the phrase social distancing was both inaccurate (in terms of what was needed to slow disease spread) and damaging, as it dismissed the importance of friendships, relationships, our communities, and us being known.

I am sorry.

It is my hope that by naming the harm that has been done and acknowledging the carelessness of our word choice in 2020, we can move forward by recognizing the importance of our relationships. In the short term, we need to all take a lesson from my Grandma Dot, who was sustained by her friendships and worked in relationships and through her communities to make the world a better place.

We need to find friends and family to know us, listen to us, encourage us, sustain us, and forgive us.

For me, this — finding friends and family to know, listen, encourage, sustain, and forgive me — has meant valuing quality over quantity. Our pod family is in constant contact throughout the week, and we eat dinner together every Saturday. And our neighborhood family — which was created when one of our neighbors started sharing office space with my husband early in the pandemic — does the same. We eat dinner together once a week. We share our weekly highs and lows. We laugh together. We share our dreams. And we celebrate the big and little things together. These relationships are life-giving to me!

Additionally, in the short term — like TODAY — we need to stop using the phrase social distancing. I know there are still stores and schools with signs on the front doors instructing us to maintain proper social distance.

Take them down!

To prevent the spread of a viral, airborne disease, we need to maintain physical distance between individuals. And at the same time encourage more meaningful social interactions.

As we look to the future, our next normal, we need to eliminate the phrase social distancing from our vocabulary, AND we need to all work to heal the damage that was done by months and months (years) of using the phrase social distancing. My suggestion is that we reconnect with individuals that we love, dive deep into friendships and work to sustain them, and apologize for things we might have done that were hurtful throughout the pandemic.

Being socially and emotionally healthy requires that we surround ourselves with friends and family who are willing to know and love us.

Never again can we fight an infectious disease pandemic by encouraging the world to be socially distant from our life-sustaining relationships. May we move into the next normal cherishing our friendships and knowing that in community with others we can make our worlds happier and healthier places.

May that be the lifelong lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic…

The work that we have ahead of us — to forgive public health for instructing us to socially distance, to create and sustain life-giving relationships, and to put an emphasis on the importance of being known — involves each of us. And while the public health officials, mental health providers, counselors, and social workers can lead this work, this work has been assigned to each of us.

We are all public health. We need each other; life is a team sport.