What comes after reset? REBUILD

The last couple of years were probably the most challenging for the humanity in a very long time. Along the history, the world had faced diverse traumas of different gravity (accidents, wars, financial crisis), but the Covid pandemic had a certain particularity that created unprecedent exhaustement. It couldn’t be controlled through known mechansims. It was long. It was unpredictable. It had no rules and no experiences to relate to. It was very harsh at emotional level. It created lots of disruptions in people’s lifestyle.  

When something so sudden happens to the outside world and forces you to adapt on so many levels, the trauma is inevitable. A trauma is an experience that surpases someone’s capacity to control the threat from outside. It is accompanied by feelings of helplessness and lack of self defence and the consequences at psihological level are inevitable. It triggers a major lenghty earthquake in the way the human connects with himself or the humanity as a whole. When in a trauma, the individual is deprived of the capacity to use his intellectual abilities to surpass the danger and protect your life.

The feeling of helplessness arises when one feels that can not help himself, nor any other person. At this level the individual often chooses decoupling like a method to “cut-off” for a while the hurting part of your life, the one that produces pain, so as to be able to survive. In other words, the survival mechanisms become priority. 

The pandemic crisis produced that kind of trauma. People were forced to cut-off from the living system they were functioning with in order to save lives. There was no choice. And during this isolation new mechanisms came and restore people’s faith and feeling of control. 

The restoration had two phases: 

1. Time to reset (2021) was a period of individual revolution. People faced the reality of their personal life, got to the bottom of it and obtained answers to questions they never had time to ask themselves in the pre-pandemic era. Being alone or surrounded only by close family or friends, they’ve had the time to reflect and decide what’s good for them, what makes them happy versus what’s bad and draining them of energy. They had time to think how they want to work, what people they want around, how they want to eat & sleep … in a way reset their inner balance after their living system has been shaken to its roots 
2. Rebuilding us (2022) is the phase we are going through as we speak. After the time of individual “pieces” restoration, after the system has been broken, you might find out that parts are not that compatible anymore. The desire to come back together might be there already, yet the “dance” doesn’t flow as it used to, although at individual level balance is restored already. People came out from this pandemic with a fully revised list of individual priorities which puts them in a very good relationship with themselves, but in many cases on different paths at social level. Some have decided they never want to go back and work from an office, they want to work from home forever. Others want to live on a different immunity level and consider nutrition and sports as priorities. Some consider they missed a lot of time away from family and children and consider that this should be top priority from now on. Others discovered hobbies or abilities they did not know they had and decide to re-center their life around these. With all these pieces going through such dramatic changes, the world definitely needs to create new systems of cooperation, a new way of building connection, of creating a functioning US 

End of 2021, beginning of 2022, finds us in a tense stage of passing from phase 1 to phase 2 of recovery: growing from ME to US, from survival mode to the social functioning one. People are still confused about the new rules of functioning together – with or without a mask or certificate, with or without vaccine, work from home permanently or not… Lots of doubts and uncertainty

Latest measurements of the trust levels in Romania show that people don’t trust anybody from outside more than they trust themselves. 61% say they have full confidence in themselves and 48% trust their close friends and family. On the other hand, the trust in the outside system has reached an unprecedented low. The only institutions that seem to have preserved somehow people trust are those related to faith: the church, the NGOs (1 in 4 Romanians put trust in these). The trust in other authorities or institutions (press, justice, education, banks, politicians) goes below 20%, which indicates the level of the trauma this pandemic has created in Romania. The recovery is going to be lengthy and challenging. The ones that will accept that people have changed (in the good sense) and they matured during these difficult years will definitely know how to guide them through to rebuild a functioning US. 

As people say, this pandemic had a curative effect, it brought out to the surface the naked truth about people’s lives and society and also strengthen the importance of accepting the other’s choice & nature, the importance of emotional intelligence, empathy and tolerance

If we manage do reconnect wisely, we will definitely have a better US in the years to come.