Steer Clear of Synecdoche!(…What?)
Feeling like everything you know is up for grabs? You are not alone. In a disaster, the psychological footprint is always greater than the medical footprint. One of our colleagues getting COVID can cause ripples of stress and anxiety: one patient crashing can emit a much larger pall: one violent patient casts a halo of anxiety over the unit. And out in the world, a single air crash can ground hundreds of planes, one local shooting can create a terror of crime in a neighborhood and fear walking down the street. In our discipline, medical systems collapsing in London and Los Angeles cause high anxiety – exacerbating stress and burnout -- for our providers in Illinois.
We are trained by a 24-hour news cycle – and the result is synecdoche.
What is synecdoche? Bet you haven’t seen that word since studying for the SAT. According to the Oxford Dictionary, “Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase that refers to a part of something is substituted to stand in for the whole, or vice versa.” In other words, we erroneously generalize: a shooting is a sign that everything is unsafe. A colleague with COVID means we all are going to get it. What is happening elsewhere is what is happening everywhere.
Certainly healthcare providers and officials would like patients to sympathize enough with crises in order be motivated to take precautionary, preventive and curative measures. But the current overwhelming, overlapping disasters are pushing our patients’ coping mechanisms past sustainability. And well may be pushing our own coping mechanisms right to the limit.
How to Stop the Synecdoche
When the impact of events becomes dysfunctional, having negative impacts, we need to stop seeing the example as the whole. In the Psychological First Aid trainings we talk about “grounding” – pulling patients back into their present, sometimes into this very hour or this very minute. As providers, we are trained in this. We routinely take a big situation and break it down medically to the most acute pieces, to identify appropriate interventions.
What about when we need it? Exactly the same technique, applied to ourselves.
Sometimes we need to get very, very simple. A grounding exercise might be breathing deeply and reviewing what our senses are telling us right now. I see a desk. I hear the air conditioning. I feel the chair. I smell the hand sanitizer. I am breathing without effort. We can review the current environment. I have a warm safe room to sit in. Nobody is hurting me right now. I am not hungry. We can simply note our emotions. I am sad. I am frightened. This simple act of grounding can help us become more calm, aware, and re-connected.
Now we expand the field of vision a little bit. Do we have current crisis issues? What needs to be solved right now? If there is a crisis, what is happening in this moment? Can I simply review the current situation? Even in crises, the overall situation can be broken into subparts that are urgent, others that are very important and others that are stable at some level. What are our next steps?
Synecdoche Can Immobilize – It Can Steal Your Power.
You Can Reclaim It.
In this time of massive upheaval, what if we remembered to ground ourselves in this moment? What if we stayed in this place, in this problem, in this part of the problem that needs addressing? The whole situation does not need to be solved this moment. The part that is elsewhere does not need to be solved. The part that today is stable does not need to stress us out. The part that is tomorrow may not need to be solved right now.
Synecdoche is not the answer. Steer clear of the temptation. Instead, stay in the here, the now. Reconnect. Regain your calm. When you do, you will regain your power, your agency, your true ability to respond (not just react) and create positive change – moment by moment.