BUSINESS
Strength
STAYING
STRONG
Elizabeth Ashley explores personal resilience…
S
TRONG. Now there’s a word with many different interpretations. It could mean, physically, mentally, or emotionally. Perhaps one of the few useful things COVID has done is turned the notion of being emotionally strong on its head. Hopefully, the changing collective consciousness about how it feels to be put under pressure will also burst the festering boil that was mental health. One thing’s for certain, even if the vaccine has put some distance between us and the virus, there is another crisis most certainly now hitting the NHS. My daughter is a paramedic. After 12 months of living out this nightmare on her own, in Sheffield, finally the doctor has drawn a line. Despite her cries
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HOLISTIC THERAPIST 2021
of indignation, she has been signed off on long term sick, completely shattered by trauma. The problem being, of course that the strain of COVID, the sheer number of cases, the colossal amount of overtime required to plug the gaps because of people self-isolating…all of that was piled onto what was already a terrifyingly traumatic job. These coming days, I predict, will be extremely hard for my daughter. That she should rest, for her, is cognitive dissonance. It goes against everything she has come to believe. Every synapse in her body is screaming for respite, but through necessity she has trained it that it must not. She will not be the only one in this state. Indeed, I know that she is not. It’s not just keyworkers, either is it?
holistictherapistmagazine.com
