This feels so familiar, both from the Brexit experience (all those articles about it causing relationship break-ups and ideologically divied family Christmases...) and the onset of the pandemic. While most people seemed traumatised to some degree, there was a huge distinction in how disabled and non-disabled people reacted.
Non-disabled people faced an abrupt and unprecedented isolation and lost their autonomy, plus aspects of their identity deriving from in-person work. Chronically ill people were also deeply shaken, and many more of us were even more isolated and had a higher risk of death, but we had coping mechanisms to share now that other people were experiencing marginalisation that echoed ours.
But it was the political reaction that really showed the difference in lived experience: healthy people realised for the first time that their government was wilfully building policy that could kill them. And we, the disabled survivors of Welfare Reform and Tory austerity, said: "We've been telling you."
As to therapy, it's honestly encouraging to hear someone else say they're managing to alter a chronically dysregulated nervous system over time. I've also been lucky in finding a therapy situation where we can discuss problems that come up, and find the lesson in them, but the nervous system stuff is some real slow going.
This feels so familiar, both from the Brexit experience (all those articles about it causing relationship break-ups and ideologically divied family Christmases...) and the onset of the pandemic. While most people seemed traumatised to some degree, there was a huge distinction in how disabled and non-disabled people reacted.
Non-disabled people faced an abrupt and unprecedented isolation and lost their autonomy, plus aspects of their identity deriving from in-person work. Chronically ill people were also deeply shaken, and many more of us were even more isolated and had a higher risk of death, but we had coping mechanisms to share now that other people were experiencing marginalisation that echoed ours.
But it was the political reaction that really showed the difference in lived experience: healthy people realised for the first time that their government was wilfully building policy that could kill them. And we, the disabled survivors of Welfare Reform and Tory austerity, said: "We've been telling you."
As to therapy, it's honestly encouraging to hear someone else say they're managing to alter a chronically dysregulated nervous system over time. I've also been lucky in finding a therapy situation where we can discuss problems that come up, and find the lesson in them, but the nervous system stuff is some real slow going.