What if I Give Covid to my Parents? And Other Guilt Provoking Thoughts

By Staff Therapist

As things have opened back up, I’m noticing more and more people talking about COVID guilt - the anticipatory guilt of possibly giving COVID to someone else. What if I have COVID and I don’t realize it? What if I give COVID to my parents? Or to my high risk colleague? Or to my pregnant friend? Given that we are inundated with terrifying stories and facing uncertainty, it’s not surprising these thoughts and feelings are present for so many of us.

Now these thoughts and feelings can be helpful. If held lightly they might motivate us to get tested if we feel ill for example - but they’re also uncomfortable... and we humans naturally go all out to avoid sources of discomfort. We might use strategies to assuage these thoughts and feelings such as reassuring ourselves, mentally playing through recent outings to make sure we were socially distant, calculating the odds that we’ve caught COVID, reading and re-reading the news, researching COVID stats on medical websites, avoiding more and more situations, etc. Sound familiar? These strategies temporarily bring down our discomfort and make us feel in control. When used flexibly and mindfully, some of them may even be wise!

But our discomfort always comes back because complete certainty alludes us. There is also a dark side to these strategies. Because they lessen our discomfort in the short term, they can become somewhat addictive. Plus, there is a cost when we start using these strategies frequently, rigidly, and pervasively. Imagine a map of your life so to speak with brightly colored areas representing the places you “travel” - the relationships you participate in, the places you go, and the important activities you engage in. Now imagine you stop traveling to some of these places as you retreat to spend more and more of your time in the comfort of your control strategies. As we give up terrain a little at a time in the service of controlling our discomfort, these areas one by one begin to turn gray, and our world starts to become smaller.

So what’s the alternative? If we can practice willingness to feel discomfort and carry it with us then we can become free to chart any course based on our wisdom. We no longer have to reactively restrict our movement to merely inhabit our control strategies. What areas of your map would you visit if you weren’t checking the news for the third time today to see if there is a new article on COVID? What might you be able to connect with if you weren’t in your head reassuring yourself? Are there places on your map that you’ve given up and now want to reclaim - like sitting on your porch to get some fresh air? To experiment with willingness try this brief exercise: When you notice discomfort (hint: it’s usually there when you’re reaching for one of the control strategies) pause and see if you can locate the physical sensations of discomfort in your body. Once you’ve got the general area, take just a moment or two to curiously investigate and describe the sensations. Is there heat, cool, tension, flow, tingling, pressure, heaviness, lightness? Just taking a moment or two each day to allow these sensations to be with you on your journey (rather than retreating) will make it easier to carry them with you to the places that matter most.