Suddenly the entire world was on vacation. There was something fantastical about it. In my home I felt as if I was in a movie, I and my family. There was something exciting [about the situation], a sense that “many really new and special things are about to happen to me.” It wasn’t a standpoint of fear, my position was one of curiosity. There was some kind of fascinating fantasy going on here.
Orit refers to the suddenness of the situation and emphasizes the strange, fantastic “movie-like” nature of the new reality, yet at the same time the shared experience created a sense of affinity to the world at large (“The entire world was on vacation”). Such an experience of a living in a fantasy or being swept away by the circumstances of the situation is consistent with findings by Kazmi et al. (2020), who connected the experience of the pandemic to loss of control, anxiety, and stress. In her article, Sheerie describes a similar experience:
The increase in numbers of people diagnosed positive with Covid-19 was called: GAL. In Hebrew GAL means wave, a vibration of energy that transfers in the water. While swimming in the ocean, we can jump over a wave, decide to go under, or at times, we are left without a choice as the waves decide for us. There is neither familiar rhythm, speed, or direction. The idea of being in control vanishes. Much like in a whirlpool, you can’t fight it but rather let it take you and lead you to a new place in space. The whirlpool of COVID-19 has led us to a new space in a new reality.
The lack of control, similarly to what one feels when one is swept away by ocean waves, as Sheerie describes, was implied by several participants, though not directly mentioned, almost as if the experienced loss of control is taken for granted. Orly wrote, “…the fact that you have no control. We talk about a state of loss of control today, in the Corona [pandemic], it’s what we know…we’ve lost control over a basic capacity…”
Loss of control is an unpleasant feeling associated with anxiety and stress (Kazmi et al., 2020), yet participants made little mention of how they cope with these feelings. Ilan, for example, referred to participation in demonstrations against the government as an experience that, among other things, reinstated his sense of control (see section on Social Protest). In general, participants in this study did not explicitly report their own personal fears and anxiety, but they emphasized their clients’ experiences of these emotions. For example, Gil generalized, “It seems that the Corona can lead to an increase in the anxiety levels of clients and therapists.”
Martha, for example, recounted that one of the more typical phenomena she currently encountered in, in the Bowlby Center, which she manages, was the children’s fears, and that in the zoological setting [in the Bowlby Center], children gain a better sense of control by working to overcome their fear of animals. Ziva similarly noted that, of all the emerging issues, anxiety related to the sense of uncertainty was one of the more prominent issues that demanded a group intervention in the psychodrama group that she facilitates:
Here, [pointing to the first chair] sites anxiety. A sense of uncertainty. A sense that we wanted something but did not get what we wanted. Both in our studies and in general. We are in a place where we don’t know what’s going to happen next. What name to give this feeling. [It is] Something very chaotic that disrupted our everyday routine and turned it into something unclear and nameless.
