Living & Working During a Time of Universal Crisis

In Chinese iconography, the symbol (above) for our English word CRISIS is made up of two symbols; the upper one represents danger, the lower one represents opportunity. When I first began my post-doctoral studies in the emerging field of crisis intervention at the Center for Training in Community Psychiatry and Mental Health Administration at Berkeley in California (1971-1972) and later as a Fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Laboratory of Community Psychiatry (1972-1973), a CRISIS of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic could have hardly been anticipated.

For weeks turning into months and in every hour of every day we are bombarded with facts, images and tales of this worldwide CRISIS: in short, we are inundated in representations of its danger.  You do not need a psychologist to tell you about the effects of this danger — a condition the effects of which clinicians will soon identify as a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  I see the effects of PTSD all around me in family, friends and strangers.  As a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional I know the signs and courses of these conditions.  I want to help minimize these effects in others.  I want to minimize danger and optimize opportunity during this COVID-19 CRISIS.

I will leave to the medical professions to advise all of us on how to best manage the danger inherent in the COVID-19 outbreak here in America and the rest of the world.  My expertise - framed by 50 years of clinical practice in high stress situations: war; civilian organizational leadership; incarceration; mental illness, addictions, chronic illness and death of a loved one – directs me to turn my life coach focus to assisting others who are being swept away psychologically, physically and economically by fear, disorientation and despair delivered daily by COVID-19.

In short, for now my focus is narrowed.  I focus on the opportunity embedded in the CRISIS paradigm.  In order to quickly identify and work through personal stress caused by COVID-19, I have developed the Pandemic Personal Stressor Scale™ (PPSS™), a 50 item questionnaire that helps persons suffering from generalized pandemic stress responses to target stressors with the greatest current impact.  In this way, I help clients move from a generalized stress response to a prioritized list of specific COVID-19 related stressors.  With that list in hand, clients can target high impact stressors which, when better managed, will free up focus to address lower impact – but still real – stressors.

In short, my greatest contributions as a clinical psychologist, trauma expert and long-time executive are: (1) to help individuals who are distressed to regain personal, professional or relationship balance; and (2) to help organizational leaders and others responsible for the well-being of others to personal and organizational success.

The importance of the leader's ability to connect for the organization's members its present (which includes the impact of its past) and its future is highlighted by William Bridge’s (Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1980) description of the impact of major organizational change on individuals: “It is as if we launched out from a riverside dock to cross to a landing on the opposite shore -- only to discover in midstream that the landing was no longer there.  (And when we looked back at the other shore, we saw that the dock we left from had just broken loose and was heading downstream.)”

What a prophetic description of our current times when the normal ebb and flow of personal and corporate life has turned into a deluge threatening our lives and livelihoods!