The difficult return to normal
In recent weeks I have often read about the “hut syndrome” : a specific phobia with respect to life before. After spending more than two months in confinement, many people have found it difficult to resume leaving the house .
Many have felt and still feel the threatening world around them and find reassurance in their own homes . Indeed, the easing of restrictions for many people has coincided with a rise in anxiety levels. For many people, this moment is proving more delicate than that of confinement.
We will try to understand a little more starting from what are the classic anxiety disorders, to arrive at formulating a hypothesis on what may be the specific anxiety of this period. Next, we will try to figure out how to try to deal with it.
The anxiety of public places
Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder that pushes sufferers to avoid specific situations. According to the DSM-V, the essential core of this disorder is fear and anxiety triggered by actual or anticipated exposure to a wide range of situations, which generate thoughts about the fear that something terrible might happen.
Situations involve:
- Being among other people in different contexts ranging from the use of vehicles, to being in open spaces
- Being indoors
- Be in a queue or in a crowd
- Being alone outside the home
For this reason, forced confinement, for those with tendencies towards agoraphobia, was a period of tranquility.
Social anxiety
Social anxiety refers to anxiety triggered by the fear of feeling judged by others . More precisely, there is a fear of being judged negatively by virtue of a personal defect such as poor intelligence or an unpleasant appearance.
This fear inhibits the possibility of social interactions, producing a serious disadvantage at the level of the subject’s quality of life. Furthermore, the need for positive recognition can push those who strongly fear the opposite to engage in negative behaviors.
Hypochondria
Hypochondria is an anxiety disorder related to excessive worry about the possibility of being sick or of contracting a disease.
The current context, with its very high degree of uncertainty and the unknown that it brings with it, is a powerful anxiety-inducing factor. In light of the three types listed above we can hypothesize one, specifically linked to the coronavirus, which is also referred to as “cabin syndrome” which brings together specific traits at the same time as agoraphobia, social anxiety and hypochondria, and more. This new anxiety syndrome is a specific reaction to the health emergency we are experiencing.
Symptoms:
It consists in the phobia to go out, a direct consequence of a series of anxious worries related to the situation outside one’s home. Similarly to agoraphobia, we fear open spaces as well as closed ones, and we feel protected only in our own home.
The perceived anxiety in this situation makes being out of the house really intolerable. It becomes difficult to abandon that reassuring quiet offered by one’s nest, due to the uncertainty that awaits us outside.
The anxiety arose mainly from two factors:
- in the present, what worries the most is the fear of contracting the virus, the fear that if you leave, you can get infected. This then can produce brooding because since there is no immediate relationship, but there is an incubation time for the virus, it can happen to rethink occasions in which one is exposed, more or less, to risk and fear of getting sick.
- future concerns due to the consequences of the coronavirus: on social relationships, on the health of loved ones most at risk, on the economic aspects with which we will face in the coming months.
The fear of this situation can almost assume the configuration of a phobia and for this reason, by avoiding going out of the house, all worries are avoided tout court . Basically this is the same mechanism as agoraphobia. The agoraphobic, withdrawn at home, tends not to go out in order not to deal with situations which, unconsciously, he fears he is not up to.
Furthermore, by staying at home, you can deny what is happening outside, according to the saying if I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist. On the opposite side, even the gatherings of nightlife we are witnessing are a more violent denial of what has happened in recent months.
The uncanny Freudian
That strange feeling halfway between the familiar and the unknown
The human being is by nature adverse to what he does not know, and in this historical moment we are all confronted with something still too unknown. Until a few weeks ago it was not at all extraordinary to think that there was a monstrous entity outside.
Feeling safe coincided with staying at home. I who continued to work, on the street I was seized by an unusual sensation. Freud defines it unheimlich , in Italian it is translated as uncanny, it is that feeling of disorientation experienced when one witnesses something that is both familiar and unknown.
In fact, going home, taking the usual route I take every day, without crossing other means than ambulances or police patrols, had something that stirred me inside. In such a difficult context, the security offered by the house has proved invaluable.
Solutions
“Those who sit by the fireplace are not as easily exposed to getting lost as those who venture into the world”.
This passage by Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, is taken from his book Aut… Aut, or… or, a book on choice, which I find very current. After all, during the lockdown, we were forced to home, but at the same time relieved of numerous responsibilities, through the various decrees that followed. Duty relieves us from wanting and it is in a sense easier to follow duty than to want.
Duty is impersonal, it is a rule to follow, it does not involve anything of the subject, it is de-subjectivating. The will, on the other hand, requires a great personal effort, the greatest of all because in wanting we put ourselves on the line, without the certainty of the result. The will is uncertain and therefore very frightening, because at the same time it forces us to sacrifice many other possibilities.
Freedom anxiety
For many who were at home the anxiety was gone along with the freedom, nothing could be done and therefore there was not much to choose from. Now, however, the possibility is present again and with it many difficulties have returned.
Basically there is no choice without a will, and there is no alibi that holds once we have chosen . A therapeutic path allows to deepen the relationship both with one’s own desire and with duty, which in each of us takes on a unique character linked to the plot of our life as well as to the innate dispositions.
