Anxiety Support Group

Anxiety is a physical condition marked by intense and persistent feelings of distress, fear, angst or dread. General anxiety caused by routine day-to-day stresses usually passes quickly and is experienced by almost everyone at one time or another. However, such feelings that linger over time and are very difficult to cope with, and which lack a clear cause, may indicate...

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Social Distancing

arfie
arfie

I am feeling far more stable since the medical trauma flashbacks have let up with the number of masks on the daily horizon. Thank you, all for the gentle support or at least tolerance as I have worked my way through the phobic reactions. Coronaville has been a rough ride. Prayers in progress. Healing hopes for all. No exception.


My current thought loop is around watching the decline of the Social Distancing mandate. I suspect I have been self-gaslighting on this piece of the Corona pie. That is a pretty common twist of my damaged memory. I gently monitor constantly for accuracy in my memory functions. I believe I remember the term from my earliest days of psychotherapy in the early 70's. I believe the people who introduced me to the term believed many of my problems stemmed from my social distancing habits.


Any history buffs among us? Could I be remembering right?

Brockster
Brockster
Afraid I can't help with the history angle of the term, but I'm glad that the decline in mask wearing is helping you feel better. It's been an adjustment to go back to not wearing them, but I totally appreciate and enjoy seeing faces again when I'm out and about.
arfie
arfie
I haven't been able to confirm nor deny the memory, but I'm feeling inclined to trust it. There is quite allot of 20th century psychology which hasn't made the internet.

I still haven't managed to mask it up. My social distancing skills were my survival mechanism for both years of 2020. Good thing that those social distancing skills proved therapy resistant, huh? My foster kids got me a "2020 Social Distancing Champ" t-shirt for Christmas.

Now that the maskite invasion seems to be waning, I don't know that I want to give up social distancing again. "Please increase your social distance" might be a protocol I will hang onto.
rmb
rmb
Haha! I love the t shirt!

I have jumped into the whole not wearing a mask thing with 100% gusto. I’m now a permanent member of the work from home tribe and therefore my social distancing is more or less forced on me during the work day but I’m adapting. I’m all for self imposed social social distancing as needed. Government sanctioned social distancing, not so much.

Glad for you that the mask stuff has been lifted.
arfie
arfie
I did manage to find a 1957 reference to "Social Distancing" within a sociology collection describing cultural hierarchies. I'm enough of a sociology buff that it is entirely possible that is where I picked up the phrase. For sure, inside my strictly personal context, "Social Distancing" is a thing I do with people I would rather not know. I still can't talk to a maskite. . .

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/28/social-distancing-how-a-1950s-phrase-came-to-dominate-2020

During the 1918 masky dask, the corona dance was called, "Physical Distancing." Makes more sense, if you ask me, but? ? ? Nobody's asking and I'm not seriously asking germaphobes to be sensible in my socially distant senses.
Brockster
Brockster
That shirt sounds pretty awesome.

I'm finding myself in the interesting position of wanting to maintain social distancing with the population-at-large, but also wanting to reconnect with people that I know. I've been finding myself working from the coffee shop I used to frequent a lot lately and starting to go to the gym again just to see familiar faces and smile at people. My office doesn't officially open until September and, even then, I'm only gonna do a couple days a week in the office, primarily for the social aspect.

All that said, I'm glad for this slow, and hopefully steady, march back to some semblance of the old normal.
arfie
arfie
The memories I find flickering like actors behind the old theater gaslights seem to indicate that in the early 70's and 80's the therapy catch phrase, "Social Distancing" morphed through the mysteries of etymology to, "Isolating." One of many, many linguistic morphings which have transpired along my long, hard recovery road.

For sure, the government mandates on "Social Distancing" hit me as a blatant invalidation of 40+ years of recovery and psychotherapy. My conditioned response is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Proof has arrived that those psychobabbling fools are as crazy as my baby-raping daddy claimed.

Sorting. . .

Is it an appropriate irony that that cool t-shirt the foster kids bought me is a couple sizes too small for me? I may frame it.
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