Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 3B
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

It’s only been six days since the first 

coronavirus cases were reported in Michigan, 

but it feels like an eternity has passed. My heart 

sinks every time I see another student moving 

out of their dorm, lugging mattress pads and 

portable fans across the street to waiting cars. 

I’ve temporarily moved back home myself and 

visited Ann Arbor earlier this week to see a ghost 

town. Empty parking spots were scattered all 

along South University that should’ve been filled 

with cars at 1 p.m. on a Monday. I think back to 

the frenzy of the Bernie rally in the Diag last 

Sunday, or the dread with which I returned to 

classes after spring break, and wish my life still 

looked like that.

Amid all the adjustment, I do recognize my 

privileges; I have a loving family to return home 

to and wonderful friends to support me. Even 

so, it’s important to recognize that the emotions 

students are feeling during this turbulent time 

are valid. Social distancing can feel isolating and 

virtual platforms are sometimes a poor substitute. 

I’ve already been invited to two “FaceTime 

parties,” neither of which I participated in, 

suspecting they would instead be more endless 

conversations about the coronavirus. I’ll talk, but 

about anything other than that.

One common thread of advice I’ve gotten from 

my friends and mentors is that “everything will 

be OK.” “We’ll get through this,” my professor 

said during my first BlueJeans class on Monday. 

Which made me wonder, is the passage of 

time enough for us to overcome the events of 

the last couple of months? From an infectious 

disease standpoint, yes, though projections 

from the Center for Disease Control show that 

the spread of coronavirus will probably get 

worse before it gets better. But from a healing 

perspective, how long will it take to throw off the 

emotional baggage coronavirus has brought to 

communities? How long before the xenophobia 

and paranoia die down? 

Which brings me to my central question: Does 

time heal trauma? After this crisis has blown 

over, I believe we will be able to safely say the 

coronavirus classifies as a form of community 

trauma. This pandemic has the potential to 

inform the way we see the world for decades to 

come. As much as we like to believe otherwise, 

healing involves much more than just the passing 

of time.

Part of the reason time can’t “cure” healing is 

that healing has an incredibly fluid definition to 

begin with — a simple Google search will show 

you as much. I constantly hear from friends and 

family that “time numbs pain.” Before writing 

this, I’d assumed that the passage of time almost 

informed healing and was an integral part of it. 

Recognizing my gaps of knowledge in the field 

of healing, I caught up with two experts to hear 

their insights.

“Healing is to never forget what has happened,” 

said Laura Monschau, an embedded psychologist 

with Counseling and Psychological Services at 

the University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate 

School. Monschau has served as a psychologist 

at the University for over 20 years, including 

seven spent at the Sexual Assault Prevention 

and Awareness Center (SAPAC). “The healing 

journey is both how to put a foot into the past and 

feel what was unendurable at the time, and also 

bring it forward into the future,” Monschau said. 

Listening to Monschau made me realize I’d 

always thought of healing as a necessary step, 

an inevitable hurdle to be crossed, instead of 

an ongoing way to incorporate trauma into my 

being. In Monschau’s view, healing is less an 

endpoint and more a lifelong process. Trauma 

patients rarely feel as though they are suddenly 

healed. This feeling is universal — we can be 

reminded of our past at any moment, and thus 

have to learn to live with it, accepting it as a part 

of us and shaping our life around it. 

Monschau draws many of her perspectives 

from Judith Herman, a feminist and social 

justice-oriented psychologist who’s 1992 book 

“Trauma and Recovery” offers a three-tiered 

view of healing. Herman’s last stage involves 

integrating the trauma into one’s being and 

moving forward. If this isn’t realized, no amount 

of time will help. 

Barbara Niess-May, executive director of 

SafeHouse, a sexual assault and domestic abuse 

shelter in Ann Arbor, thinks of healing in a 

different light. “First, survivors need to be safe,” 

Niess-May said. For some, this safety can be hard 

to come by. SafeHouse handles over 6,000 cases 

of sexual and domestic abuse every year, and 

often the most difficult leap is making survivors 

feel secure while understanding that safety won’t 

necessarily assuage their memories. 

“When they’re ready to talk about it, people 

don’t believe them,” Niess-May said. The 

#MeToo era has helped in this respect, and as 

more women feel comfortable bringing their 

allegations forward, campaigns like Start by 

Believing urge us to listen to survivors rather 

than doubt their stories. 

Regardless of what healing constitutes, both 

Monschau and Niess-May agree that time 

isn’t the end-all cure. Time has the capacity to 

change the way we see events — for example, 

that breakup two years ago probably doesn’t 

have the same sting now as it did then — but 

rarely is it the solution. According to a 2016 study 

by psychologists at Arizona State University, 

creating expectations for when someone should 

be “healed” is usually not helpful and a poor 

heuristic to follow. Monschau stressed the 

importance of honoring everyone’s “trajectories 

of resilience” in their individual journey toward 

healing. “It can’t be rushed,” Monschau said. “It’s 

a lifetime journey of reintegration.” 

Time can also alter the way we see traumatic 

events by drawing us out of linear time. We’ve 

been trained to think of time in a linear sense, 

progressing from one scheduled event to 

another, morning to night, but a trauma-riddled 

brain doesn’t see events as a continuous string. 

“There’s a liminality to time. You can feel like 

you’re in linear, everyday time, and suddenly 

you’re pulled,” Monschau said. Remembering 

a traumatic event can make time slow down, 

and this transitory time can make us feel like 

we’re not in the past or present, but somewhere 

in-between. Think back to a pivotal moment in 

your life, and chances are you remember it in 

bursts of memory. In a car crash last summer, I 

remember the crunching sound of metal and the 

feeling of my heart dropping somewhere beyond 

my stomach, but my memories of immediately 

before and after the crash are hazy. 

This pull away from linear time isn’t exclusive 

to the traumatic event alone. Superficial 

everyday events can serve as triggers and 

remind us of our trauma. Niess-May believes 

this is especially damaging for survivors. “Your 

brain can train you to think normal situations 

are dangerous,” said Niess-May. Niess-May has 

worked with many survivors over her near two 

decades as SafeHouse Executive Director, some 

who remember sensory details like the song that 

played in the background during their assault, 

even years later.

Niess-May, a survivor of sexual assault herself, 

is still reminded of the life-changing event 30 

years later. “There are days when I feel like I’m 

good,” Niess-May said, “But other days when 

I’m like wow, that really reminded me of what 

happened.”

If time doesn’t necessarily facilitate healing, 

I wondered if the opposite was true: Could time 

hurt the healing process? Maybe. In extreme 

cases, Monschau said, “... time can almost seal 

the trauma in.” Unable to cope with trauma in 

their past, people may get stuck in a repetitive 

cycle of remembrance sometimes linked to social 

isolation. More commonly, trauma may remain 

underground while life flies by, but reappear 

suddenly and intensely. In this way, time can 

give you the false illusion of forgetting while 

never truly letting you escape. Post-traumatic 

stress syndrome (PTSS) and post-traumatic 

stress disorder (PTSD) can be manifestations of 

this trauma kinesthetically locked in the body, 

like a caged animal unable to escape. It’s less 

about diverting your attention until the trauma 

doesn’t hit with the same ferocity and more 

about understanding that the trauma may never 

completely leave you.

The turbulence of healing: Trauma through the lens of time

TRINA PAL

Daily Arts Writer

NEEDPIX

B-SIDE

B-SIDE
The power of time in the current age of COVID-19

NINA MOLINA
Daily Arts Writer

Time is an active friend. It skips, flies, 

races and slows. It’s spent and wasted. It’s 

on our hands and walls and microwaves. In 

moments of joy, we never have enough of it.. 

And, in a few indelible moments in our lives, 

time holds its breath and stands completely 

still.

Last Wednesday afternoon, I sat with 

my friends at a booth in the Dana Building, 

laptops burning our eyes, only glancing 

up for groans about MSU closing before 

us. I thought I wanted a week off, even 

two. When the announcement popped up 

in my friend’s Twitter feed, though, time 

indefinitely ceased its ever-forward march. 

Everyone at that table was a transfer 

student 
I 
met 
through 
serendipitous 

circumstances — a transfer tour of Hatcher 

in August, Artscapade, a transfer dinner 

event, a friend of a friend at a party. We all 

carved spaces and homes for ourselves here 

after everyone else. We knew not to ask too 

many questions of the “before,” all being 

from other colleges or breaks from college. 

For the first time in a while, we had built a 

community we loved. In an instant, that new 

life crumbled. My heart dropped through 

the cloth-covered couch and onto the floor. 

At a nearby table, a boy threw a bunch of 

paper into the air in either frustration or 

relief. 

Whenever I am in doubt or confused 

of what to make of the world, I run to the 

Oxford 
English 
Dictorionary’s 
online 

database. This moment was no different. 

If defined as a verb, to “time” is “To befall, 

to happen.” When the coronavirus became 

real, it fell over our table of friends like a 

blanket of virgin snow, silent and eerie. We 

looked at each other and I tried to choose 

a single emotion. I tried to pluck something 

from my turning mind and racing heart. I 

couldn’t pin down anything, so I settled on 

having everyone over at my place one last 

time. 

That night, we crowded around the TV 

in my living room, news headlines flashing 

every few minutes. I lit a scented candle, 

a meager attempt at diffusing the anxiety 

palpable in the silences of our conversation. 

A reporter’s voice boomed around the 

apartment walls as we ate the cassava 

cake I had baked. It felt as though we were 

plopped down into a new reality, a new era 

of existence. 

The OED’s 3a. definition of “time” reads 

as “a period in the existence or history of 

the world; an age, an era.” Growing up, I was 

told that everyone remembered where they 

were on 9/11. My older brother remembers 

kneeling in front of our TV, staring at the 

towers crumbling like Legos while my 

mother frantically dialed our family in New 

York. 

I think we’ll remember when COVID-19 

became real, all of us scrambling to figure 

out how something could change our lives 

so fast. Just as 2001 ushered in the era 

defined by survellience, war and terrorism, 

2020’s coronavirus has altered public 

consciousness permenantly, claiming a new 

time in our lives. 

In true Shakespearean tragedy-worthy 

irony, my English class’s unit on public 

poetry and health started last week. We 

are reading Anne Boyer’s 2019 poetic 

memoir “The Undying” about her breast 

cancer diagnosis, how she grappled with 

her rearranged reality, and its aftershocks 

in politics. Boyer writes, “if that suffering 

does not meet sufficient language, those 

who endure that suffering must come 

together to invent it.” Just as she endured a 

reordering of language of her new reality of 

“sonograms,” “imaging,” and the word “ill,” 

we too have a new language of our time 

filled with “respiratory,” “coronavirus,” 

“social distancing,” “quarantining” and 

“generational war.” 

Though some of us are enduring the same 

isolation as Boyer, there is, and will always 

be, time. Time to make TikToks with our 

siblings stuck in the house with us. Time 

to sit and watch that new series on Netflix 

(between our BlueJeans lectures of course). 

Time to realize that loneliness and isolation 

caused by a public health crisis is simply a 

concept, a construction that can be pushed 

aside for taking the time to realize the 

humanity of those closest to us.

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com

