Studying the article, I noticed Leah has a Minneapolis-based therapy practice, so I reached out and set up an in-person face masked meeting. During our exploratory conversation, we unearthed six psychological and overlapping therapeutic themes and nuances we want to share with you as we begin addressing the longer-term effects of our collective and individual experiences since 2020. Today we discuss the first two themes.

We need context and content to psychologically and emotionally evolve. We need Leah’s systems perspective to understand our interconnected experiences from a broader context. Before discussing the two of six psychological and overlapping therapeutic themes that emerged from the Coronavirus pandemic, I want you to discover who Leah Seeger is and how she moved into a second career as a marriage and family therapist after three interrelated events changed the trajectory of her life.

Leah grew up in a small southwestern Michigan town with 42 students in her high school graduating class. She describes her home life with two parents and a younger brother, four years her junior, as a complicated mixture of love, stubbornness, creativity, gullibility, and pride laced with alcoholism and living with her father’s chronic and progressive Parkinson’s disease. You get the picture; it’s complicated. Ohio State University provided the opportunities, and sense of belonging Leah craved while acquiring a degree in business administration and forging a career in advertising after that.

An opportunity to work for a multinational advertising agency brought Leah to Minnesota. In her 12^th year as an ad exec, three big questions brought her into therapy: career, parent’s divorce, and coping with her father’s debilitating and declining disease. You will hear how Leah asserted a new direction to pursue her lifework as a therapist out of therapy. She earned three designations: a master’s degree (MA) and two licenses. One license as a marriage and family therapist (LMFT) and the other as an alcohol and drug counselor (LADC). She runs her therapy practice through LynLake Centers for Wellbeing with 150 to 160 other therapists.

Here are the two psychological and overlapping therapeutic themes and some of what we discuss. Use the diagram below to understand your world from a systems lens. 

Theme I – Panic and Anxiety accompanies News of a Novel Virus (disclosed nationally Mid-March of 2020)

• Stockpiling toilet paper and other amenities. Store shelves become bare.
• Inconsistent information begins between the Medical Science of the CDC and other agencies and leadership.

• We all thought this would be a few months, and we’ll be back to everyday living. The initial panic subsided, and daily anxiety peppered our existence.

• The diagram is from Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, developed in 1974. Leah briefly describes the five systems in the chart and how this view of systems can aid in understanding ourselves and what is going on around us.
• Our lives and families form an emotional unit interwoven with all the systems around us: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem. Leah describes these systems in an easy-to-listen-to-and-digest kind of style so that you can put yourself in the bullseye of your life. 

Theme II – Social Distancing and Other Life-Altering Changes like Virtual Living

We discuss life-altering changes at home, in our communities, and around the nation and world. We shifted into Virtual Living, and you will hear how Leah and her clients shifted as well.

• Stickers on floors, plastic partitions at the grocery store.
• Lack of physical touch as we canceled all our events and isolated/cocooned.
• Unprecedented violence and social justice uprising around the world.
• Feeling out of control with our safety and security.
• The violence threatened our stability.
• Layers of destabilizing factors at the same time moved us all into panic and life-threatening situations.

Virtual Living brought out creative expression and different ways of coping. The traumatic intensity of these two themes changed our lives and how we live and work together forever. Leah applies a strategy to assessing how much bandwidth you have to help others. Hear how she changed her practice, managed her well-being and held space for the fear and rage of others.

Leah recognizes how our bodies, minds, and emotions work together to heal trauma. A lot changed, forcing us to adapt quickly. These changes were hard for us. “Extending grace and empathy knowing that everyone responds differently to change can go a long way,” says Leah.

This conversation reinforces the importance of integrating change constructively and permits us to acknowledge how much distress we have been living with and how vital self-compassion and forgiveness are in healing individual and collective trauma. DOWNLOAD

NEXT STEP after listening: Challenge yourself and do the Conscious Attentive Leadership Mentoring (C.A.L.M.) Activities below.