Michelle
“I always figured that, at some point in our lifetime, we’d live through some kind of pandemic because there are so many people on the planet. I just thought I’d be swinging a samurai sword and chopping zombies’ heads off – not staying at home! So, to know that it’s possible to sit and do nothing, but still help is an interesting paradox to me. But, also, I think I was capable of just sitting still; I’m not somebody who sits still very well. For me, it was really about getting back to basics, and doing the growth I had been putting off because I was so busy. It made making the connections to the people I love mean that much more.”
It may take years to truly understand the extent of the “silent pandemics” that have run parallel to the more visible effects of COVID-19. Among the many silent viruses that have emerged – including a delay children’s education and social and emotional learning and increased food insecurity for many families – is the rise of domestic violence (DV) incidents and mental health needs. With people out of work, children home from school, financial concerns, more family members under the same roof, and generally heightened anxiety about the state of the world, domestic violence rates began to skyrocket in the early weeks of lockdown.
The crisis was worldwide. According to the American Journal of Emergency Medicine and the United Nations group U.N. Women, when the pandemic began, incidents of DV increased 300% in Hubei, China; 25% in Argentina, 30% in Cyprus, 33% in Singapore and 50% in Brazil.
Similarly, in the United States, police departments reported increases in DV around the country: an 18% increase in San Antonio, 22% in Portland, Ore.; and 10% in New York City, according to the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. One study in the journal Radiology reported that at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, radiology scans and superficial wounds consistent with domestic abuse from March 11 to May 3, 2020 exceeded the totals for the same period in 2018 and 2019 combined.
As DV rates increased, counselors, therapists and victims’ advocates were faced with a groundswell of clients, while adapting to new ways of offering services – telehealth therapy and COVID-safe community outreach and education. All the while, counselors and therapists were mitigating their own burnout and increased mental health needs created both by the pandemic and the urgency and severity of DV with which they were faced.
Michelle was a counselor, and Director of Education and Community Outreach at the Domestic Violence Resource Center (DVRC) during the height of COVID in 2020. She is now a private therapist with a full caseload of clients, and is continuing to work with survivors of DV.
This is her story, in her own words.
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We can’t really put our finger on what makes a person resilient and what makes a person have grit. I’ve always kinda thought in life, “I’ve got this – I’m good. I’m resilient. I know how to do this.” Holy shit, did COVID push that to the limit.
Like everybody else, at the beginning, I was listening to whispers of what was going on on the other side of the planet. March hit, and we started having real conversations in our directors’ meetings about the possibility of what COVID was about to bring; we just kind of crossed our fingers and hoped that nothing would happen. We knew if we closed, the shit was going to hit the fan. We were thinking through how to keep people in the office, if others had to go home. We needed to figure out how the agency’s doors would stay open. That didn’t happen. Everything shut down, and we literally had to figure out how to do everything online in about a week.
We knew things were going to get really bad when the shutdown orders happened. I don’t think any of us thought shutting down would be what it was – which was, really, only having the grocery store to go to. Even doctor’s appointments were off. I looked at my Executive Director at the time and said, “All hell is going to break loose as soon as everyone is locked down. If we’re going into a true lockdown – a quarantine like we see in the movies – it’s going to be a matter of weeks.” Every director just said, “Yep, let’s get ready.”
The first few weeks, probably the first month leading into quarantine, we just kept telling the counselors to be ready. We knew everything was going to move fast and client stories were about to get ten times worse. Within six weeks of the shutdown, things began to change. It wasn’t gradual; one week to the next, there were just huge, huge crises.
As COVID got worse and worse, families started coming together. People were losing jobs – they didn’t have money for rent anymore. Three generations of families started living together. It was a mess. There were some households that had grandparents with restraining orders on adult kids; adult kids with restraining orders on the grandparents or kids having restraining orders on parents. It was multiple restraining orders in one household. No one could go anywhere – they were stuck. The intensity of the abuse happened very quickly. People were drinking, couldn’t go anywhere, not working and they were frustrated. So, even in situations where DV didn’t exist before, it manifested during COVID.
The intensity of cases is what was really different. You know, you hear horrible stories, and it’s terrible, but they don’t surprise you anymore. We just started hearing more and more intense situations when COVID hit. So, for example, a client who had reported being raped in their relationship before COVID, all of a sudden had to go to SANE (sexual assault nurse examiner) because it had gotten so much worse – the frequency of it and the brutality of it. Intensity, frequency and brutality – all three – just started going up, regardless of the situation. In families, in couples, where abuse might not have even existed before, it just kept happening. There was no money, no food, no work, nothing to do – you’re stuck at home – it was just the worst-case scenario for so many people.
Pre-COVID, the majority of my patients were out of relationships and about 20-30% were still with their offenders. When COVID started, those numbers completely flipped. If you don’t have somewhere to go, you’re gonna stay in the relationship. And, people were trapped without anywhere to go during lockdown. You could have a normal therapy session – and DV is never normal – but someone might come in and we’d talk about their week; we’d work on self-esteem, skills to bring symptomology down and processing trauma. We’d help people calm down, build communication, work on boundaries. All that went out the window when COVID happened. I would just ask, “Tell me what you’re doing to survive. What do you need?”
There was a lot of checking in with clients who probably never had substance abuse problems who had them start – or people who were relapsing. It was literally triage and safety planning; it was just about survival. Even though we had our treatment plans, it all went out the window. We just needed to make sure people were OK. It wasn’t about their progress on paper; we just needed to make sure they were alive.
People, obviously, couldn’t leave. But, what was interesting was that all the stuff that we say can happen in DV situations – the reason why we safety plan – is for the far off chance that the abuse would get worse for a client. And, COVID did that; it made everything worse very quickly. The people who had previously thought they were OK – maybe because nothing was broken or whatever – had those things happen during COVID, because that intensity of the violence and abuse escalated quickly. It was fascinating to see these light bulbs go on. They were neon, blaring red, in your face lights.
Clients would say, “This is what you were talking about,” and we were able to say, “Yes, we’re in the middle of COVID, but you still have access to all of these resources.” We might call Safe House and say, “Hey, we need this or that” and everybody just said, “Great – give me a minute and we’ll make it happen.” A cop would show up, move a client out until we could get them into shelter. It was just boom, boom, boom fast. It was interesting that it took COVID for this to happen, but there were lightbulbs going on everywhere for these victims. They were safe all of a sudden and then they’d look at you and say, “OK, now how do I heal?” So, we just kept moving forward. That was where the magic was. It might have taken a year longer for some of these people to get to that point, if COVID hadn’t have happened.
I think one of the biggest silver linings from this time has been opening discussions and shining a spotlight on DV and mental health. Mental health is as important, if not more important, than our physical health. I got lots of invitations to speak online with classes during COVID – high school and middle school – and it was just kids wanting to know what a healthy relationship was. To me, that’s platinum. Those are the kids who are going to be the next generation, and if they already know what they don’t want at home, they’re asking now what they need to know for it to be different.
DV will never go away, but our best shot of trying to correct some of it is really getting into the homes. You can’t always do that in therapy, but when you’re speaking to a classroom of thirty kids for seven hours, that’s totally different. With kids, you start talking to them about DV and you just start seeing heads nodding. Even if they don’t want to say anything in school with their peers and their teachers, we can at least get them the information that they need to know – which is, that there is something different for them out there.
The devotion of people who worked at DVRC, or in the DV world in general, is amazing. The loyalty is amazing. And, the passion to really work with that population is on point. I don’t think any of us said, “We can’t do this.” We just tried to figure out how we could do it more easily. We really worked hard to figure that out. Telehealth, for example, just isn’t the same with therapy. I think the statistic is 70 – 80% of communication is nonverbal, so when we’re doing Telehealth, we have to work extra hard to read between the lines, listen to people’s tones, hope our internet doesn’t go down. I’d say, we started getting very tired, very quickly. It was important to start to think about what we could do to keep ourselves going – who were we talking to? So, if someone needed a mental health day, they took it. There were no questions asked.
We hear a lot of really negative things – even now as the world is opening back up, and we’re starting to see negativity and anger everywhere – but there are still people in the trenches, doing their work and making the world a better place. We didn’t know how to make things happen during COVID, but damnit, we made them happen. Just everybody moving mountains. There’s something about finding a niche with populations that makes therapists feel like we’re here, and doing this work for a very specific reason. Definitely, I was doing DV work for a reason. And with COVID, yeah, I was where I was supposed to be.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Randy Pausch – he wrote a book called, The Last Lecture – and in it he said, “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” I think that applied to a lot of people over the past year. If we had it our way, would we have gone into lockdown? No. If we had it our way, would we have worn masks? No. If we had it our way, would the world look this way? No, it wouldn’t. But, when we don’t have it our way, we’re forced into a place of discomfort and the only way that you can grow is in that discomfort.
