2020 is posing new challenges for families throughout the world, which Dr. Bonnie Goldstein and discussant Dr. Pat Ogden explore, offering innovative strategies to cope with uncertainty resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. Emphasizing the somatic narrative, we offer helpful resources for navigating these massive life changes, exploring the impact of the environmental threat and ensuing feelings of upset, aggression, irritability, fearfulness, avoidance, loss of interest in activities, etc. affecting children, caregivers and families.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy treatment options will be elucidated as we explore ways to ameliorate the impact of chaos and destabilization on family members and stitch new patterns into the fabric of family dynamics. We offer concrete tools to address apprehension and fears by exploring shifts in posture and stance that help foster confidence and communication, discovering actions to support aligned posture (e.g. lengthening spine, shifting stance, etc.) that parents and children can practice together.

Treatment directions for addressing kid’s and caretaker’s feelings of hopelessness or inadequacy are illustrated through case studies describing the collaborative nature of treatment, including evoking curiosity about movement or gestures that might support new positive feelings, beliefs, and enhanced communication between family members.

We discuss a case study involving a father’s concern for his son who sank into loneliness after the pandemic shuttered schools. Recognizing that schools’ cancelling of sports and other extracurricular activities is particularly hard for kids because such activities support their social, emotional and physiological health, we explore the physical correlates of well-being that can provide similar support.

The relational impact of the pandemic on family members, friendships, and the therapeutic relationship are explored and we introduce tools for reinforcing new behaviors that support positive relationships. 

We look at the range of responses to the pandemic, as some students thrived during distance learning this past spring, where many others struggled with the format, feeling isolated, bored, frustrated, Zoom-fatigued, inability to concentrate, or academically challenged. Other prevalent concerns which we address include:

• fears of disruption including another school year of stops-and-starts after unprecedented months of interruptions
  
• qualms about putting parents at risk, especially older parents, when children feel like their protectors
  
• concerns about family finances as economic devastation becomes widespread
  
• stress related to traumas around race, discrimination, political turmoil, systemic oppression, etc.
  
• worries about health as families navigate unimaginable loss

Challenges in the home environment that have been exacerbated by the pandemic include difficulties setting boundaries and respecting boundaries set by other family members; we discuss a mother-daughter dyad where mother’s complaint of her daughter’s clinginess, dependency and need for approval was interwoven with concomitant needs for autonomy, as we explore the ensuing challenges that arose within the family.

We address feelings of helplessness in the face of losses, capitalizing on somatic ways to feel more in control during these complicated times and offering creative ideas about play, connection, touch that help establish positive interactions.

Concrete tools are offered to address some of the challenges family members experience as they negotiate health issues such as mask wearing; ideas are proposed to address younger children’s resistance while validating their feelings, and to ameliorate teens concerns that masks feel hot and sweaty, adversely impact their skin, or give them “mask breath.”