Love in the Time of Covid-19: Experiences of a Psychology Trainee

ABSTRACT

As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) swept across the country, graduate students faced challenges they could have never anticipated. The future of coursework, research, graduation, and practica was unclear; for some, the circumstances were more dire as university closures resulted in a lack of housing, food, and internet access. While there is extant research of clinical trainee experience, significantly less has been written on their experiences of major events, let alone how it impacts our clinical work or theory-making. Perhaps even more to our detriment, literature has continued to shy away from the most basic component of clinical work: love. What follows is my account of analytic love, loss, and healing during a turbulent time in my clinical training at a large metropolitan hospital. The goal of this article is not extravagant. By sharing these experiences, I hope to record these events, name my experience, and remind the analytic community of the power of love, and the necessity of discussing love, particularly its salience during times of immense distress.

KEYWORDS:

• Analytic love
• clinical training
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The first author was supported as a predoctoral fellow in the Behavioral Sciences Training in Drug Abuse Research program at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse [T32DA007233]. Points of view, opinions, and conclusions in this paper do not necessarily represent those of National Institute on Drug Abuse or New York University.

Notes on contributors

Adelya A. Urmanche

Adelya Urmanche, M.A. is a doctoral student, pursuing a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University. Interested in bridging the gap between substance abuse treatment, research, and policy, Adelya focuses her efforts on social justice, harm reduction practices, psychotherapy research, and increasing access to empirically based substance abuse treatment. She considers herself very lucky for she has known love.

Kate Szymanski

Kate Szymanski Ph.D. has nearly 30 years of clinical experience of working with trauma and conducting research on psychopathology and resiliency related to traumatization. She is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University and maintains a private practice. She published numerous articles and book chapters on the impact of trauma on adults and children, and co-edited the book “Expression of the Unspeakable: Narratives of Trauma”. She presented her research at a number of national and international conferences, collaborating with colleagues from Europe and North America. She served as an adviser to Tuesday’s Children, a non-profit organization that works with children and families who lost a loved one to a terrorist attack. Her current research addresses the traumatic impact of life-threatening illness, loss of a loved one, intergenerational transmission of trauma, trauma-related shame and culture, and factors that facilitate posttraumatic growth.