Thoughts on reading “Aftershocks”, a contemporary poem by A. E. Stallings.

Since March 2020, traumatic loss and its associated grief, anxiety, and sadness due to the Covid-19 pandemic have been powerfully in evidence in clinical practice. For some couples lockdown has led to richer, more pleasurable intimacy; for others, it has exacerbated their sense of enforced captivity and heightened the claustrophobic-agoraphobic dilemma. For many people lockdown has imposed unwelcome separation from their wider family, friends, and colleagues. In this scenario both client and therapist are tested in similar ways. Indeed therapists' own needs for solace and connection with others are intensified in the face of continuous mortal threat. How then in this crisis do practitioners sustain themselves enough to be able to engage with and contain their clients' anxieties? Surprisingly for me, a couple psychotherapist, reading poetry has become part of my self-care, both as an internal safe haven and space for reflection and processing emotions, and as a secure base for cultivating new and old friendships through online literary discussion.

Recently I discovered a poignant poem, “Aftershocks”, a Spenserian sonnet by A. E. Stallings (2006), which captures exquisitely the emotional-relational tensions of couple loss during a real-world calamity. Stallings