Darkness and Lights

As I look out of my office window on the deserted street, I see several police cars parked near the entrance of my office building. Their lights blink in silence. The sight of the police gives me goosebumps and I step away from the window. My thoughts return to the morning news: the authorities will declare quarantine any day now.

At that very moment, the police officers stopped one of my patients in the lobby of my building and called me to come downstairs to fetch her. I was taken aback by this incident because in our country the police is one of the threats, and I did not know what the consequences would be for us on that pre-quarantine day. I regretted my decision to see my patients in person one more time and told myself that I should have gone online earlier. That day, the 28^th of March, was the first time that the anxiety about this virus got under my skin.

The pandemic reached Russia much later than it did other countries. As Europe was being hit by the COVID storm, only the first drops of it were occasionally heard in our country. In my consulting room, very few Russian patients mentioned the coronavirus before the end of March, when their foreign trips got canceled. Prior to the lockdown, most Russians were not taking the virus seriously. We shared an illusion that this terrible infection was somewhere out there, outside of our country. But by the end of March the situation began to worsen before our eyes. Then came a tipping point when “out there” became “here.”

When the Russian government imposed the quarantine, it disrupted our collective dissociation and the coronavirus became a force that organized our new social reality. It exposed problems at many levels of our lives: from people’s distrust of the government, financial inequality, the deplorable state of our health care, to facing one’s personal problems.

Then psychotherapy moved online. It raised a lot of discussions about the future of teletherapy among my colleagues. Because I have been working mo