Why Do People Feel Ashamed About Having Had Corona?
How can it be that people feel ashamed about the fact that they’ve had corona, and what is “corona shame”? Your ten-day quarantine is over, you’re symptom-free, and yet you don’t dare tell the people around you that you’ve been sick, out of fear of negative reactions. Afraid that people won’t want to be near you anymore.
How do you tell people this? Would you now come across as one of those young people who take the virus so lightly, who just carelessly keep partying? While you’ve actually been so careful.
That you’re sometimes treated differently, no longer get visitors, which gives you the feeling that people think you’ve behaved irresponsibly. You can then take that personally and feel ashamed about it. If an older person goes out without a face mask, they can already get comments and be judged. You see that in the news too, so the fear of being judged isn’t so strange.
Where I used to sneeze openly, I now try to hold it in too. That’s not out of shame exactly, but these kinds of things really aren’t done anymore. So a new awareness has emerged about what you can and can’t still do around other people. And if you do it anyway, because you have a runny nose and are sniffling, you now have very different thoughts about that.
Corona shame has become an increasingly widely shared phenomenon since the start of the pandemic; Facebook groups are being set up for it — where (former) patients can talk to each other about it, the largest of which has 15,000 members — and more and more articles are being written about it.
How useful is shame as an emotion?
Shame is often seen as something you want to get rid of; people can also suffer greatly under it, with loss of self-confidence and fears as a result. But actually, all feelings exist with a clear function, and there’s often a positive intention behind that function. In the case of shame, it can have a signaling function. For example, the signal that you risk falling outside the group. The positive intention in this case is the need to belong somewhere. In this case it’s a kind of social antenna that prevents inappropriate behavior within the group.
As a second function, it has a corrective function on your own behavior. I recently had a woman in therapy who felt her husband didn’t give her enough attention and left her standing in the middle of the ski slope to go do a descent through deep snow with someone else. He kept brushing it off by saying: we’ll see each other again down at the bottom in ten minutes anyway, what’s the problem? And once she started discussing this and other things with a friend, and later with me as her therapist, he suddenly started looking through someone else’s eyes and was better able to imagine what it was like for his wife when he left her alone.
How do you avoid suffering from corona shame?
You can realize that it now affects a great many people — it’s a pandemic, something that’s happening worldwide. There are people who, because of that, feel no shame at all — it has by now become “normal.” More and more well-known people are appearing in the news who have or have had corona. The author of Harry Potter mentioned it on her Twitter, Prince Charles, Prince Albert of Monaco firmly denies that he infected Prince Charles — so there might well be some shame involved there. Tom Hanks, Youp van ’t Hek. And of course Trump, who received special corona treatment with experimental medication. He even got that for free, so that could also be a reason to feel shame. But the chance that he experienced shame about it isn’t very big.
If you’re a bit more sensitive to the opinions of others and you feel the shame, then it’s enough to realize that you apparently find someone else’s opinion important. You apparently have an ideal image in your head that you feel you have to live up to. By letting go of that ideal image and replacing it with a somewhat more realistic one, you can free yourself from it. Often this isn’t something you easily do on your own, but something you can see a therapist for, who can help you find the underlying reason and help you deal with it differently.
How can you best tell people that you’ve had corona?
By now there are many people who’ve either had it themselves or know someone who’s had corona. So being open about it and telling people that you got tested, that you were in quarantine and therefore followed the rules, and that you’re feeling well again now.
How can you best respond when someone tells you they’ve had corona?
If someone tells you they’ve had corona, you can ask how that person experienced it, what the symptoms were, and show a bit of empathy — imagine what it would be like if you got it yourself.
And if you’ve been in contact with that person and corona was confirmed, go into quarantine if you were near that person for too long during the infectious period.
Bio
Jacqueline Evers is a relationship therapist who helps couples build a loving, fulfilling relationship instead of a bitter and costly divorce. Over the past 16 years, she has helped more than 1,350 people through individual and relationship therapy. With her book ‘Cheating. Moving Forward Together in 5 Steps’, she offers couples affected by infidelity a new way of loving. She regularly works with expats and wrote the e-book ‘Cheating. 5 Steps to Recover from Infidelity.’ She works from her practices in Huizen, Almere Poort, and online, and is regularly heard on NPO1 radio. The Loveworkx podcasts can be heard on Spotify, among other platforms.