Breaking News Has Broken Us
Mass disasters create grief, confusion, loss, distrust and fear that transcend individual experience. Collective traumas require collective healing in the newsroom and beyond.
Overview
Episode 6 of How’s Work? with Esther Perel assembles 70 employees of a media organization to explore the challenges of bearing witness during a pandemic. As essential workers on the frontlines of crisis, they are participants in the very stories they’re reporting — without the camaraderie and crosspollination of the newsroom.
In Breaking News Has Broken Us, Esther strips away at the catchword of “stress” and gives us a new vocabulary to move through collective trauma and respark a sense of aliveness.
Thematics
What to listen for in this episode of How’s Work? with Esther Perel:
- To counter isolation, collapsed boundaries and a loss of contextual living, create routines and rituals that demarcate functional spaces, roles and states of mind.
- Self-care amid collective trauma means tapping into the resources of others.
- Prolonged uncertainty, ambiguous loss, collective grief, and tragic optimism are all part of our new vocabulary in this season.
- Take a pulse check of what colleagues are experiencing and feeling. Asking questions that meet people where they are in this moment helps to strengthen the emotional and relational health of your team. And builds trust and accountability amongst each other.
- Catastrophic events have large-scale psychosocial implications. Forget individualistic constructs, collective traumas need collective healing.
- Freedom in confinement comes from your imagination. Create rituals for serendipity and surprise.
- Disasters, and crises function as accelerators. They function as accelerators in relationships and they function as accelerators in terms of our priorities.
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