How the Talking Cure Reduced COVID-19 Anxiety in a University Classroom

As the COVID-19 pandemic arose during the late winter in

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early 2020, the sense among many of my students at Humboldt State University (HSU) seemed to be “This doesn’t involve us. It can’t happen here.” Who could blame them? We live in one of the most rural parts of the Pacific Northwest. Our campus is surrounded by forests and mountains, and bordered by the sea. The COVID-19 pandemic seemed unreal and remained an unformulated experience: neither here nor there, known-about but unknown, felt but
unthought or thought but not felt. Many students didn’t know how to respond to their thoughts and feelings.

Everything changed during the week before spring vacation when HSU’s president announced the campus would shut down after the break and all classes would be online. A majority of HSU students are from out of town, and the ones who lived on campus were encouraged to move back home and not return. The news fell on my undergraduate Developmental Literacy class like a hammer. The playful jokes and banter were gone. We talked about the pandemic before, but now it was real. Palpable fear and anxiety filled the room. My students, future elementary school teachers, averaged four or more hours of fieldwork per week in local public schools. Now they realized this compounded their exposure. The pandemic was radically changing their lives. My discussion plans about free voluntary reading fell by the wayside and everything but fear’s object and anxiety’s objectless dread flew out the window.

That’s how it should be. When experienced in the right context, the gifts of fear and anxiety channel attention and thinking to help ensure survival. The virus dictated our class content, which became the actions we should take and the thoughts and feelings that plagued us.

In addition to reemphasizing the nuts and bolts of the protocols designed to protect us from catching the virus, I found the best way to allay the excessive fear, anxiety, and sense of powerlessness my students experienced was to have the class connect and express their thoughts and feelings about the pandemic. I began by having them talk in small groups at their tables, so everyone could speak about their hopes and fears. Then we funneled the group talks into an entire class discussion by having a member from each one summarize what they said. After that, we opened the entire class up to individual comments. No one was forced to speak to the whole group, but many chose to.

Fear and anxiety are not completely independent, but the

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distinction between them is important. They are generally separated in the following way. Fear is triggered by a threat that is immediately present. So, this allows us to narrow our focus to that object in order to eliminate or avoid it. Anxiety concerns a threat without an immediate nearby object. It is worrying about something that is not present, often something unknown or unnamable, which may or may not occur. Both fear and anxiety are the opposite of a sense of safety, and both tend to colonize the body and mind.

The healing power of expressing emotions and the benefit of articulating upsetting feelings are well known. So, I knew the entire class would benefit from describing the invisible thoughts and feelings in the room. While there is debate as to why the talking cure works, such practices go back thousands of years and modern psychotherapy is based on it. Anyone who has had a good friend they can confide in knows this is true. Expressing pent up thoughts and feelings can be liberating, salutary, and give one a sense of control. This is important because one’s sense of control is related to a flexible thinking style with higher-level thinking. In Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions (1997), James W. Pennebaker states “When people don’t have control over a stressor, they move to a lower level of thinking. With potential control, however, people move to a higher level. When faced with threats, such as the pandemic, high-level flexible thinking has survival value.”

In addition to my training in education, I am a psychoanalytic research candidate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. I have a provisional license to conduct psychoanalysis and have spent much time in the clinical consulting room. One of the most important lessons I learned was how to be a good listener, which is the opposite of the traditional model of the lecturing professor. Another was to “go for the emotion” in order to help clients become aware of and explore their feelings. I have also found that good therapists, teachers, and professors often create frameworks that they can lead from behind. These three factors helped facilitate good discussions in my class about students’ reactions to the virus.

Classroom discussions to help students connect and express their thoughts and feelings about their struggles with the pandemic are surprisingly easy to carry out and may help to alleviate excessive fear and unwarranted amounts of anxiety. I simply created the frame and let the students take over the speaking and listening as

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they clarified and validated each other’s thoughts and feelings. The teacher doesn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be, acting as a therapist. They should just be open and accepting.

In my class, once my students were given the open-ended chance to speak to their classmates, what was in their hearts and on their minds freely bubbled forth. In the case of “going for the emotion,” all I had to do was to tell them to discuss their hopes, fears, and other feelings as part of the initial directions. Psychodynamic interpretations aren’t called for, just validation of what is said. This approach resembles Rogerian and group therapy more than psychoanalysis, but all three still rely on the talking cure.

After the students talked, I summarized what they said and shared my thoughts and feelings about the pandemic as well. I also said nature had equipped us with these emotions to help guide our actions. I stressed that the constant and sometimes intense forms these emotions were taking could be considered abnormal and maladaptive during normal life, but in the face of this pandemic, they were natural. At times like this, fear, anxiety, obsessive compulsions, and even having a sense of paranoia, are normal. Not to experience them would be abnormal. We needed to treat them as friends and listen to the wisdom of what they were telling us without letting them take us over.

Just before dismissing class, I went to the board and drew Yerkes-Dodson’s inverted U-shaped curve, which illustrates the difference between facilitative and debilitative anxiety. We discussed this as well as the danger of becoming carefree. When there were no further questions, I wished my students a great spring break—if possible—and expressed my concern for their welfare. I told them my class was secondary to their health and well-being and I would make any accommodations they needed to complete the work to pass my class.

As my students left our last brick-and-mortar classroom, they seemed more relaxed and hopeful than when they arrived. Those who had displayed the most bodily tension at the beginning appeared more comfortable. I noted, as I read their faces, that the fear and anxiety of many was still there, but much of the intensity was gone.

Twelve days later, with spring break behind us, we had our first online class on Zoom. I checked into my Zoom room 15 minutes early to make sure everything was working. One student

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was already waiting. The tension and worry on her face filled my computer screen. After some brief pleasantries, I mentioned she looked worried and asked her how she was doing. She began to talk. This student was married with three young school-aged children who were now being schooled at home, and she had a husband whose job required him to keep working with the public. She seemed to be at her wit’s end, but as she talked about her fears, she relaxed some and felt a little better. I mostly said things like “you’ve got a lot on your hands and much to worry about” and didn’t do much more than offer a sympathetic ear.

Soon more students trickled in. By the start of class, 25 had arrived. Some looked shell-shocked. One had the thousand-yard stare. I could see by their faces that the fear, anxiety, and tension were even higher than before spring break. The pandemic had hit home.

I began class by telling my students I would hold office hours immediately after every class for the rest of the semester. Anyone who wanted to hang around to talk was welcome, and they could talk about anything they wanted. Then I announced we were going to talk again about how everyone was coping with the pandemic, and I put them in breakout rooms of about five students apiece for around ten minutes. After that, I brought the whole class back together, and we returned to the syllabus for the rest of the class. This included the discussion we’d forgone on how to teach children to love books and encourage free voluntary reading.

When class was over, seven students stayed for office hours. They took turns to talk while others listened. As I tended to them, some had little unimportant questions about the class, but the subtext of their words made me feel they were seeking assurance in the security of my attention and presence. Others informed me of this or that. The worried housewife with three children stayed until the very end to talk some more. After about 30 minutes, all of the students had signed off. After the next class, five or six stayed. The class after that, there were three or four. The worried housewife showed up 10 minutes early to class three more times and continued to talk. But after the end of the following week and for the rest of the semester, no one showed up early or stayed late. They internalized my you-can-lean-on-me function and, similar to the secure attachment behavior of young children, the trusted assurance that they could come back sufficed.

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For the rest of the semester, we began with breakout rooms. I called it gossip time. I told the students to use the ten minutes to share their thoughts and feelings about how they were dealing with the pandemic, and if they didn’t have anything to say about it, just to shoot the breeze. This seemed to help. The biweekly ten minute “sessions” were popular, and the fear and anxiety in my online class significantly subsided over the rest of the semester. The “normal” pandemic baseline was still there, but the jokes and banter returned and they continued to learn.

Giving students a place to talk freely, forming secure attachment bonds, facilitating connection and community, and being an authority figure that expresses paternal and maternal functions is the work of teachers. Not only do students look to teachers for knowledge, but they need to use us as figures who provide acceptance, assurance, and safety. We need to nurture their hopes and mitigate the fears they bring to class to help them learn, especially during a pandemic.

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