Chris Cuomo and the Sobbies: Learning the Lessons of Trauma

I’ve called it “chemosobby,” and “mastectosobby.”  

Heart attacks have their own version of it, as do strokes, massive injuries, and just about any other major physical trauma.

“It” is the experience of a sudden emotional downdraft that sucks you and all your thinking into the pit of something that’s closer to despair than depression. It’s the temporary blackness of reaching your personal bottom while still caught in the trap of whatever has you.  I call it “the sobbies.” 

If you’ve ever been through the challenges of a major physical trauma of any sort — and COVID-19 appears to rank up there with the rest of them — and you haven’t at some point collapsed and sobbed like a heart broken child, then you are probably a man. A man’s version of the sobbies is usually to rant and say all manner of ultimately meaningless things that he will want to unsay later.

This isn’t an absolute thing, but for the most part, women tend to cry at these times and men tend to get angry. As I said, that’s not absolute. Sometimes women get angry and men cry. Whichever way it goes, it’s the sobbies and it’s part of getting well. 

Based on my experience, the sobbies tend to hit when you’ve already been through the worst of it. During the hardest part of the battle, you’re stronger because the trauma hasn’t yet ripped you up as much as it can, and you’re focused on the fight. If you’re going to survive, you’ve got to keep it together. The sobbies come when you’re starting to beat it, but you’re also at that point that it’s pretty much beaten you, and you still have a lot of the long hard slog to recovery to crawl through. 

Nobody who has not experienced it can imagine just how steep the incline out of a pit of trauma really is. There is no tired like after-trauma tired; no sense of this-will-never-end despair like that period of time when you’re coming-round-the-bend and getting better, but there’s so much getting better left to do. 

CNN newsman Chris Cuomo gave a radio interview a few days ago that sure sounded to me like he’s at that point in recovery from his battle with COVID-19. He’s at the sobbies. Since he’s a man, and he’s a newsguy, he’s reacting by running his mouth instead of collapsing on the sofa and sobbing. 

His comments were all about how he doesn’t like his job, and he doesn’t think he’s spending his life on doing something worthwhile, that the warlike mentality of the newsroom seems like a waste of life to him. 

That is, of course, another side of a serious trauma. It creates perspective on life. Suddenly, you love everybody. Life is so precious that you can’t contain your awe of it. 

All this intensifies when other people die of the same thing that you survive. You may never lose the weight of responsibility that you are carry because you are alive and other people are dead in your place. You know that they are not dead in the eternal sense, but you also know that you are here, in this life, when they are not and that is a responsibility. You have what they lost, which is time in this time. 

Life, when you’ve almost died, when you know that you are dying, is so beautiful. It is so precious. It is always worth fighting for. 

Chris Cuomo’s experience of the sobbies seems, at least for now, to be pulling him away from the hubris of his profession and forcing him to look at his deeper values and how he wants to live them out. 

I doubt if this experience will have a permanent impact on Chris Cuomo and how he choses to live his life. The things you think in the sobbies are mostly just the weakness and sickness talking. When people get well again, they usually forget how it ever felt to be sick. But it seems that for now he’s in the throes of something spiritual as well as COVID-19. 

The sobbies are like that. They are a physical trough, an emotional overdrawn point, and a door opening on reflection and deep spiritual change. 

Whatever decisions he makes — or doesn’t make — as his body slowly beats this virus down, I hope that he brings the memory of this illness forward into his life as he lives it afterwards. It is a reckoning of sorts to experience deep trauma. 

God will walk all the way through it beside you. If you let Him, He will use the trauma to fashion you into a more effective instrument for His will. 

Whether Chris Cuomo goes back to his old job or seeks a new way of living altogether, I hope that he carries the lessons that the Lord wanted to teach him with this illness into it.