A mental health clinic has seen a rise in businesspersons seeking their services to cope with the rapid hit their companies have taken from COVID-19 and the resulting strain on their personal lives.

Since the pandemic began, the founder of Willingness said there had been a 10% increase in businesspersons asking for support in decision making and relationship issues.

“It can be a very lonely place for a leader of an organisation right now dealing with the fact that their business isn’t doing well,” Matthew Bartolo pointed out.

“When they look carefully at their excel sheets and what they need to cut down on to make their business succeed, sometimes it’s people who have been there for a long time and who were very loyal to them,” he said.

Tough decisions such as these were causing a lot of pressure and anxiety, Bartolo said, and having to go back to the drawing board and rethink everything they thought they knew about their market, often brought up a sense of failure and self-doubt.

And these feelings didn’t restrict themselves to their professional lives but often found ways of seeping into their personal lives and affecting their relationships, he continued.

“With partners at home dealing with the children full time and their own anxieties brought on by the virus, it can be difficult to open up about what’s going on, which can create distance between a couple.”

Along with the lack of space to talk about issues, men also tended to “clam up” during difficult periods, causing them to withdraw further.

Distance often led to a lack of intimacy that set into motion a “vicious circle” enhancing the loneliness the business-person was feeling and provoking anger or rejection in the partner.

While one would feel completely alone and overwhelmed in dealing with their problems, the emotional and sexual distance could easily prompt the other to suspect infidelity or that they were no longer wanted.

Bartolo said it was important in these cases to encourage the businessperson to be more open regarding the emotions they were feeling, and to support the partner to put into context the reasons behind the other’s withdrawal.

One of the ways therapists supported those struggling to keep their business afloat at the moment was to help them build resilience, “the ability to bounce back,” Bartolo said.

“We ask them to remember the difficult times they had passed through at some point during their business, and the strategies they used to deal with those hard times,” he pointed out.

While encouraging them to see that they had overcome problems in the past, this also gave them the opportunity to draw on coping mechanisms or helped give them ideas to create new ones.

How has COVID-19 affected relationships and intimacy?

The effect of COVID-19 on relationships and intimacy had been a mixed bag, from what Bartolo and his team had so far observed.

The additional time couples have for each other and the fact that many have been forced to move in together because of social distancing or quarantine measures, has led to improved intimacy in some cases.

Other couples however were experiencing added tension in their relationships because they were always together, and compounded with other anxieties, this was having an adverse effect on their sex lives.

The team of professionals at Willingness are currently gathering more data to understand the trends better in a confidential survey.