Loss comes in many forms - betrayal, abandonment, death - and from many sources: the end of a decades-long relationship, the death of parents, the loss of a career, the loss of a beloved geographic area. The list goes on: the loss of innocence, a loss of purpose, and many more - theme and variation. The sequelae of loss are equally myriad: shock, isolation, depression, anxiety, loss of income and status, mental and physical illness. Irrespective of cause and manifestation, resilience demands that you have a strategy to survive psychological trauma.

Real Life

This topic is - for me, right now - more than pedantic finger-wagging. Life has spread its cards and dealt me, again, a surprising and unwelcome hand. It happens to all of us fortunate enough to awaken to a new day. Loss is a part of life and dealing with trauma is a necessary skill in the quest for happiness and well-being.

I have had the better part of seven decades to develop, test and refine my own set of strategies to deal with loss. What better time to share them than now, as I go through them in real time. Again.

Stay

Don’t run. Don’t distract. For God’s sake, don’t medicate with food, drugs, doom-scrolling or anything else. Sit with it. Feel the pain and the regret and the fear. Grieve. Be sad, be angry, be resentful. Grieve some more.

Realize that some version of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ stages of grief - ill-defined, overlapping and messy though they will likely be - have to play out in your life. You will have to move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and - if you do it right - into acceptance. And the process takes time.

The stages may go easily and quickly only to reoccur once you thought you were “over it.” You may have them all hit at once. There is a high probability that some will feel insurmountable. By all means find a mental health professional - who won’t immediately try to numb this most important first stage with psychotropics - if you feel the need, but realize that the only person who can truly heal you is you.

Above all, when this step feels overwhelming - and it may well, especially if you are not expert at psychological coping skills (and sometimes if you are) - realize that you can’t skip it. It’s not a matter of strength or sacrifice or stoicism. Intellect, insight and intuition are certainly helpful, but they won’t allow you to skip this first “stay” step. There is no get-out-of-jail card to be found here.

Be still. Think your thoughts. Experience your emotions, fully. Journal about all of it - there is grace in the writing.

If you try to skip this step, the grief and terror and sadness and longing will come for you again and again. Trust me when I tell you that you are not tough enough to fast-forward. The world is full of forlorn misanthropes burdened with the weight of this revenant, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

While you are feeling your feelings, engage with the rest of the plan.

Move

Get up. Get out. You can stay with your feelings and process emotion without being frozen in fetal position in your bed. Movement will actually facilitate the process.

Take a walk or a run or a swim or a bike ride. Hit the gym. Climb a tree. Move.

Bonus points if your movement is outdoors. Forest bathing, or Shinrin-yoku (森林浴) is a practice prescribed for many disorders in Japan and South Korea, and is gaining popularity in the US and elsewhere. It involves mindful time in nature - best in an actual forest - and has significant research to show efficacy in dealing with trauma of the type we are discussing. Turns out that trees apparently emit  phytoncides (aerosolized plant compounds) that have lots of psychological and physiological benefits. Look it up if you are curious - I don’t want to digress down a biochemical rabbit hole.

Here’s the secret sauce about move, our second step: It takes discipline. Sometimes it takes lots of discipline, and heaps of effort. (This is one of the reasons I talk about “Hardcore Happiness,” but that’s another rabbit hole, albeit an essential one - read some more of my blogs or my book of the same name to learn more).

When you are wrestling with psychological trauma, there is a tendency to grab the ice cream and the remote and sit in a dark room bingeing Netflix. Or to just stay in bed. You won’t feel motivated. You may not be able to think of a single reason to do a single thing.

To avoid degeneration into an anhedonic blob of adipose and self-pity, you just have to do it.

Go. Outside. And. Play.

This is why discipline beats motivation, every time. I don’t care if you don’t want to. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t "feeling it.” Just do it.

You need some catchy cliché phrases to help you pull your butt out of bed? Glad to oblige:

“Stay hard!”
“Embrace the suck!”
“The only easy day was yesterday!”
“There is no such thing as staying the same: You are either allowing yourself to get worse or forcing yourself to get better!”

Think

OK. So you are staying in your feelings and giving them time to naturally progress, and you are moving your body, maybe in a forest, should you be lucky enough to be near one.

Now that the limbic (emotions) and musculoskeletal (movement) systems are engaged, time to fire up the brain.

Mindset is the lens through which you perceive the world and the filter that informs your actions. And actions determine your future. This is another very lengthy topic and a frequent subject for my writing (and a core component of Hardcore Happiness).

We are going to harness the power of mindset as a powerful weapon in our fight against existential angst and psychological trauma in general.

To begin, think about every single thing that you have going for you. Be intentional about it (that’s why this step is called “think”). Write it down. That journal of yours is going to pay for itself many times over as you learn to survive trauma.

Gratitude is the destroyer of despair.

Yep, sometimes it’s hard to think of things for which you can be thankful when you feel like crap. You have been knocked sideways by some shitty event and “grateful” is far from your list of applicable adjectives at the moment.

Do it anyway (hello again, discipline).

I’ll get you started:

Do you have a place to sleep at night? Do you have access to food? Maybe you have someone who cares about you, even loves you. Do you have a job or a pension or some source of income? What have you accomplished in your life? Have you raised children or cared for a puppy? What have you accomplished today? Did you make someone smile? Did you hold the door for someone or wave at a neighbor?

If you are breathing (pretty safe bet), you have a reason to be grateful. Can you feel the sun on your face or the wind against your skin?

NO “YEAH, BUT”S. Write your list. Read it every day. Read it several times a day.

Commune

Great. You are staying with your feelings and moving your body to the benefit of your mind and soul, and thinking about the good things in your life. Now get around other people.

This is non-negotiable. I realize it may be some time before you are ready to talk with close friends or loved ones about the details of your trauma. Like I said before, these things take time.

But get around people. You don’t even have to talk to them, at first. Go sit in a coffee shop (as I am right now as I write this). Treat yourself to lunch in a restaurant. Go to a concert or a play. When you’re ready, hang out where you normally hang out (but again, avoid bars and such. If you normally hang out in bars, you might want to rethink some things at a more fundamental level…) and have casual conversation with your friends.

One of the most powerful things you can do at this stage is to be heard, without judgement. Talk to a trusted friend or professional, if need be. You don’t need anyone to tell you what to do (that’s not what skilled mental health professionals do, by the way), just allow you to talk.

If you’re ready to seriously talk with someone now, go do that. If you can only handle casual conversation, then do that. If all you can handle is being around people with whom you don’t converse, for now, then do that.

But do not isolate yourself. You want to get better and that will most certainly have the opposite effect.

Use that discipline of which I spoke earlier and go out and get around people. And when you get back, write about how grateful you are for other people - or maybe just one person - in that journal that is becoming your best tool to survive trauma.

Act

When you confront a life-changing situation, the best thing you can do is change your life.

Take stock of these last few weeks, months or years. What isn’t working for you? Is there anything you could do differently to avoid situations like the one that traumatized you? Once you find that thing (or things), make a change.

It might take a while - even a long while - to change, but even getting started will give you a much-needed boost.

Actively take care of yourself. Because no one else will - or could - do it for you. The steps in this article are a good place to start. Do them every day and things will get better. I say this from experience.

The point of all this writing is to put in in play. Read this, then go DO IT. Thinking about it is of minimal benefit.

The only person who can make you get better is you. The only person who has to live your life is you. You are the only person from whom you must ask permission and the only person who will reap the consequences of your actions. Remember that good actions - no matter how difficult - bring good consequences.

Stay with your feelings, move your body, think grateful thoughts and act in your own best interest.

Create your world.

By the way, want to supercharge the benefits of action? Do something for someone else.

To Survive Trauma

Do I have an advanced degree in clinical psychology? Yep. Does it help in stuff like this? It can. Knowledge is always useful when you do something really important, like working to survive trauma.

But right now, today, this is all coming from my heart, through my own pain and feelings of uselessness and fear of being unloved and questioning of my own purpose and all the rest. I’m in the thick of it and maybe you are too.

We can do this. Again.



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To learn more about how to use these concepts or to inquire about working with me, you can contact me on the Hardcore Happiness website, the comments section on my Substack or Medium accounts or the Hardcore Happiness blog page. If you have found value in this article, follow my Instagram account for daily insights, or my X account for occasional tweets. To support this community, you can Buy Me A Coffee or donate through my Patreon account.

- JWW