Looking after yourself and others when personal crisis strikes

When personal crisis strikes, all that matters is keeping ourselves and others safe.  Ultimately, if we keep ourselves safe it will mean we can keep others safer too.

Human behaviour elicits two different inappropriate responses to existential conflict; escape and attack.  Within these are the trauma responses of fight, flight, freeze and fawn.

Intrapersonal stress mounts and must either be projected onto another/others through an attack, or the stress is introjected, and the aggression is turned inward upon oneself.

Many people cannot allow themselves to attack others; at least not as the first voluntary act.  Some attacks come out of absorbing too much for too long, especially in relationships where there is a lot of aggression to bear.

But also, many people hold nothing back, and when they don’t think about their impact, when others are around others are easily hurt.  The worst variety of those who respond by attacking others are those who feel entitled to do so.  And the most dangerous of those are those who see themselves as the victims, because they gaslight others into submission.  True victims aren’t characteristically attackers.

When crisis strikes, we need to keep things simple.  Really simple.  The elements of crisis — any crisis — are so multilayered that they overwhelm us.  Rather than become trapped in trying to make sense of what is often too complex to understand — especially when we’re reeling — it’s better to simply respond with mindfulness for the two inappropriate responses.

That gets us to pause long enough to consider what our response will be.

The reason we react in these inappropriate ways?  We all know how easily we opt for reacting out of the presence of anger or fear.

ANGER, FEAR... SADNESS

Anger harms others and fear harms ourselves.

Whenever we harm others, we also harm ourselves — our reputations, our roles, our opportunities, our futures.  And when we harm others, in many cases, we can cause trauma.  Once the damage is done the best from there is restitution.  Not everything can be put back together again.  Better as much as possible to live without regret.

Whenever we harm ourselves, not only does our world miss out on the best of us, there is the real risk that others who love and care for us can be harmed.  The harm we do to ourselves ranges from self-loathing to real action of self-hatred and self-anger, when the voice within is not one of anger, but of cavernous sorrow for the fear we cannot reconcile.

One thing is clear: anger and fear are often secondary emotions.  They herald the need to go deeper into the primary emotion that is truer existentially.  That is often sorrow.  Anger and fear are underpinned at the rawest level by sadness.  What our body is saying we need to express the sadness we feel deeper below our conscious awareness.

Think of the relief we feel having howled our eyes out.  The body has its own expert way of helping us process sorrow, yet so many of us are afraid of sobbing heaving mobs of tears.  That and the support of those who ‘get’ this sorrow that morphs into anger and fear.

If only we can stop in the midst of the crisis and calculate for a better response — so we don’t hurt ourselves by introjecting harm or hurting others by projecting harm.  Neither anger nor fear are helpful responses when we’re overwhelmed by stressful situations.

If only we can manage our crisis without hurting ourselves and others, we will get through it without regret or causing harm.

Ultimately we learn something very important by responses that honour our deeper truth.  The only way we learn these things is via practicing them.

Photo by Jamie MacPherson on Unsplash