How To Cope When Disaster Strikes... All The Time

Photo By: Doğukan Şahin on Unsplash

A new tragedy strikes pretty much every day in the US, and as a therapist, I’ve noticed that a lot of people have just stopped talking about it. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they can’t care.

No, really. I’m talking about the ability to care. Turns out we only have so much energy reserved for caring.

This is called reaching our “surge capacity”.

A “surge” or a highly stressful incident occurs and our battery gets drained from it. But when a surge happens every day, our batteries are constantly drained. So we feel depleted and burnt out, and we can’t handle any more processing of it.

The biggest piece of advice I can give you is not to judge it. Our bodies were never made to live through this amount of tragedy because a surge is supposed to be a rare event. This is the first time in history we have been exposed to disasters daily.

So if you’re not talking about it, you might just be adapting.

The responsibility isn’t on you to fix your feelings.

The responsibility is on the systems that allowed it to go this far. And fixing those systems is a blog post for a different day since so many of us have reached our surge capacity.

And that is okay.

All we have to decide is what the next right thing is.

Ask what your spirit needs today.

Whatever that is, is okay.