Now and then, when things fall apart, I experience a mixture of fear and frustration. I desperately try to fix the situation, worrying, running through multiple what-if scenarios in my head. This can go on for days before I manage to stop and taste my own medicine: accept what is beyond my control, let go of the what-ifs, and admit that I do not know what the future holds. None of it comes naturally to me. I suspect it comes naturally to almost nobody.
What a crisis actually is
The word has a more interesting history than its current usage suggests. In Greek, krisis meant decision, or judgement, the point at which things separate one way or the other. Hippocratic physicians used it for the moment in an illness when the patient would either start to recover or start to decline. So a crisis was originally a turning point, and only later became shorthand for catastrophe.
Psychologically, what marks a crisis is loss. Sometimes the loss is concrete: a person, a job, health. Sometimes it is harder to point at, a loss of direction or of meaning, and those can be every bit as disorienting. In each case something that felt certain has stopped being certain, and the sense of control has gone with it.
The four phases
The Swedish psychiatrist Johan Cullberg described a course that most crises tend to follow. First comes shock, lasting hours or days, and often strangely unreal, as though the event were happening slightly to one side of you. The reaction phase follows, and this is when the defences arrive: denial, guilt, blame, the endless replaying of how it might have been avoided. Processing is the long, unglamorous middle, where the loss gradually becomes fact. Eventually the world turns usable again, which Cullberg called reorientation. Not the same world as before, but a usable one.
He was careful to say the phases are not tidy. People circle back, or skip one, or stall. Some get stuck, often somewhere between reaction and processing, and that is the point at which finding support belongs near the top of the to-do list. Nobody processes a serious loss on willpower alone.
Why we make it harder
We have become so fixated on happiness that we can hardly bear grief, loss or pain at all. Pain gets treated as a malfunction to correct quickly, when often it is a phase that has to be moved through at its own speed. And when direction goes missing, the automatic reaction for most of us is to act our way out of it, or think our way out of it, immediately, because being in a state of not knowing is so uncomfortable.
There is an old Buddhist simile about this. Pain is the first arrow. Everything we pile on top by fighting the fact of the pain, the resentment, the resistance, is a second arrow, and that one we fire ourselves. It is not easy, but I promise, you double the suffering when you keep resisting something that already is and sits outside your control.
What acceptance means here
People bristle at the word acceptance because it sounds like approving of what happened, or giving up. It means something closer to accurate mapping. Let the situation be what it already is, so that whatever energy remains can go toward the part that can still move. Release the version of events that should have happened, since a surprising amount of the hurt lives in that version. The uncertainty stays regardless of what you do with it.
Some crises are specifically about work, and about the self that work built. Burnout Rewire sits in that particular territory.
