Understanding the Nature of Crisis: How to Digest Something You Didn’t See Coming

The holiest and heaviest moments in therapy are often sessions where the person sitting across from me is coming to grips with unthinkable news. Something has come up that has set off a bomb in their inner world and often their outer world. It might be the workplace sexual scandal du jour, but this time, it involves your spouse. Your child was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Your financial advisor was stealing from you, and you discovered you can’t retire next year. Your best friend’s husband just committed suicide. Your teenage son gets his girlfriend pregnant. Or maybe it was you who set off the bomb. But a proverbial bomb has been set off, and…now what?

Regular life is hard enough, but occasionally, you get handed a situation you did not see coming, and you have no frame of reference for how to absorb it. 

Some things can be so overwhelmingly bad you feel like nothing will ever be the same again. And if you don’t have a sense of how crises unfold, you’ll stay discombobulated for longer than necessary. 

So when a crisis happens in your life, and all bets are off, what can you expect in the hours and days ahead? When a bomb goes off, how do you proceed? Here are the five phases you can expect from a crisis. 

Phase One: The bomb.

You get the dreaded phone call. You see the thing that you’ll never be able to unsee. Your worst fears are realized. This phase is entirely shocking and prone to big emotions. Your “fight or flight” mode is activated, so you probably want to take the gloves off or get the heck out of dodge—or both. You try your best to make sense of it within the context of the life you had, but you just can’t. There’s nothing to “do” at this point other than to make sure everybody is safe and stays safe (including you). The complete shock lasts around 24-48 hours, depending on what occurred.

Phase Two: Fruit basket upset.

When the initial shock wears off and the adrenaline starts to wane, the next phase is what I like to call “fruit basket upset.” It feels like the old game from elementary school where everyone is running around and sits in a different seat than the one they left.

Everything you thought you knew to be true in your life is currently up in the air. You only have some of the information at this stage, but what you do have is incredibly bad. It’s bad because it’s not good news, and you likely don’t have good intel.

So many questions and unknowns. You don’t even know the right questions to ask. Do you tell people? Are people going to find out anyway?

It’s common at this stage to continue to discover more information that puts you back at square one emotionally. This setback is the nature of the beast at this stage. It’s awful, and there’s nothing anyone can do or say to make it less horrible. I’m sorry.

This phase has a lot of chaotic energy. Disbelief. Bargaining. Denial. Questions you never thought you’d ask yourself or someone else—sentences you never expected to utter. You are just looking for the insanity to go away. It doesn’t. But this stage is when your brain starts to understand what’s happening. This phase hits around 2-3 days after the initiating event.

Phase Three: Step HERE.

At this phase, you are starting to research and look for possible answers. Your brain is pushing you along so you can get a handle on the chaos and stop the madness. So you look for “solutions of how we can fix this.” You’re determining which resources are quality and helpful and what’s trash or lousy advice.
While you want to know the whole plan, it doesn’t emerge at this phase. At this phase, you only get ONE step at a time – one thing you know to do for sure. And when you take one step, the next few choices will emerge. Choices you didn’t even know existed until you took that first step. Then, you’ll decide on the next right thing to do out of those choices.

Another step…another few choices. This is how it works. Take a step. Find more choices. False starts, wrong information, and “two steps forward and one step back” characterize this phase. This lasts for another day or so. You’ve come so far from the initial bomb, but it’s frustrating because you don’t yet have a clear path forward.

The purpose of this step appears to be giving your brain time to catch up to the shift in reality. You need some time to adjust and for reality to sink in what’s going on. You aren’t ready for the whole plan, even though you desperately want one. This catch-up phase is a necessary step that slows things down. It’s not a fun phase, but what is at this point? Trust the process and keep going.

Take a step. Find more choices. Take a step. Find more choices. It’s just one step at a time until before long, here comes the next phase. The one you’ve been waiting for.

Phase Four: The path.

As soon as you get used to the “one step at a time” rhythm, the information you’ve needed falls into place, seemingly out of nowhere (God). The right doctor. The right therapist. The right lawyer. The right path lights up. You finally feel like you’re getting some mastery over the chaos. This isn’t healing yet. This feeling is just the hope of healing.

Somehow, you went from not knowing anything about this crisis through the shock of beginning to grapple with it, one step at a time, and now your path appears. You’ll start to hear yourself talking with more of a sense of authority again. You just found out this path existed a few days ago. But now you see where this path goes, and you are starting to trust the process. This is great. It’s not as great as “the thing” not happening, but if you’re here, it’s much better than the previous phases. This phase lasts a little longer because sometimes, just because you know what the path will be doesn’t mean the path starts today.

Phase Five: Digestion & Integration.

Phase five is when the narrative appears. When you’re able to tell the story in a way that makes sense and not just as a jumbled-up mess of facts, this is the sign that you are beginning to digest the news. Stories help us gain mastery over the chaos.

You’ve got to be careful here because stories also create meaning. How you tell your story matters.
This phase is where starting therapy can be really helpful if you aren’t already established with someone.

The “new normal” will settle in at this phase: new rhythms, patterns, and expectations. As humans, we all crave homeostasis, so this phase helps your world begin to feel “right” again, as crazy as that sounds initially.

You’ll be able to catch your breath and start gaining an understanding beyond the immediate facts. You’ll catalog your injuries and identify lessons learned.

At this point, you still won’t have all the answers. You still may not know what the mid-range future will look like, but you know what next week will look like. You’ll remember who you are and what has remained unmarred; those things go a long way in life.

You didn’t choose this new normal, but you’ll begin to see how you’ll survive it. Thriving comes later. But you’ll get there.

This is the nature of crisis:

• The proverbial bomb goes off.
• Everything is chaotic and upside down.
• One step at a time, the plan will appear.
• It doesn’t stay unbearable forever. 

At this point, you might be wondering if I will turn the corner and tell you that everything is going to be alright, or “everything happens for a reason,” or some other trite quote. But I’m not going to do that. What I will tell you is that as someone who has survived a few bombs, there is life on the other side. 

You’ll be forever changed, but you’ll also be surprised at your capacity to grow and adapt, and eventually, you’ll thrive. Healing comes in its own time, and the resilience you build will be enduring. If you feel like you are in the midst of a crisis or need a little guidance and direction, contact us today to speak to one of our professional counselors. For more insights, experiences, and stories like these, check out our other blogs and visit our social media.