The Crisis Response & Recovery Cycle

Bob Montgomery in his book “Surviving: Coping with a Life Crisis” says that people typically go through a number of stages of adaptation as they come to grips with a life changing incident:

1/ Crisis response: Shock / Disbelief / Realisation / Non-emotional survival state.  This is the immediate response to an unfolding crisis.  Shock can affect a person so that they feel overwhelmed physically.   As with most stress reactions, blood is withdrawn from the outer part of the body as well as the brain, causing nausea and dizziness, perhaps fainting.  Breathing may become fast and shallow while the heart rate increases.  When extremely frightened, a person can lose control over the muscles of the bladder and bowel and although it may feel very embarrassing, this is a very common experience.  Disbelief, a coping mechanism used by the mind to protect itself from the full impact of the crisis, can give the mind breathing space to come to grips with the enormity of what has happened.  Realisation gradually emerges, triggering a non-emotional survival state where the victim can even become immobilized.  In this latter frame of mind many people will remark on how calm the person has been during the most intense part of the crisis.  In this state, a victim will do almost anything they think will keep them safe-sometimes resulting in actions which are later regretted.

2/ Release or escape: once a person escapes from the initial phase of the crisis, they can then find themselves left with a task that most people would actually be unprepared for and even unaware of while it is happening – the need to cope with the emotional aftereffects of having been in a crisis.

3/ Recovery cycle: Shock / Depression / Mood swings / Anger / Philosophical reflection / Bringing it All to Rest.  After escaping the crisis, people will often fall back into a state of shock, often marked by a dull, flat emotional state.  Friends and family may actively but unwisely encourage the apparent emotionless façade by suggesting that the person forgets about it at that point.  As time goes on and with a little less social support, the victim can be unable to sufficiently express anger and other intense reactions to their experiences and may slump into depression, which only adds to the victim’s sense of emotional isolation.  Toward the depression face many victims experience marked mood swings, up one day and down the next and these mood swings can cause extreme anxiety if they are misinterpreted by the victim as being abnormal or undesirable.  Mood swings will pass more quickly if the victim, as well as everyone else, accepts them as normal for a person in this position, and no one will try to resist them.  In time, anger can emerge almost as a natural attempt to regain control-perhaps an attempt to gain a healthy sense of management but at this stage it may produce defensiveness in friends and further isolate for the person.  Someone on the receiving end of the victim’s anger can easily become distressed themselves-particularly because the anger will seem unfair and unprovoked. Three basic truths in normal life have been challenged by a trauma: the assumption that regardless of attempts to remain safe, we are all continually vulnerable; secondly the awareness of the possibility of an inevitable death is often suppressed; and third we discover that events occur without notice and seemingly at random.  As the victim comes to a realisation of their essential vulnerability, a new perspective through philosophical reflection will emerge and at this stage questions about God and ultimate destiny will inevitably be asked.  As a result of accepting and working through normal distress reactions, a victim can finally lay their crisis to rest as a bad but fading memory.