The Top Ten Tips To Coping With Crisis

The Top Ten Tips to
Coping with Crisis

A gift for you from

Wendy Keller
Author + Speaker + Survivor

www.WendyKeller.com

www.KellerMedia.com

www.FameFinders.com

If you’re reading this, you’re no stranger to suffering. I’m sorry about that. It
would be wonderful if the world worked exactly the way we’d like it to, wouldn’t
it?

This document is the result of some suffering I’ve done and the lessons I’ve
learned. It’s super short, because if you’re in shock, pain, sorrow, grief, angst,
anguish, sadness, PTSD or anything else, I know you don’t have much of an
attention span for some long boring stuff.

You just want some useful advice, and you want it now.

You’re probably caught between two questions:

Why did this happen?
and
When will it stop hurting, if ever?

Answer to Question One: you will probably never know. As best as anyone can
tell, it’s all about how you handle the rotten things that happen, not about figuring
out why. “Why?” will drive you nuts. Let it go. If there’s something you did
wrong, figure it out and don’t do it again. But don’t spend your life blaming
yourself or anyone or anything else. Breathe. Learn. Let go. It’s possible, really.

As for Question Two, the answer is “sooner than you think – if you let it.” When
my children died, it was years before I could go a whole day without crying. But
next week, it will be 21 years since they died and you know what? I’m doing OK.
I’ve observed lots of suffering people, including other bereaved parents, and I’ve
come to notice this:

 Blaming yourself doesn’t change What Is
 Arguing about it doesn’t change anything
 Unfortunately, crying doesn’t change anything either

© Copyright Wendy Keller, 2012 Page 2

What’s happened has happened. There’s likely no way to fix it or get it out of your
head or you’d have already done that. No one likes to suffer.

So let’s get you started on the path to recovery. Note that “recovery” doesn’t mean
going back to how things were. That’s not possible and may not even be beneficial
to you in the Grand Scheme of Things.

I’m guessing that you’re in the acute stage of suffering if you’re reading this, so
these things work as bandages and casts and splints to get you through the worst of
it. When you’re feeling stronger, that’s the time for the real work of processing the
situation and gleaning lessons. Give yourself a break – if it’s been less than a year
since The Incident, you’re not even ready to be “better” yet.

NOTE: I didn’t make this stuff up. I was so devastated emotionally, physically,
spiritually, mentally and in every other way that I researched how people handle
crisis, applied different things to my miserable life and these are the things that
worked. They’ll likely work for you. I hope they do.

Tip Number One: Accept Help

Especially in the USA, we’re trained to be tough and rugged and individualistic.
Especially guys. But when your legs have been cut off at the knee and you’re
hemorrhaging from some awful life event, that’s not the time to tie your bath towel
around your neck and pretend you’re Super Man – or Super Woman.

Humans have the attention span of a house fly – they spend way more time
thinking about themselves than other people. If there are people in your world who
want to help you while you’re suffering, ACCEPT THEIR HELP! Geez! Enough
already with the “I’m fine” stuff.


Let them bring you food, send you cards, listen to you cry and repeat the same
story over and over. Let them give you money or spare clothes or a place to sleep,
or whatever it is.

Just say YES. (And “thank you”.)

Whether you can see it now or not, people who want to help you while you’re in
crisis are a special gift. They’re proof you live on a good planet, despite the bad
things that happen here. You’re helping them as much as they’re helping you – or
more. Most people who want to aid those who are suffering had someone help
them when they were down. This is “paying it forward.” Someday, you’ll do the
same for someone else. Really. It’s your turn to receive, so just accept it and float
on the kindness of the world.

Tip Number Two: Decide To Survive

I made numerous suicide attempts when I came out of my coma in a draughty
English hospital and knew my children were in the morgue below. The doctors
considered amputating my left leg. I didn’t like my husband much before the
accident, and now I didn’t like him at all. I had nothing left to live for, in my
opinion.

If you want things to get better, your first job is to commit to surviving. Surviving
doesn’t mean you commit to living sad for the rest of your life. If you’ve heard me
speak, you’ve probably heard the story of Little Billy’s mother – the woman who
carried her unmanaged grief for 26 years and destroyed all other relationships in
her life in the process. Don’t be like her!

Make up your mind to live, to get through this and to see if you can make your
life better than it was before The Incident. It starts with that choice.


Tip Number Three: Trust Your Body

The human body is an amazing receiver of signals. Your brain is full of chemicals
that create emotions. Emotions are a spontaneous reaction to external stimuli – and
sometimes to internal ones.

One of the hardest things to do when your world has gone topsy-turvy is to listen
to your own body. I don’t mean if it is craving drugs, alcohol or some other form
of abuse to blot out what you’re feeling. I mean if you feel tired, lethargic, like
crying, like yelling, like you have a headache – go ahead and give in.

Those of us with the perfectionistic or workaholic gene tend to push harder when
our bodies aren’t doing what we think they should.

While you’re in crisis, it’s crucial that you get enough sleep – which will likely be
way, way more than normal.

It’s important that you eat healthy things, because suffering diminishes your
immune system already and it will only complicate your recovery if you get sick.

It’s also important that, if you are perfectionist, you loosen up on yourself a little. If
you’re just too sad and tired to do the dishes right after dinner, enlist someone else
or give yourself permission to do them in the morning.

Of course, if you find yourself unable to care for yourself in any way, it’s time to
get some outside professional help. But the ebbs and flows of emotion during a
crisis are exhausting, disorienting and overwhelming.

You don’t get any extra points for beating yourself up trying to force yourself to do
things you’re really not up to doing.


You have 100% permission to say “No” to social obligations that seem
burdensome to you right now.

You don’t have to do any errands, favors or services for anyone except dependent
children or geriatric/sick parents right now.

Be gentle with yourself. You’re going through a hard time. For a little while, turn
off the “Shoulds” in your head.

Tip Number Four: Choose Hope

Look, if you’re going to live, you sure as heck don’t want to spend the rest of your
life miserable, do you? What’s the point in that? Forget that idea.

If you’re going to live through this, you gotta do this: decide things will get better.
Pick something to hope for. It doesn’t matter if it’s big or small. My early “hopes”
were that I’d someday walk again without pain; that I would have another child;
and that I would find a way to go all day without crying for my lost babies.

I eventually achieved all three of those – and so, so, so much more than I ever
thought possible.

I would certainly trade every moment of happiness I’ve had since the tragedy to
have my children back – any parent would. But since that’s not a real option,
choosing to live, to be happy again someday, and even to thrive is a great
alternative.

Just deciding has power in it. Your life will begin to calm down, level off, improve
the very day you make that decision. Promise.

And things can and will get better if you let them.


Tip Number Five: Realize You’re Not Alone

My kids died in a tragic accident on a rainy evening in England – and we live in
California. We’d been on vacation less than 48 hours. My then-husband, the driver,
just didn’t look both ways. He had jet lag. He was tired. He pulled out in front of
an oncoming car. Wham! My life changed in that split-second.
For a long time, I thought no one else could understand my pain. I was severely
physically injured, too, and didn’t walk for almost a year, and didn’t walk without
extreme pain for nearly three. I’ll spare you the gory details.

But because my situation was so dramatic and so tragic and so incredibly sad and
all the other things people said to me, I found myself feeling isolated. Well, I was
wrong.

Many children die every day all over the world.
Thousands of car accidents happen.
Parents, friends and spouses die.
People witness the horrors of war.
They are subjected to vile crimes and abuse.
Marriages end badly.
Injuries and terminal diagnoses and natural disasters and on and on and on….

Guess what?

Other people have gone through something similar to what you’re facing and
survived it. They’ve gone on to live reasonably happy lives – the “new normal” –
which is slang for how things are going to be After It Happened.

If other people made it through this kind of a crisis, it means you can too. Really.
You can smile, laugh, play, enjoy life again. You have permission to get through


this. You’re not the only one in history who has suffered as you are doing. There
is reason to believe firmly in a better tomorrow.

Tip Number Six: Everyone Suffers at 100%

When I was in fourth grade, I came home from school and my beloved hamster
Caesar was stone cold dead inside his cage. I was devastated! I was having a hard
time – my mom and her new husband had recently had two new babies, one right
after the other, and I’d lost my place as Supreme Child in the Household. I loved
that little hamster - I thought of him as my best friend.

When Caesar died, I grieved for him at 100%. I was completely sad. As sad as I
could get.

As an adult, I have to laugh. Losing him was nothing at all compared to the grief
I’d later feel when my grandmother died, and years later, my children.

The lesson in Caesar’s death for us all is this: that everyone grieves their own pain
at 100%.

That is to say, whatever’s happening to you, well, that’s what you feel most. You
can watch someone on TV dying of some awful thing, and it’s sad. You may even
shed a tear. But it’s not you, it’s not your life.

There are two sides to this coin:

First, because it’s absolutely true that everyone grieves their own losses and pain at
100%, you are never alone. Anyone you meet over the age of about six has
experienced a loss or a pain, and knows what it means to hurt, to ache, to be sad.
It’s the human condition. You’re not alone.

Second, because everyone grieves their own pain at 100%, you get to choose to
find other people who have survived things that you think are the same or “worse”


than what you’re dealing with and do what they did to get through it. Because they
did.

I first realized that everyone grieves their own losses and pain at 100% when
people sent me cards- lots of them – after the kids died, that said, “I know exactly
how you feel. My dog (or cat) died and it was like a child to me…”

At first I was furious. You morons! I never left my dead kids home for the day
with a bowl of water on the floor and a litter box in the corner! It’s not the same at
all!
But slowly, it dawned on me that for that person, it was - because they’d known no
greater suffering. (Lucky for them!)

If you can accept that everyone suffers at 100%, you can find lots of people who
will comfort, support, encourage and inspire you as you travel down this arduous
path.

Tip Number Seven: Know When to Call in the Professionals

I am not a grief counselor, a therapist, a psychiatrist or a psychologist. Part of the
reason I can do this work of helping other people get through crises is because
people like those helped me along my path.

If you’re seriously suicidal…
If you don’t start participating in life again and it’s been more than six months…
If you’re neglecting your health, your children, your home, your job, your friends
and family and it’s been more than three months…
If you feel afraid of what you might be capable of…

Get professional help. It’s easy to say, but hard to do if you’re caught up in
thinking it should be something you can handle on your own. Face facts: it isn’t.
That doesn’t make you bad or weak – it makes you normal and smart. Get help.


There are places that counsel people like you for free or for low fees. Look online.
Ask a friend to find them for you. Do something – don’t just sit there waiting.

People make a big mistake when they tell people in crisis that “time heals”. Like
hell it does! Time doesn’t do one single thing! BUT if you have time and you take
concrete positive actions – like those I’m describing in this document – and you use
that time to practice your coping skills – then in time, you will absolutely find it
gets easier to manage the crisis you’ve endured.

If you feel stuck, talk to a professional. Please.

Tip Number Eight: Focus on the Future

When you were a kid, maybe you thought you’d grow up to be a rock star or a
fireman, a president or a princess. If someone had asked you, you’d have probably
confidently told them your career plans.

It made you happy to have a destination in mind for your life, and it made the
grown-ups stop asking you that dumb question all the time, “What do you want to
be when you grow up?”

Well, now that you’re facing this crisis, it’s time to do a little daydreaming again.
Whether you become a rock star or a fireman isn’t the point. The idea is to spend a
little time picturing a new future for yourself.

Obviously, it isn’t going to be the same future you imagined before The Incident.

It’s going to have to be something new. Take some time – five minutes, maybe ten
– today. Picture yourself five years from now. What would your ideal life be like,
knowing what you know now?


I know. It may not be as happy since this awful thing happened. But just pretend.
You can finish these sentences if it gets you started more easily:

“Given what I know now, five years from now I’d like to at least….”

“Since my life will never be the same, the best I believe I can hope for five years
from now is…”

“If I could start my life over again from the moment it happened, I may as well…”

You might surprise yourself! Depending on where you are in your crisis, your
answers to these questions might change – dramatically! It’s normal after a big
crisis for any of us to re-evaluate what we’ve got, what we’ve lost, where we were
heading and where we’d like to go now.

Now that things have changed.

Give yourself five or ten minutes today to daydream. Maybe you’ll want to do it
again tomorrow, too. Test your ability to bravely plan What Comes Next for you.

What you focus on becomes your reality.

Tip Number Nine: Decide to Give Back

Let’s be super, super clear here: you don’t have to do anything, ever. You are
completely and utterly entitled to just survive for the rest of your life. That’s 100%
A-OK.

It makes me a little nervous when someone’s child dies and three days later they’re
starting a foundation to prevent or research something. I personally suspect such
gung-ho enthusiasm is a way of not dealing with, processing and moving through
their pain. It’s an avoidance technique.


I’m not talking about that. And I sure am not talking about giving back to anyone
who has helped you get this far through your crisis. I’m not even talking about
starting a foundation. (If that becomes a real goal for you, you’ll know when the
time is right.)

I am talking about deciding to give something back in the sense of wisdom. In the
sense of learning. If someone came to you a month from now, facing something
very similar to what you’re now facing, what would you tell him or her?
Would you tell them that it is something people survive and have survived
throughout history?

Would you tell them to give it all up and go shoot themselves?

What if you were asked what the Most Important Lesson you’ve gotten from this
is?

It doesn’t have to be some big fancy universal lesson people start wearing on t-
shirts. For a lot of people, a major crisis makes them decide to live each moment
to the fullest. Or to be present in the moment. Or to tell the people they love that
they love them every day. Or to mind their temper.

Someday, somehow, someone is going to come to you because they need your
advice and wisdom. What are you going to say?

In that moment, when you distill all this pain, suffering and sorrow you’re
enduring now into a valuable lesson for someone else, you’re giving back in a very
big way.

I think of it as hiking up a steep mountain in the dark. You’re shining your
flashlight for a moment on the path behind you, to light the way of someone who is
travelling the same path.


Tip Number Ten: Reward Your Progress

You remember in school how the teacher drew a smiley face or put a sticker on
your paper when you did a good job? Well, as a grown up, no one does that for
us anymore, so we have to reward ourselves. Compliment ourselves. Be nice to
ourselves.

What you are trying to process is hard. It’s a bad situation, it’s exhausting
emotionally, it’s physically depleting, mentally distracting and overall just a rough
time.

If you’ve been applying any of these tips, you will be seeing little sprouts of hope.
Little victories where you have minutes, moments, hours or maybe even days when
you can see the sunlight peeking through that ol’ dark cloud above your head.

That’s when you know you’re making progress. When you can look back on how
you felt last week, or how you handled your life last month, and see a little bit of
progress. It’s wholly unrealistic to put a time limit on healing, but it’s really
important to recognize and celebrate your progress.

I kept a journal after the kids died, of how much emotional and physical pain I felt,
of how angry I was, of how scared and hopeless I felt about the future. I kind of
stumbled on the idea of keeping score of myself along the way – and I found it
really helpful.

One simple way is to score your mood. On a 1-5 scale, 1 being miserable and 5
being happy, where would you rate yourself at this exact instant?

Write it down or put it into your smartphone or something. Take your “mental
temperature” at fixed times during the day – like, upon waking, just before eating
lunch, and just before going to bed.


Watch and see if you don’t start making some progress! A shift from three “1”
scores to a 1-2-1 day is progress! It’s not going to happen overnight. Nothing
worth having does.

But watching yourself heal, well, that can become pretty fascinating. If you have
the energy, try to keep a diary, even if you only jot down 30 words a day. Be real
with yourself. Recovery isn’t a straight up arrow! There will be low days, high
days, and then medium days all mixed in together, like it or not. The goal is that a
month from now, you have more higher scored days, more happy or at least
peaceful days, than you did a month ago.

Inch by inch, day by day, you’ll be making progress. You’ll be coping and then
processing and then healing from the crisis you’ve endured.

I know you don’t want to hear this, but it will actually make you a better person.
You’ll become more compassionate with the suffering of others; you might learn to
take better care of yourself emotionally and physically; you might make important
changes in the trajectory of your life; some people find it changes the way they deal
with other people. It will help you realize your valuable place in the world – hoe
many people care about you and want you to be well and happy. It can open your
eyes to opportunities to give, love, serve, grow, expand your beingness.

Although we hate this truth, it appears that when things get too complacent, the
Universe (God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, The Great Pumpkin, whatever it is out there)
pushes us to grow. No one gets through human life without a lot of unwanted
“learning opportunities”.

What you do when you’re enrolled involuntarily in these “classes” makes all the
difference in the quality of the rest of your life.

You WILL someday look at this calmly and see some benefits – some good things
that sprout in the darkest hours of our lives.


You CAN get through this.

Things WILL get better if you let them.

Best wishes to you for a healthy, happy, peaceful, rewarding life from here on out!

Wendy Keller

Wendy Keller speaks and leads inspiring, practical workshops on overcoming adversity.
Find out how to get her to come to your group or event at:
www.WendyKeller.com

If you would like copies of this document for distribution, please write for permission to:
Help@WendyKeller.com


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