I’m a trauma therapist. I support and guide people in navigating trauma for a living — both Big-T Trauma events like sexual assault, finding a body, or surviving a mass casualty event; and small-t trauma experiences like early attachment wounding and parental neglect.
I’m also a sailor. Always will be. I don’t make the rules, and I didn’t get much choice about this part of my identity — it’s an occupational hazard of growing up a tomboy in a long line of seafarers.
Both professions, at heart, are about navigation. Understanding where you are, pinpointing where you want to get to, and figuring out how to traverse the patch of unknown between here and there. And essentially, surviving when things get rough (traumatic bereavement, terminal diagnosis, grief, betrayal) is about knowing when to move and knowing when to brace.
Prepare.
If you’re about to get hit by a storm, the first thing you want to do is make a distress call. Let someone know where you are, what’s happening, and that you might be in trouble. If there’s a chance you’re going to need outside help, you want to seek it as soon as you can. The worse things get, the harder it becomes to ask for help because all your energy, resources and will may have to go towards surviving each moment.
You can always turn down help, if it turns out you don’t need it. It’s much harder to call for help late — and even if you manage it, you might not be afloat anymore when it arrives.
The same goes for surviving a crisis, holding yourself through a traumatic event, or suffering a serious bereavement. Tell the people closest around you what’s happened, as soon as you can. Also give them any information you can about what tends to be helpful when things get rough for you. Maybe you need lots of company and talking through what’s happening in your head. You might struggle with the daily stuff of life, and it would be good to have someone help you with shopping and remind you to eat or shower. Perhaps you do best with positive distractions, and need people to drag you out for walks or show up with movies and snacks. People often want to help, but have no idea what might be useful and don’t want to presume, so they fall back on “call me if you need anything” then disappear for three months, assuming silence means you want to be left alone.
The second thing you want to do is reduce your capacity. Out at sea that means switching to a smaller sail if you’ve got one, then flattening it so the majority of the air will spill out. For an impending emotional crisis, this looks like cutting down the amount of responsibilities you’re going to have to manage. When you’re about to get hit by something big, you want to ditch as much pressure as possible. Take on no extra responsibilities, and arrange to take time off work if you’re in a position to. Stretch your deadlines as far as you can get away with.
It’s much easier to add things back in later, if you’re managing better than expected, than it is to risk breaking under the combined pressure of life responsibilities and post-traumatic stress.
Finally, you must secure anything you need to keep safe. On a boat, this means tying some things down and placing others where they’ll stay dry. Taping all the drawers shut so you don’t get brained by a flying can of beans.
In life, this means thinking about your dependents. If you can get extra help to care for your children or dependent family members over the coming weeks, put that in place quickly. Your job is to make sure they’re taken care of, and sometimes that means accepting you may not be in a position to be the only one caring for them 24/7 because of what you’re living through.
It doesn’t make you a failure, it makes you smart and decent. If your appendix burst, you’d have to make similar arrangements and nobody would shame you for it. It’s not like a grieving heart or a shattered psyche are any less incapacitating.
Move.
If you’re sailing into a storm, and you don’t have any reliable information about how bad it’s going to be yet, the first thing you want to do is keep moving. Slowly is good. Slowly means less chance of breaking things, but movement means you can steer. Movement means you can choose a direction. Movement means you’re less at the mercy of the waves, of being knocked this way and that, getting disoriented, feeling sick. Movement means you’ll be able to hold a better course out of here.
In life, this looks like sticking to as much routine as you can. It involves moving towards what remains meaningful in your life, despite the enormity of what you’re dealing with.
Please don’t misunderstand me, just because I used the word “meaningful” doesn’t mean it has to be profound. I spent the months (years?) following my own traumatic bereavement playing Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for stretches of time that would have been frankly obscene under any other circumstances. As ridiculous as it sounds, doing that kept me alive. I didn’t know how I was going to cope with anything in my new reality, but I did know that right now my task is to kill all the lich in this dungeon. I can do that. Then, I’ll find a new mission. My character needs to eat … I suppose I do, too.
Maybe you’re a person who does better when busy, with something significant to move towards on the horizon. But movement can be as simple as doing the next right thing. Putting a cup in the dishwasher. Drinking a glass of water. Taking out the rubbish. Replying to a message. Petting a cat.
Shelter and Brace.
There comes a point, when a storm continues to grow in intensity, where trying to move simply endangers you more. The unpleasantness and cost involved in staying put becomes outweighed by the danger of persevering. Keep trying to control your course in a raging maelstrom, and eventually something’s gotta give. Your mast will bend under the force of the wind, or if you’re really unlucky you’ll lose the whole rig.
Once things get really bad it’s safer to down sails, throw out a sea anchor, and hunker down. A sea anchor looks like a giant parachute, you throw it off the bow and it keeps you facing into the wind and waves to minimise your movement and stop you getting swamped. In a pinch, you can tie a rope to a mattress and it’ll work well enough. Then you want to get inside, to the very centre of the hull, and pray to whatever God you believe in because it’s out of your hands at this point. I’ve done a couple of deliveries (taking a boat from one port to another) where the yacht in question had harnesses and anchor points set into the roof and floor for this very possibility. Much as the deckies made plenty of stupid jokes about bondage and how kind it was of the boss to buy us all sex swings, the black ropes and chains were a grim reminder of just how badly things can go wrong out at sea.
Imagine it. Shamble inside, soaking wet and cold, and click shut the harness that may well be holding your waterlogged corpse in place tomorrow (not that anyone will ever find it). Brace your body in the dark as the floor bucks and shakes, watching the flash of moonlight on white water, trying to close your ears against the animal screaming of the wind. There’s nothing like the sound of proper storm wind, you never forget it. Without wanting to sound massively dramatic, I can hear it right now and the bar I’m writing in is playing fucking Hella Good right now.
In life ashore, as in life at sea, there comes a time where you must simply shelter in place and trust the system around you to hold. Get through one day at a time, as they say in AA. One hour at a time, one five-minute block at a time, if you have to. Nothing lasts forever, and simply watching a clock tick through the seconds can be a comfort in the dark night of the soul. Wait out the long hours, and dawn will come. Then you can go back to slowly navigating your way towards a different place.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is lie frozen under the covers, immobilised, and wait for the worst to pass over you. Sometimes it’s the only thing you can do. Adding shame about your incapacity on top of your already unbearable load may be the thing that drowns you.
It pays to remember that’s all this game is about, the process of moving and bracing, choosing which will best serve you in each moment: trying not to drown in the too-muchness of it all.
And if you’re feeling alone in the storm, never forget that somewhere just beyond your line of vision are many, many others moving through pain. To suffer what feels unsurvivable, at some point in your life, is a universal human experience. You’re never outside what makes us all human, even if nobody can bear it on your behalf, and plenty of others are trying to find safe passage in the distance. Perhaps you’ll see the lights, if you squint.
A note on ADHD and trauma: I generally write with an ADHD focus, but people with an ADHD diagnosis are far more likely to have experiences that fit the definition of trauma. That’s true of both “big-T Trauma” events like child abuse or sexual violence, or “small-t trauma” events like parental misattunement or emotional neglect. Smarter people than me can argue about whether this is causation, correlation, or a combination of both, but for the purposes of this particular discussion it doesn’t matter. If you have an ADHD diagnosis, you have probably experienced trauma and therefore what I’m writing about may be relevant to you. If not, thank you for making it to the end of this piece, and feel free to leave feedback in the comments.
Writing for a Cause
All subscription funds raised by Painting with Lightning go towards funding independent research in psychotherapeutic treatment development. My areas of experience and interest include suicide bereavement, sexual trauma, ADHD, addiction, and the use of AI in psychotherapy.
If you would like a paid subscription but can’t afford one, please email me at skyesclera@gmail.com and I’ll grant you access.
This post was written and edited without the use of AI.
SKYE THIS WAS GREAT.
As someone who spent some turbulent times at sea as a kid (both literal and metaphoric), this piece totally sang to my soul. So many wise gems, shared in such a compassionate and creative way. Thank you! ❤️
Ah, you wrote this on my bday 🤗