Survival situations can be over in moments or require years of endurance. You might find yourself flying through the REACH protocol in the space of several minutes, or you could be repeating the protocol again and again as your situation evolves, just like our survivors in this book have demonstrated. Either way, at some point your survival journey will reach the end of your particular battle.
For most of us, we start out expecting life to go well . . . until some kind of hardship hits us. Going through survival breaks the illusion that we are always safe, that everything will always end up okay. is is a painful loss, but it isn’t a total loss.
We gain something too. We make it through our survival experience stronger than we were before. Your capacity for appreciation went from a max of 100 percent to 110 percent. You’re more thankful for life’s lulls because you know there are other adversities to overcome. You have become, through trials and suffering, a realistic optimist.
When another struggle inevitably comes your way, you are equipped with a fuller toolbox. Rather than going from 100 percent to 80 percent, however, you now go from 110 percent to 95 percent. Survival once again drives and deepens your ability to feel grateful for being alive, and you spike back up again— pushing past 110% to a new level. Surviving terrible situations actually increases how much you appreciate your life and how getting to the other side of survival actually raises your baseline “happiness.” When you experience a new setback, you don’t fall as far into despair as you might have before because your capacity for positivity and resilience have been increased. Every struggle makes you stronger, boosting your confidence in yourself and your gratitude for your life. If you choose to let them, difficult experiences further define you and your character.
But, even with your enhanced appreciation for life, you will experience some days when the struggle doesn’t feel as if it’s over. For some people, the second part of the survival journey is harder than the first. Living with your survival experience can affect your life in profound ways.
Just as everyone’s survival journey looks different, your ability to move past and integrate your survival experience into your life will different too. There can be positive outcomes from having undergone a survival experience: a new perspective, increased gratitude, and practiced resilience. There can be negative carryovers as well, both physical and psychological. Until you are on the other side of the journey, it’s difficult to know what your own residual effects will be.