When Survival Mode Feels Endless

How love interrupts the cycle of hopelessness {Plus 1 fun thing, 5 things worth your time, and 1 thing I'm pondering}

Apr 17, 2025

I didn’t give a great answer to a question I received at an event a few weeks ago. During the question and answer time at the Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, Texas, one person asked, “What do I do if I’m in survival mode?”

It was an anonymous question, so I don’t know any of the details behind it. I don’t know if survival mode came because of a hard diagnosis or crisis. Or if survival mode arose out of the daily challenge of little humans who need their noses wiped and fingernails clipped alongside our own bodies and souls that need attention and care.1 Or if survival mode has to do with existential angst over our political moment or a sick family member or climate change or a crisis of faith.

What I do know is that all of us find ourselves in survival mode sometimes, and when we are there, it can feel endless.

In Dallas, I gave a vague answer that left me unsatisfied.

Ask for Help

What I wish I had said was,

“When you find yourself in survival mode, ask for help.”

Tell someone that you aren’t okay. Pray honest prayers of anger or lament or disbelief. Cry out—to God and to humans. Let yourself not be okay, and assume that there are other people who can, and will, and will want to, come alongside you.

Allow something from outside the closed system of your own efforts to enter in, to be with you in the hardship of it all, and, eventually, to help break open new possibilities.

The Inevitable Cycle of Survival Mode

I took our son, William, to see the musical Hadestown for his birthday last year.

It’s a beautiful, moving, haunting story based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. What struck me most about it was the Greek understanding of fate. There’s a tragic cycle that continues again and again. There’s an inevitability to the suffering of life. There’s no way out.

This way of thinking contains a deep truth. Things fall apart. We seem doomed to repeat our worst mistakes. We pass along pain from generation to generation. And when we live within a closed system, when there is no room for God, no room for love, no room for hope, that cycle of ultimate despair (with moments of joy and beauty along the way) is all we’ve got.

The Possibility of Hope

But there’s another way of thinking about how the world works, where hope is possible, where love can break into the repetitive cycles of dishes and diapers and broken bodies and animosity and hurt. This way of thinking opens up the circle of fate to the possibility of redemption and repair. It’s this way of thinking that gave rise to the oft-quoted line, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”2

When we find ourselves in survival mode—feeling stuck, hopeless, and without the time or energy to do anything to change our circumstances—there are little things we can do to make things better. We can give thanks. We can take one minute to pray. We can take five minutes to consider the next right thing and do it.

We Need an Interruption

But the most important thing we can do is ask for help. Ask for an interruption to the cycle. Let grace break in. Let ourselves not be able to figure it out and make it work and persevere. Let ourselves receive what we need.

When we are in survival mode, we need an interruption. We need love to break into the cycle of heaviness and hopelessness. When we are in survival mode, we need help.

For Christians, this week is Holy Week, the week in which we remember and reenact the story of a God who came to earth in order to enter into the brokenness and hopelessness of this human life, to suffer with and for us, and to break open possibilities for new life through love.

If you are in survival mode, this is exactly the right time to ask for help and wait for love to break through.

Amy Julia

Guest Podcast

Finding Joy in the Unexpected: Amy Julia Becker on Parenting a Child with Down Syndrome

I loved this conversation with Jordan Arogeti!

Listen in here!

1 Fun Thing

I got to spend a few days in Atlanta for the Hope Heals Gala and then our annual Board retreat, and it was glorious.

collage of Amy Julia with Hope Heals board members

Watch this video if you want an introduction to Hope Heals (warning: bring your tissues!). I am so honored to be a participant in this inter-ability community of people seeking to create spaces of belonging and belovedness.

5 Things Worth Your Time

Essay: DOGE abruptly cut a program for teens with disabilities. This student is 'devastated'

Students with disabilities deserve support in imagining and taking steps towards a good future, but the Trump administration is cutting off funding for programs that provide such support. For the past eight years, we’ve been working with our daughter Penny on a plan for her future that includes going to college, having a job, and living with friends. Step by step, she’s moving towards those goals. And there’s no way she would be taking those steps without a web of support, including programs designed to help her with the transition from high school to employment. Penny’s program remains intact, but others like it are being cut.

Essay: The Pandemic Is Not the Only Reason U.S. Students Are Losing Ground

I appreciated this exploration of why the kids who are struggling with math and reading in school aren’t seeing any meaningful improvements. (It’s more nuanced than Covid or smartphones, and it doesn’t have to be this way.)

Episode 94: You're More Than Your Mind with Dr. John Swinton

This episode is full of such rich, deep, pastoral goodness for any of us wrestling with what it means to be humans with vulnerable bodies and minds living in time. I think my very favorite moment was John Swinton's comment that we think our stories construct our identities when actually: “It’s not so much our story that makes us who we are. It’s God’s story.” {GoodHard Story with Katherine Wolf}

Episode 294: Why Down Syndrome Isn't Something to "Cure"

I so appreciated this thoughtful conversation about what we mean when we talk about a “cure” for Down syndrome. Heather Avis' words at the end have stayed with me: the hope isn't for a cure for Down syndrome—our kids with Down syndrome bring the hope. {The Lucky Few podcast}

Episode: Making as a Spiritual Practice with Makoto Fujimura

This beautiful Trinity Forum conversation got me thinking about how much we need to pay attention to beauty and goodness and love and truth right now, not as an escape or alternative to attending to the dehumanizing forces all around, but as a reason to hold onto hope and as a reason to engage those very forces.

1 Thing I’m Pondering

When I read verses in the Bible that say if you do such and such, then this is what will happen to you, I tend to read them as conditional promises, or even threats. So when I read Exodus 19:5: “Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples,” I first took it as a formula. If x, then y. Put another way: Be good and then you’ll get a reward.

But I don’t think this is a formula. God has already rescued the Israelites. God has already promised faithful love to them. We know how the story goes—they mess up, and God remains faithful. Forever. Which leads me to believe that this verse is a statement of spiritual reality. It’s a message about what happens when you walk in the way of love, the way God lays out, the way that leads to life.

What about you?

What are you pondering, reading, watching, or listening to these days?

Reimagining the Good Life

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