For anyone who has been in therapy, the term “survival mode” is nothing new. In fact, your therapist likely used this term to explain to you why you feel like you’re drowning in life. However, “survival mode” isn’t just a simple explanation. It’s an entire state of existence. It is common, hard, and alters your perception of reality for a long time.

Here’s what I’ve learned from living in survival mode for the past two decades.

Survival Mode is Lonely

When humanity fell from the garden of Eden, sin entered the world and all the chaos of evil settled upon the earth. Eternal life was stolen from the earliest humans and they were cursed to work in fields with thorns and obstacles. Suddenly, life wasn’t just about living – life was about surviving. We see how crucial survival is in a world with sin from the example of Cain and Abel. Death became possible and people were desperate to avoid it at all costs.

Since then, humans have had to survive through new generations, one after the other. There is a saying that “the only thing all people are promised is death.” And yet, we have created communities and ecosystems where some people thrive and others fight to survive. Even within the same families, one person may feel comfortable, at peace, and unworried about life while another battles a chronic health crisis that completely shatters their joy and peace altogether.

When we suffer, we often feel like we’re all alone. However, I have learned that this loneliness not only comes from isolated suffering, but also lack of compassion. While I am the only one in my immediate family who has a diagnosed mental illness and has been to therapy for an eating disorder, I didn’t necessarily have to feel alone. Growing up, it often wasn’t what my family said that made me feel isolated from the family unit. Rather, it was how I was treated.

I was expected to behave as if I didn’t have a disability. I was expected to hold in my strong emotions. As a child, having emotional restrictions placed on me was completely demoralizing, defeating, and shaming to the utmost degree. Breaking these restrictions always had consequences. I was expected to “talk things out” with my psychiatrist but was never actually allowed to visibly express my pain, anxiety, and depression.

How could I have “talked things out” if I were never allowed to express my emotions in the first place? The first and most important part of emotional regulation (as I’ve learned as an adult) is being able to express your emotions freely in a safe environment. That’s how you learn, study, and understand what you’re feeling.

You cannot adequately describe what you’re going through if you never give yourself the space to actually feel things through. As a child, I wasn’t given this space and later learned to provide myself enough grace to do so on my own.

Survival Mode is Learned Over Time

Perhaps I always had a “safe” environment to express my emotions in a literal sense. I had a bedroom, a pillow, and a heart full of anxiety. I could scream and cry and kick the blankets off my bed. I could write all of my frustrations into a journal, but I never had anyone who loved me enough to listen to my woes while I was experiencing them.

I learned to keep things to myself. If I angered, embarrassed or upset someone every time I felt big feelings and expressed them (even partially), I was chastised and told to keep quiet. My anxiety was often met by others’ rage. People thought I was starting a fight or a temper tantrum but really I just needed to cry and have someone tell me that they loved me.

I was never truly emotionally safe – people became defensive when I showed my true feelings. The battle turned inward eventually, and I was suicidal for over 10 years. I was all alone. If I tried to honor my emotions and explain myself, I was called “selfish” or told I needed to find a better therapist. I was told I was “crazy” for expressing my emotions even only partially.

The worst part about it was that I would watch those I loved express big emotions all the time. When they screamed or cried, when they were dismayed or heartbroken over something, they didn’t hold back. And I knew from my own experiences (even as a young child) that just because someone is sad or angry, it didn’t mean I had to fight them. Others’ pain didn’t bother me because I was fully acquainted with my own.

I made a pact with myself from an early age – right around the time I became suicidal with intention and a variety of different plans. My pact was this: always be kind to people because you never know how their lives are going.

If my kindness could make a difference, then HECK I would do whatever it would take to make someone else’s life better. This helped me stay alive – it gave me a sense of purpose. Before I truly knew and had a firm relationship with Jesus, I dedicated my life to serving others. It was the only thing that kept me going. I often saw the difference that my kindness made in others’ lives and I discovered that it was the one thing that brought me joy.

I chose to be kind even when people were unkind. Jesus even says that we must be good to our enemies – that is the truest test of love. It means nothing if we are only kind to those who are kind to us. I developed a fighting strength over the years. Daily life became a battle I fought from waking up until falling asleep. Quite unfortunately, I also deal with chronic insomnia from hypomanic episodes. I learned to exist in that fighting mode for years.

In late 2020, I started dipping my toes into reading Scripture and learning about the great love God has for me. I remember accepting the Gospel with such joy and excitement. I also remember lots and lots of bad things happening from early 2021 to late 2025. I went from being suicidal and never certain if I would actually “go through with it” from going into woe after woe after woe. Even though I knew I was saved by Christ my Lord, I was still suicidal for a period of time after my faith had begun to bloom.

Survival Mode Becomes a Habit

Around the time I started healing from my trauma, eating disorder, and deepest pains from my mental illness – especially being suicidal – life started getting really, really hard. I had developed severe, chronic insomnia and was getting a few hours of sleep every three nights. I was living on roughly 10 hours of sleep per week. This season lasted for eight months straight. I had begun to experience heart issues, dizziness, and disassociation from the lack of sleep. There were days I struggled with breathing normally and found myself taking deep gasps for air multiple times during the day. I’d briefly forget where I was and would have to re-center myself wherever I was in those moments. I couldn’t even hold a conversation – I mainly used context clues to reply to people as necessary.

I eventually started a different course of treatment for my mental illness which greatly helped me stay balanced emotionally and helped me to sleep at night. I remember it clearly – I had just started a new job as a copywriter and content manager and was struggling to keep up from lack of sleep and a long list of foreboding health issues. I remember praying to God for help, telling Him that I couldn’t even work at this wonderful job He had blessed me with without sleep. I was a month in to that job and that was when my doctor upped my meds and I started sleeping better.

Around the time I started sleeping adequately for the first time in my life, my mom was diagnosed with stage 3C cancer. I was her only child living at home at the time. One of my sisters had been moved out for a while and my other sister was away at school. I did my best to physically support my mom while she went through chemotherapy for a second time in her life and six rounds of radiation. By the end of her treatment, I was so emotionally exhausted that I started isolating myself as often as possible. I had gone through a decade of carrying all of my brokenness all by myself to then carrying the brokenness my mom experienced with her third time with cancer. I carried the emotional baggage of years and years of sadness, failure, and setbacks.

When Life Changed, My Fighting Instincts Kept Going

After my mom was diagnoses as NED (no evidence of disease), we experienced another onslaught. Within just a few years, my grandma on my dad’s side, one of my uncles, one of my aunts, and my grandpa on my mom’s side had all passed away. I lost two jobs that I adored. I suffered a traumatic car accident and was attacked by the woman I collided with, only for the police to dismiss my injuries as “seatbelt burns” instead of abrasions from being punched in the neck multiple times (who wears their seatbelt across their neck?). I felt defeated. And while all of these incidents and tragedies were often too hard to bear, I saw God in all of them.

Sure, all of these had a purpose in God’s will for my life. None of us are promised a joyful, loving, or peaceful existence on this broken, evil earth. At some point in my relationship with God, I stopped blaming myself for the mistreatment others put on me and realized that no one would love me like God does. I was suicidal because I felt unloved. I was constantly fighting, in a battle with everyday circumstances, to love others in the way I always needed them to love me. I became loving because I endured hard times. Jesus shaped me into looking more like Him because He showed me how important it is to love everyone intentionally and fiercely.

Because God waited such a long time to answer my prayers, I built up the habit of survival. I began to defend myself when I had honest intentions and people mistreated me instead of hating myself for making a mistake. I started seeing that I was doing my very best in every situation, and while my best will never be perfect, I was worth it because I was following God as closely as I could. He loved me and all I could do was fight to love Him back, even when it was hard to believe He loved me at all.

Then, one day, I started having these dreams of sleeping. You read that right – I was dreaming of resting and waking up on vacation. Along with these dreams, I saw two prayers of mine being answered (in real life). The first one gave me a feeling of completeness that angered me at first. I always wanted to feel complete while being single. I was learning to love my alone time and the fact that meeting a wonderful guy and dating him made me feel complete was troublesome. Wasn’t I worthy enough to feel complete on my own? Why did I have to be in a relationship to feel this way? Was it because this was God’s will?

Then, I earned work on a project that actually pays my bills. Through multiple full time and part time roles, I was finally making enough to save AND cover my basic living expenses. While I know this is a short term project, I feel “covered” financially for the first time in my life.

I remember just months ago convincing myself that I might be homeless one day because I couldn’t find stable work. I have been on dozens of interviews in the last year. One of the worst realizations is knowing that you are capable of work, desiring of work, yet prohibited to work in a job that actually pays your bills. I set out to work part-time just so I could make my car payments. However, I was still draining my savings and unsure of how I would be able to pay for my health insurance as someone with mental illness.

I had given 10% of every single paycheck away to my church and Christian organizations throughout the past two years only to find myself jobless and unable to truly pay for my living expenses. I applied everywhere, networked, and prayed my butt off only to be ghosted and denied every role I interviewed for. Then, I found work on a project that I know is God-sent. For the first time in while, I can thank God for things without feeling bitter. Gratitude doesn’t feel forced, it feels like a genuine response.

Survival Mode Never Truly Ends

My journey started with me on a battlefield, fighting until I was broken and raw. My journey currently has me resting fully, working to provide for myself and not just skim by, and blessed with a wonderful boyfriend, church community, group of friends, and a family that has become more understanding of my mental illness with time. And of course, God has been there since the beginning. I know I am never truly alone because of Him. As I learned from a delightful sermon one day, God saves you and then He redeems you. There are seasons where we feel like we’re drowning in the middle of the ocean, seasons where we learn to swim, seasons where a boat finds us and picks us up, seasons where we need food and water but don’t have them yet, and seasons where we’re cuddled up next to a warm fire with a tall glass of water, some bread, and maybe a Bible to read.

Do I feel like I’m done surviving? No. I don’t even know what “not” surviving looks like. I went through years without feeling any true joy (bipolar hypomania doesn’t count) and somehow get the inkling that joy is about to return. I am realizing that the joy I felt from loving others ran out during my time on the battlefield and now I need to replenish from others’ joy of loving me. I pray to God for both the love and the joy, from Him and from others, because I think that just might be the key to moving out of survival mode and into a full season of restoration.

Knowing that my most basic needs are met, that I am loved, seeing love in action and building trust in the Lord’s will for me are what I am working on right now. If the lack of love made me feel the need to fight, then perhaps the abundance of love will allow me to rest. With any relationship, even with God, trust must be built. Reading the Bible doesn’t help me build trust with God anymore because I went so many years feeling alienated from it. I would read about how God treats His remnant and say “that mustn’t include me” because of how radically ignored and unloved I felt.

Because God is the same today, yesterday, and forever, I haven’t been able to fully give Him my trust yet. If He could have me feel like I was dangling from a thread for years and years, then why would I suddenly trust in His goodness just because my circumstances have changed? I have faith in Jesus, that He died on the cross to save me, and have faith that He loved me then and will always love me (even when I felt unloved, I still acknowledged that He loved me in a way I couldn’t comprehend). In addition to being able to feel loved and trust God, I also think that seeing the reason why I had to suffer will aid in me being able to rest from the fight as well.

I want to understand why it took so long more than just acknowledge how patient I’ve become. I need to see why God let me feel unloved so I know it was all a part of a loving plan. Purpose has become a defining factor in knowing why I had to fight and survive for so long. I need to justify the pain with love. Love is always a choice, and I want to see what I chose to fight for. I want to see the love I didn’t have for so many years feel justified. If God is Love, and the Way, the Truth and the Life, then surely love will be the reason I can finally learn to rest.

Peace be with you.