Life in an “Apocalyptic” World

Susan Smith, MA, LPC

Distress, chaos, and anxiety seem to emanate everywhere. Sometimes this suffering is acute and visible. Other times it exists as a subtle crackling background noise — a persistent emotional atmosphere surrounding modern life.

This reminds me of a series of novels we once read to our children. In the story, gifted children are invited into a secret mission to help save the world. One of the first things they must learn is how to discern this crackly background of insincerity and falsehood. To complete their mission, they cannot rely on intellect alone. They must learn to feel as well as think. They must stay connected to themselves, to their senses, and to one another.

While we are not living inside a children’s novel, we may still benefit from the wisdom of these fictional adventurers.

Many of us are living as though we are trying to solve a puzzle that is simply too difficult to put together. We react, reach, grab, flee, shut down, or overfunction. Unfortunately, the ways we cope with overwhelm often affect our relationships and the people we love most.

We may notice persistent irritability with a partner or child, only to feel immediate guilt afterward. We criticize ourselves and wonder, What is wrong with me? This is a common pattern in anxiety and depression. We feel distress internally, but instead of understanding it compassionately, we turn it inward against ourselves. We continue pleasing, caretaking, and performing in order to survive while simultaneously carrying despair, resentment, or exhaustion underneath.

Others experience something different: numbness, detachment, or disconnection. Life begins to feel dreamlike. We may not know how to reconnect because reconnecting would require feeling reality again — and reality may contain grief, fear, vulnerability, conflict, or pain. Our nervous systems interpret feeling itself as dangerous.

In relationships, this often appears as avoidance. We wall ourselves off from difficult conversations, unmet needs, or painful truths because confrontation feels overwhelming or impossible. We may deeply love the people in our lives while simultaneously feeling unable to fully engage with them.

So what becomes the antidote when we are living inside such a complicated web of emotions, fears, and nervous system responses?

The Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of psychotherapy can be deeply helpful here.

IFS therapist Jeanne Catanzaro writes in Unburdened Eating that calm and peace become difficult to access when we feel barraged by emotional provocation and relational stress from others’ parts. When our experience of reality repeatedly signals danger or unsafety, our systems often need support beyond what insight alone can provide.

At the same time, we are increasingly living in a world shaped by algorithms designed to comfort, reinforce, and mirror us. Recent discussions around AI “sycophancy” point to the tendency of artificial intelligence systems to agree with users or provide emotionally pleasing responses. While validation can sometimes feel comforting, healing rarely comes solely through comfort. Growth often requires discernment, relational depth, accountability, and the capacity to tolerate complexity.

This is one reason why human therapeutic relationships still matter so profoundly.

We need spaces where our suffering can be met with wisdom, training, compassion, and perspective — not merely reflected back to us. We need help untangling the many emotional states, beliefs, memories, and protective strategies that emerge under stress. And we need to experience the profound healing resource of Self-Leadership.

IFS is one of the therapeutic modalities that offers such a roadmap.

With the support of a trained therapist, IFS helps us begin disentangling the internal “parts” of ourselves that may feel overwhelmed, despairing, caregiving, frightened, perfectionistic, angry, avoidant, or ashamed.

Founder Richard Schwartz often describes this process as focusing on one “clove of garlic” at a time rather than attempting to manage the entire bulb all at once. In IFS, this is called getting to know a part.

Something powerful happens when we begin relating to ourselves in this way.

Rather than becoming consumed by anxiety, rage, shame, or hopelessness, we begin developing a compassionate relationship with the experiences arising inside us. Over time, many people notice increased curiosity, clarity, openness, courage, and self-compassion. These qualities help therapy move forward when people otherwise feel stuck or overwhelmed.

Research and clinical experience alike suggest that healing often requires this ability to “decenter” from our emotions and limiting beliefs — not by suppressing them, but by relating to them differently.

In many ways, we begin seeing the forest through the trees again. And after we practice this with a skilled therapist for a time, we are soon able to understand the entire garlic bulb of cloves and how they fit together. As each clove heals, the system redefines into a healthier representation of the whole. This is how we share our lives, past, present, and future. 

Research also suggests that human beings feel safer when we can predict our environments with reasonable certainty. Complex trauma and neurodivergence can interfere with this process.

Bergenfield and Sweezy, in Wired to Feel: Autism as a Condition of Sensory Surplus, offer a helpful metaphor:

Imagine walking peacefully through the woods when you suddenly hear a loud crashing sound nearby. Your nervous system immediately activates. You freeze and search for danger. Then you notice a man with a chainsaw waving apologetically. You realize you accidentally wandered onto private land and are not actually under threat. Your body settles. Your heart rate slows. You return to noticing the smell of the forest and the sunlight moving through the trees.

But what if your nervous system was already overloaded before entering the woods?

What if you narrowly avoided a car accident that morning? What if your marriage feels unstable? What if you are already carrying chronic overwhelm, sensory sensitivity, grief, or fear?

In those moments, the nervous system may struggle to return to safety. Instead, we can become trapped in hypervigilance, hopelessness, indecision, shame, or emotional collapse. Over time, we may begin believing that we ourselves are fundamentally unsafe, bad, unworthy, trapped, or doomed.

This is where therapy becomes more than simple coping.

After helping clients establish greater grounding and Self energy, IFS therapy supports deeper healing processes: understanding the fear that became stuck, witnessing painful experiences compassionately, resolving internal conflict, and helping wounded parts move forward in new ways.

Rather than carrying traumatic experiences into every future situation unchanged, the brain and nervous system begin developing greater flexibility and adaptive capacity.

Importantly, IFS does not remove our need for protection. Healthy protectiveness is essential. Therapy is not about becoming endlessly open or vulnerable in unsafe situations. It is about helping people discern danger more clearly, establish healthier boundaries, and respond from grounded wisdom rather than from automatic survival reactions alone.

This distinction matters deeply.

If someone is experiencing emotional, physical, relational, or psychological abuse, the goal is not simply increased tolerance. The goal is increased clarity, support, protection, and freedom.

After helping clients establish greater grounding and Self energy, IFS therapy supports deeper healing processes: understanding the fear that became stuck, witnessing painful experiences compassionately, resolving internal conflict, and helping wounded parts move forward in new ways.

Rather than carrying traumatic experiences into every future situation unchanged, the brain and nervous system begin developing greater flexibility and adaptive capacity.

Importantly, IFS does not remove our need for protection. Healthy protectiveness is essential. Therapy is not about becoming endlessly open or vulnerable in unsafe situations. It is about helping people discern danger more clearly, establish healthier boundaries, and respond from grounded wisdom rather than from automatic survival reactions alone.

This distinction matters deeply.

If someone is experiencing emotional, physical, relational, or psychological abuse, the goal is not simply increased tolerance. The goal is increased clarity, support, protection, and freedom.

I recently listened to an interview on On Being with Rabbi Shai Held. At one point, he speaks about the importance of shaping the memories that ultimately shape us. He says:

“We have to take part in shaping the memory that in turn will shape us.”

This feels deeply aligned with trauma therapy and IFS work.

Painful things happen to good people — and to good parts within us. But healing involves more than simply replaying painful experiences endlessly. Healing involves creating new relational experiences internally and externally: experiences of compassion, protection, understanding, courage, grief, repair, and connection.

Effective trauma therapy helps integrate difficult histories with the qualities of Self rather than leaving people trapped inside survival states forever.

And as we begin relating differently to ourselves, we often begin relating differently to others as well.

Perhaps this is one small way we resist hopelessness in apocalyptic times.

Not by denying suffering.
Not by bypassing fear.
Not by hardening against the world.

But by remaining connected — to ourselves, to one another, and to the possibility of compassionate presence even in the midst of uncertainty.