Holding Fear and Grief Without Collapsing: Staying Human in Violent Times

Dr. Sarah Long

I almost didn’t write this.

Not because it doesn’t matter—but because it feels really hard to find the right words.

There’s also a particular kind of fatigue and helplessness that comes from taking in one painful event after another, and from watching our country being ripped apart.

My father spent his entire career in the military, a veteran of Vietnam, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. Because of his service—and the values he lived by—I was raised loving this country and believing deeply in respect for human life, for our neighbors, our communities, and one another.

Holding those values, it has been especially painful to witness what is unfolding right now….Because what I’m seeing right now doesn’t resemble that, no matter where we land politically.

This week, many of us are holding the shock and grief of another U.S. citizen being killed during an encounter involving federal immigration agents. Even without knowing every detail, the weight of that reality lands in the body. For some, it brings fear. For others, anger. For many, a familiar mix of grief, confusion, and dread.

And it’s not just this single moment or incident.

It’s the accumulation of all of it.

Ongoing violence and profound suffering across the world. Economic stress that doesn’t seem to ease. A constant stream of headlines that arrive faster than we can process them. For many people, it feels like there’s no space to metabolize one thing before the next arrives.

We’re living in a deeply polarized moment, and that polarization itself is taking a toll—heightening fear, hardening positions, and making it harder to stay connected to one another as human beings.

Our nervous systems weren’t designed for this kind of sustained exposure—to threat, instability, and suffering layered one on top of another.

So if you’ve been walking around with fear, grief, exhaustion. or even numbness—whether it’s low-grade and constant, or sharp and overwhelming—you’re responding to something real.

Ir may show up quietly.
A steady heaviness in the background.
A fatigue that doesn’t quite lift.

Or it could come in like a barreling waves: anger, rage, despair, or a sense of being right on the edge. You might notice that things feel heavier than they used to. Harder to shake off. Easier to feel overwhelmed, irritable, or strangely numb. You may feel more reactive than you want to be—or disconnected in ways that don’t feel like rest at all.

If that’s true for you, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you.

It means you’re human, responding to a world that’s asking a lot of our nervous systems right now.

What many of us are carrying isn’t just sadness. It’s fear and grief without resolution.

When fear stays activated and grief has no clear place to land, the body remains on alert. Stress hormones stay elevated. The nervous system keeps scanning for danger—even in moments that should feel neutral or safe.

This is different from acute trauma, which often has a beginning, middle, and end.

With ongoing exposure to violence, instability, or injustice, there’s no clear endpoint. No moment when the body gets a reliable signal that it can stand down. So we adapt. We brace. We keep going.

And over time, that takes a toll.

There’s also another layer here that often goes unnamed: moral injury—the pain of witnessing harm or injustice without having the power to stop it. Moral injury can leave people feeling helpless, angry, ashamed, disoriented, or deeply disillusioned, even when they’re doing everything they reasonably can.

Gradually this kind of exposure wears on us. Sometimes without us even realizing it. 

Sometimes it looks like anxiety or sadness. Sometimes it shows up as irritability, difficulty concentrating, or trouble sleeping. Often, it’s a quieter erosion of capacity—a kind of burnout that doesn’t announce itself loudly, but is deeply felt.

When the nervous system has been under strain for too long, it usually finds one of two protective strategies.

Collapse

This can look like despair, shutdown, or emotional overwhelm. Everything feels like too much. You might find yourself thinking, I can’t take in one more thing.

Numbness

This can look like detachment, over-scrolling, intellectualizing, or emotional flatness. You know what’s happening matters, but you don’t feel much—or you feel far away from your own reactions.

Both of these are protective responses, not personal failures.

They’re ways that the nervous system tries to keep you functioning under sustained stress. Neither means you don’t care. They mean your system is doing its best to survive – this is your body’s natural intelligence.

When fear stays high and grief goes unacknowledged, the nervous system often looks for something that feels stronger than helplessness.

This is where anger can enter…..

Anger itself isn’t the problem. Anger can be clarifying, protective, even necessary. It often signals that something matters deeply or that a boundary has been crossed.

The trouble comes when anger becomes the only place the nervous system knows how to land.

When fear and grief don’t have anywhere to go, anger can start to feel like relief. It gives shape and direction to pain. It can create a sense of certainty when everything else feels chaotic.

But over time, anger can also narrow our vision—reducing complex human beings into symbols, sides, or threats.

This is one of the quieter dangers of prolonged exposure to violence and instability: dehumanization.

And dehumanization doesn’t just harm “the other.” It costs us something internally.

When we lose the ability to see the humanity in people we disagree with—or even deeply oppose—our nervous systems stay locked in threat mode.

There’s no room for complexity, listening, or repair. Only vigilance. Only bracing.

You don’t have to suppress anger to avoid this. Anger often carries important information.

But it does need somewhere safer to move, or it will begin to shape who we become.

This is where an important distinction can help.

Holding fear and grief is not the same as carrying them.

Holding means allowing fear and grief to exist without trying to fix them, solve them, or absorb them into your body. It means acknowledging what’s painful while maintaining some internal boundaries.

Carrying fear and grief is when they become fused with your nervous system—when they live in your chest, your shoulders, your jaw, your sense of self.

Holding creates space.
Carrying collapses it.

Holding fear and grief also means noticing when pain starts to turn corrosive, and gently intervening before it hardens into something that disconnects you from yourself or others.

You can care deeply without letting the weight of the world take up permanent residence inside your body.

This is where a quiet reframe matters:

Care without carrying.

None of this is about fixing what’s happening in the world.
These practices are about staying resourced enough to remain present.

Let the body lead.

Right now, insight alone often isn’t enough. Gentle grounding through movement, breath, temperature, or time in nature helps the nervous system find safety before understanding.

Choose connection over consumption.

Staying informed doesn’t require constant exposure. Small, real moments of connection—a genuine conversation, a shared meal, a moment of mutual presence—do more for regulation than endless intake ever will.

Create simple rituals for fear and grief.

Fear and grief need somewhere to go. A candle. A pause outside. Naming what you’re carrying today, rather than all at once. Rituals don’t need to be elaborate to be meaningful.

Know when to step back.

Boundaries are not avoidance. They’re a form of care. Rest isn’t disengagement; it’s often what prevents collapse and helps preserve our capacity to stay open over time.

It can feel strange—or even selfish—to talk about joy in times like this. As if noticing what’s still good means we aren’t paying attention, or that we’re turning away from what hurts.

But joy isn’t a distraction from what’s happening. It’s one of the ways we stay human in the midst of it.

Moments of joy—laughter, beauty, tenderness, creativity, connection—remind our nervous systems that life is not only threat. They widen our field of vision when fear and anger try to narrow it. They keep us connected to ourselves and to one another, even when the world feels harsh or frightening.

In that sense, joy isn’t indulgent or naive. It’s not about denial or bypassing pain. 

Instead, joy is a quiet act of resistance against dehumanization. A way of remembering what we value, what and who we love, and what we’re ultimately trying to protect.

Many contemplative traditions have explored this same question: how to stay present with fear, grief, and anger without hardening or collapsing.

Buddhist teachers such as Pema Chödrön and Thich Nhat Hanh have written extensively about meeting suffering with compassion while maintaining boundaries, dignity, and humanity—especially in times of violence and instability.

More recently, Lama Rod Owens has offered powerful reflections on working with anger and grief as lived, embodied experiences—approaching them with care rather than suppression or reactivity.

If you’re drawn to a contemplative lens, their work offers language and practices for staying open without burning out, and for resisting dehumanization without turning away from pain.