Survival: when life gets really tough after all

There may be times in your life when you are not living, but surviving. For example, the feeling that you are surviving may emerge when you are in a traumatic situation or even after a traumatic event. In current times, even a higher energy bill can cause you to feel like you are surviving instead of living. How do you deal with that?

Surviving from moment to moment

Sometimes you can find yourself in a state of pure survival, for example, when you’re actually strongly tempted to commit suicide. In that case, you’re essentially choosing at every moment whether to continue living or not. You can do this with a mindset in which you choose not to die, or with a mindset in which you choose to live in the moment.

On the one hand, this sounds incredibly stressful, but on the other hand, it’s the lifeline you have when you’re really struggling with suicidal thoughts. By choosing not to die just yet—or to live in the moment—you’re also choosing the chance to get help to break free from that entirely negative mindset of considering suicide.

In fact, it’s also a time of great uncertainty about your purpose or destiny in life[1].

At such a time, you can be very much in discussion with yourself about reasons you need to find to keep choosing life.

As a result, you may experience intense feelings of insecurity—in your neighborhood, your home, and among your friends—and you may even feel unsafe from within yourself. These feelings of total insecurity can be difficult to express, and you may begin to think that ending your life is the only way to escape them. This is also because shame and fear of this stigma prevent people from talking about their depressive feelings .

Helping someone process their story can also help uncover why they’re experiencing certain emotions, and that can help reduce their fear of life—because at least there’s an understanding of where all that negativity is coming from. This can help shift the focus from death to life.

As a counselor, you can do a lot for someone who is in survival mode by talking to them and figuring out together how it got to this point. Study participants said they much preferred this to extra pills to solve a problem[2].

In cases like these, hypnosis can help you identify the subconscious beliefs that are causing this deep mental struggle for survival, so you can figure out what to do about it.

Also, generating more control over thought patterns then helps to choose life and thus make survival easier (source 2). This also helps to shift the focus away from death and more toward life.

Working to change thought patterns is often possible only after a person can refocus on choosing to live rather than choosing not to die (source 2).

Call 113 if you are currently experiencing suicidal thoughts and need help.

Survival with little money

In this time of inflation and utility bills rising from month to month, you may suddenly feel that that easy first world life is suddenly slipping into a less easy second world life where you suddenly have to survive on little money.

How do you go about it, and how do you make sure you still enjoy all of this mentally, too?

Financial hardship can arise because you’re uncertain about the security of your job and are therefore living as frugally as possible just to be safe. In addition, unexpected financial problems can also affect your sense of identity—for example, regarding your socioeconomic status. Where you always thought you had enough money for a comfortable, average life, your situation suddenly seems more like that of a penniless person, and that certainly takes a toll on your self-esteem.

After a social disaster, such as this extreme inflation, people may suffer more from PTSD, depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

For example, your well-being depends on your subjective identity and cues from your environment that fit that identity. For example, if you could afford a semi-detached house, but now find yourself in financial trouble because of the utility bill, that does not fit the subjective identity that you can have if you can afford a semi-detached house. Then you suffer from cognitive dissonance; a feeling that something is not right.

This is why stability of energy prices, for example, but more generally of the society around you, is so important. At least then everyone knows where they stand and what you have to put effort into certain things[3].

Hypnotherapy can help you deal with the mental side of poverty . For example, hypnosis can help you with your self-image, with giving meaning to life, and to reduce conflict (which is about money, for example)[4].

Strengthening the ego, for example, is something many hypnotherapists do to reinvigorate your identity. This can be done, for example, by repeating certain suggestions, such as:

"The amount of money I have says nothing about my value."

"I am valuable and good enough."

"I am creative."

These are just examples. Depending on the problems you are having due to low money, you can get other suggestions to strengthen the ego.

Surviving Midlife Crisis

Another thing you might want to survive is a midlife crisis. You’ve always done what was expected of you and have now achieved all there is to achieve, and then suddenly you think: “Is this it? Is this life?”

How do you make sure you deal with this realization rationally and don't suddenly ditch that sweet partner of yours for a younger model and have to go back a few years later with hanging feet?

Or how do you make sure you at least choose someone better suited to you in the next round when you really do come to the realization that this can't be all for you?

How can you make sure you don’t quit your job on a whim without having a good alternative?

How do you make sure you don't get an STI because you are suddenly having more casual sex because that proves your youthfulness to yourself?

This is then also combined with the realization that you are running out of time, that you are over half of an age you can expect to reach on average[5].

It is a period when you also begin to reflect on what your life has brought you up to that point,[6] and in some cases that can make you very unhappy. In that case, hypnotherapy can help you figure out why you are unhappy about how things have gone so far and change your outlook on it.

But what’s even better is that hypnotherapy can also help you create a plan for the future. In this case, you don’t go back to the past in your mind, as you would in regression therapy , but instead you project yourself forward to a specific future you want to achieve.

Then, in your mind, you take steps from that future vision back to the moment in the chair with the hypnotherapist. This gives you a clear plan and provides a handle on how to achieve that image.

This is an advanced technique that you can learn in the third course at the HIN to help people achieve a specific goal in their lives—whether that’s early in life or during a midlife crisis.

Survival can take many forms. You might be struggling mentally and, as a result, feel like you’re just surviving from moment to moment. In that case, it’s very important to ask for help.

You may also have difficult life circumstances that make you feel like you have to survive. For example, when bills suddenly become unexpectedly high. In that case, the image of yourself and your identity may no longer match well, and that can also feel bad. In addition to the practical steps you need to take to survive, it can then also be helpful to take mental steps so that survival feels at least somewhat "fun" as well.

Sometimes you may also have periods in your life when you are struggling with how your life is going. Or that you suddenly get the realization that your time here is limited. In that case, hypnosis can also help you make a clear achievable plan for your future.

Would you like to learn more about hypnosis? Then join our free online masterclass.

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