How Do You Recover from a Major Setback?

A business that failed, a marriage that ended, a diagnosis, a redundancy at the wrong age. Recovery is real, and it is slower and less inspiring than the word suggests.

You recover from a serious setback in roughly this order. You survive the immediate period. You work out honestly what was actually lost and what only feels lost. You put down what you can no longer carry. You wait through a season that cannot be hurried. Then something small starts, usually somewhere you were not looking.

Almost all the bad advice on this subject skips the middle. It goes straight from disaster to lessons, which is why it reads as insulting to anybody in the first year of something serious.

There is no promise here that you will come back stronger. Some people do. Some rebuild something different and quieter and are content with it. Both are recovery.

First, the damage assessment

After a storm the useful thing is not resolve. It is a walk round the whole tree to see what has actually gone.

Do that literally on paper. What is genuinely lost, meaning it is not coming back. What is damaged but repairable. What is untouched and still standing, which people consistently underestimate in the first months. And what has not happened yet but feels as though it has, because fear does a great deal of demolition work in advance.

That last category is often the largest. A person who has lost a business will describe having lost their reputation, their friendships and their future, and on inspection what has gone is the business and a considerable amount of money. Both are serious. They are not everything, and the difference matters when you are deciding what to do next.

Pruning what cannot be carried

After serious damage a tree cannot support what it supported before. Cutting back is not defeat. It is what allows anything to survive the next year.

In practice this means deciding, deliberately, what you are putting down for now. Commitments, standards, ambitions, some relationships, the version of the plan that assumed the thing that has just failed. People try to keep everything going to prove they are unbroken, and it is usually the keeping going that finishes them.

Say what is suspended rather than cancelled where that is true. I am not taking this on this year is a complete sentence and it does not require a story attached.

The season you are actually in

There is a period after a real loss where nothing much grows and nothing much can be made to. It is not depression by definition and it is not failure of will. It is winter, and it has a length that is not up to you.

The main error people make is trying to hold a spring in January. Big relaunches announced too early, a new venture started at three months because the emptiness is unbearable, a new relationship begun before the old one has finished being an old one. These are understandable and they usually cost another year.

What is available in that season is smaller than you want and more valuable than it looks. Sleep. Money kept steady. A short list of people you can be honest with. Some form of physical work or exercise that does not require you to be optimistic. Getting through it without adding a second disaster to the first is a real achievement, even though it will not feel like one.

The story you tell about it

Most of the long term harm from a setback comes from the conclusion drawn about yourself rather than from the event.

There is a difference between I built something that failed for these reasons and I am somebody who fails. The first is a set of facts you can examine and learn from. The second is an identity, and it quietly governs what you allow yourself to attempt for years afterwards.

Be exact about your part. Not a blanket confession and not a defence. Which decisions were yours, which were the market or the illness or the other person, and what you would do differently with what you know now. That level of accuracy is uncomfortable and it is also the thing that stops one bad chapter from becoming a description of you.

Where new growth actually starts

New growth after damage rarely appears at the top of the tree. It comes low down, from the part that survived, and it looks unimpressive for quite a while.

So it is with people. The next thing is usually small, adjacent to what you already know and unglamorous compared with what you lost. A piece of freelance work. A course. Helping somebody with a problem you happen to understand because of what you have just been through. This is not the consolation prize. It is how rebuilding starts, every time.

Look for the first thing that is genuinely yours to do rather than the impressive thing that would settle the story for other people. The impressive thing tends to be a repair job on your image, and image repair is not recovery.

So what

If you are in the middle of it, the honest instruction is narrow. Protect your health and your remaining money. Put down what you cannot carry. Tell two or three people the truth. Do one small useful thing most days. Do not make an irreversible decision while you cannot sleep.

If you are further out and stuck, the question is usually not what should I do. It is what am I still believing about myself because of what happened, and is it accurate.

You do not owe anyone a comeback. Some losses are not redeemed by anything, and the achievement is a life that carries on with the loss in it rather than one that turns it into a lesson.

A short exercise: the damage assessment

An hour, ideally not late at night. Four headings on a page: gone, damaged, standing, feared but not yet true.

1Fill each heading with specifics. Amounts, names, dates. Avoid words like everything.
2Under standing, keep writing past the point where it feels finished. That column is habitually too short.
3Take the feared column and mark each line with what would have to happen for it to become true.
4From damaged, choose the single item that would most improve the next three months if it were repaired.
5Write the first concrete action on that one item and when you will do it.

This will not make you feel better on the day. It replaces a general sense of ruin with a list, and a list can be worked.

Three shapes this takes

Composites. Notice the shape rather than the detail.

The business that went

The financial loss is countable and the identity loss is not. Much of the first year is spent answering the question of what to say at parties. Recovery usually begins when the person can describe what happened in plain sentences without either apologising or performing.

Redundancy at fifty two

The problem is rarely capability. It is a market that reads age as risk and a person who has never had to explain their own value out loud. The early months go better when treated as a campaign with a routine rather than as a verdict.

The end of a long marriage

What is lost includes the ordinary furniture of a life: the shared history, the routines, sometimes the friends and the house. Rebuilding starts with very small habits rather than with big decisions about the future, which is precisely when everybody wants you to make them.

If it is heavier than this

This is a piece of writing about setbacks, not treatment. If you are struggling to function, if you are drinking to get through the evenings or if things feel unmanageable, speak to your GP. That is an ordinary step and a sensible one.

If you are in crisis or having thoughts of harming yourself, in the UK you can call the Samaritans free on 116 123 at any time of day or night, or text SHOUT to 85258. Please use them rather than waiting.

Where the book comes in

The Alternative Is Unthinkable uses the picture of a tree throughout, including the weather that arrives without asking and the damage it leaves. It takes seasons seriously and it does not treat recovery as a matter of attitude.

It is a book about seeing the whole of a life honestly, what is gone, what is still standing and what can be grown from here.

Also here