If You’re Going Through Hell, Keep Going

HEALING & RESILIENCE • April 3, 2026

SUMMARY

There are seasons in life when everything feels worse before it gets better, when the ground beneath your carefully built world shifts and the coping strategies that carried you this far stop working. This post is for the woman in the middle of that passage: exhausted, destabilized, and wondering if she’s doing this wrong. She isn’t. In my work with driven women over fifteen-plus years, I’ve come to understand what “keep going” actually requires, and it isn’t what the poster on the wall implies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The Weight of a Hard Season
2. What Does “Keep Going” Actually Mean?
3. What’s Happening in the Brain During a Hard Season?
4. How Does Enduring Show Up for Driven Women?
5. The Grief No One Validates
6. Both/And: This Is Hard AND You Have What It Takes?
7. The Systemic Lens: Whose “Hell” Is Systemic?
8. How Do You Actually Keep Going When You’re In It?
9. Frequently Asked Questions
10. Related Reading

The Weight of a Hard Season

There’s a specific quality to the air in a hard season. It isn’t dramatic, not always. It doesn’t announce itself with a collapse. It’s more like waking up and noticing, again, that the weight is still there.

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Simone is 46. She’s a regional operations director, the person her team calls when a launch is falling apart. Her Nalgene bottle, the one with a faded conference sticker from three jobs ago, sits sweating on the kitchen counter at 5:40 a.m. She’s already dressed. She hasn’t eaten. Six weeks ago, her younger brother died suddenly, and the funeral was on a Tuesday, and she was back on a client call by Thursday because she didn’t know what else to do with herself.

“I keep waiting to feel like I’m handling it,” she told me in our second session, turning her coffee mug in slow half-circles on the arm of the chair. “Everyone keeps telling me how strong I’m being. I don’t feel strong. I feel like I’m watching myself from outside my own body, doing a very convincing impression of a person who’s fine.”

Sitting with Simone that morning, I felt the particular ache I’ve come to recognize in driven women moving through the middle of something enormous while still, somehow, showing up to their lives. Not pity. Something closer to recognition. She wasn’t falling apart. She was doing the thing that looks, from the inside, indistinguishable from falling apart, and is actually the slow, unglamorous work of getting through.

Maybe you know exactly what brought your hard season on. A death. A diagnosis. A marriage that ended badly, or slowly, or both, sometimes tangled up with a bond that took years to name accurately. A pattern that traces back to an attachment style you didn’t choose and didn’t understand until now. Or maybe you don’t know exactly why everything feels so difficult. You only know that it does, that you’re exhausted in a way sleep doesn’t fix, that something in the architecture of your daily life has shifted and the blueprints no longer match the building.

Churchill’s line gets quoted constantly. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” It shows up on motivational posters, in the kind of well-meaning texts that land in your phone from people who care about you but aren’t quite in it with you. There’s something true in it. There really is. But when you’re actually in the hell, the instruction to keep going can feel hollow at best and, at worst, like one more demand on a body that’s already at its limit. Like being told to run when you can barely stand upright.

So let’s slow this down and actually interrogate what “keep going” means when everything hurts, not as a performance of strength but as a lived, embodied practice specific to you, your history, your nervous system.

And if you’re in crisis right now, if you’re having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please call or text 988 (the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) before you read another word. You deserve real support, not just words on a screen.

What Does “Keep Going” Actually Mean?

“Keep going” sounds self-evident until you’re actually in it. Then it raises a hundred questions. Keep going where? Keep going how? At what cost, at what pace, and what exactly counts as forward when every part of you wants to stop?

I want to offer two frameworks here, not as competing answers but as different lenses on the same hard reality. The first comes from Viktor Frankl, MD, PhD, psychiatrist, neurologist, Holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the most-read books of the twentieth century. Frankl survived four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and what he observed in himself and in others was that the people most able to endure unimaginable suffering were the ones who could locate some sense of meaning inside it. Not in spite of it. Inside it. “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances,” Frankl wrote, “but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

This doesn’t mean your hell needs a silver lining. Frankl rejected that kind of forced positivity. What he meant was subtler: even a small thread of purpose, staying alive for someone you love, choosing how you respond to what you can’t control, can make endurance possible. The thread doesn’t have to be grand. It just has to be real.

DEFINITION WINDOW OF TOLERANCE

The window of tolerance is the zone of emotional arousal within which a person can function effectively: processing feelings, thinking clearly, engaging relationally. Daniel Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, developed this concept to explain how stress and trauma narrow this window, making a person more susceptible to hyperarousal (anxiety, rage) or hypoarousal (shutdown, numbness).

In plain terms: When you’re in a hard season, your emotional bandwidth shrinks. Things that wouldn’t normally bother you feel unbearable. That’s your window of tolerance narrowing, not a personal failing. Understanding this means you can stop blaming yourself for struggling and start working with your nervous system instead of against it.

The second framework comes from Russ Harris, PhD, psychologist, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy practitioner, and author of The Happiness Trap. Where Frankl emphasizes meaning, Harris emphasizes acceptance: the willingness to have difficult thoughts and feelings without being controlled by them. In ACT, “keep going” doesn’t mean suppressing pain. It means carrying your pain with you while still moving toward what matters, acting in line with your values even while feeling terrible.

Put these two frameworks together and something useful emerges. Keep going is not about performing strength or pretending you’re okay. It’s about locating, even minimally, some thread of meaning or value that makes the next step possible, and then taking that step. Not because you feel ready. Not because the hell has cleared. Because the thread is there, and you can feel it.

What’s Happening in the Brain During a Hard Season?

There’s actual biology underneath this, and I think it helps to know it, not as a way to explain away your pain, but as a way to understand why the pain feels so consuming.

When you’re in a sustained hard season, your brain is running a threat-response program built for short-term survival. Your amygdala, the alarm system deep in the limbic brain, is heightened and reactive, scanning constantly for danger. Your prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for perspective and planning, has reduced access to the driver’s seat. This is why, mid-hard-season, you lose the capacity to imagine the future accurately. Not because things won’t get better, but because the part of your brain that holds perspective is running in low-power mode.

I recently found myself returning to Martin H. Teicher, MD, PhD, director of the Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and his research with Susan L. Andersen, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Their landmark paper on the neurobiological consequences of early stress documents how sustained stress reshapes the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and structural brain development, not just in childhood but across the lifespan when stress is prolonged (Teicher & Andersen, PMID: 12732221). What stayed with me is how physiological this is. Your exhaustion during a hard season isn’t a character flaw. It’s neurohumoral. Your body is doing exactly what stressed bodies do.

This is important: the inability to imagine a way through is a neurological state, not a fact about the future.

At the same time, research on post-traumatic growth, the documented phenomenon in which people emerge from hard seasons with genuinely greater psychological resources, suggests something real can happen in the brain during sustained adversity. Alexander D. Stover and Josh Shulkin, researchers whose 2024 meta-analysis I’ve returned to more than once this year, found that cognitive reappraisal, the skill of subjectively reinterpreting a stressful experience in a more workable light, is strongly associated with personal resilience (Stover & Shulkin, PMID: 38657292). That’s not the same as toxic positivity. Reappraisal isn’t pretending the hard season is fine. It’s the specific cognitive skill of finding a workable interpretation of a genuinely hard fact, and it’s trainable.

DEFINITION COGNITIVE REAPPRAISAL

Cognitive reappraisal is an emotion-regulation strategy that involves reinterpreting the meaning of a stressful or adverse experience in order to change its emotional impact. It’s one of the most consistently studied predictors of resilience in the psychological literature.

In plain terms: This isn’t about deciding your hard season is secretly a gift. It’s about finding one interpretation of what’s happening that you can actually work with, rather than one that leaves you frozen. Small reframes, done honestly, change how your nervous system processes the same hard facts.

Research by psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, adds another layer: emotions are constructed, not delivered. What you experience as despair is the brain’s best prediction about what’s happening, built from everything it has accumulated about the past. In a hard season, the brain over-indexes on negative prediction because the threat-response system is activated. The weight you feel is real, and it’s also, in part, a story your nervous system is telling based on incomplete information. You don’t have to believe every story it offers you.

What this all suggests, practically: in the middle of a hard season, your brain needs external scaffolding, from other people, from routine, from meaning, to compensate for the prefrontal access it’s temporarily lost. You weren’t designed to endure alone. The neuroscience says so.

How Does Enduring Show Up for Driven Women?

Simone’s experience points to something I see constantly in my work: driven women often carry a very high bar for what counts as “handling it.” Functioning isn’t the same as thriving, in their reckoning, and anything less than demonstrable progress can feel like stagnation or failure. But functioning during a hard season is not nothing. It’s actually quite a lot. The bar for enough has to shift when the circumstances are genuinely difficult.

Six weeks into our work, Simone told me something that’s stayed with me. “I keep waiting to feel like I’m getting through it,” she said, still turning that same mug in her hands. “But I can’t tell if I’m actually getting through it, or just surviving it.” That distinction, between getting through and merely surviving, is something a lot of driven women get stuck on. Surviving was unconscious, automatic. Getting through implied intention and agency. What we worked on together wasn’t reframing her brother’s death as an opportunity, it wasn’t, but something more elemental: recognizing that her continued functioning, showing up, not giving up, getting out of bed, was itself the evidence she was looking for.

Not every hard season looks like Simone’s. Yumiko, 41, a product design lead, came to me eight months into caregiving for her father after his stroke, a very different shape of hard season than grief but no less consuming. She kept a laminated care schedule folded in her bag, next to a phone whose lock screen was a photo of him before the stroke, laughing at something off camera. “People keep telling me I’m so patient,” she said, unfolding the schedule and refolding it without looking at it. “I’m not patient. I’m just doing the next thing on the list because if I stop to feel it, I don’t know what happens.” Her hard season had no funeral, no clean before-and-after. It just kept going, week after week, with no visible finish line.

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Nicholas J. Thompson, PhD, and Devika Fiorillo, researchers whose work on coping strategies I find myself citing often, found that specific coping strategies function as mediators between resilience and long-term PTSD outcomes after trauma exposure, meaning the strategies themselves, not just an innate trait called resilience, protect people over time (Thompson & Fiorillo, PMID: 28837948). Endurance isn’t fixed. It’s built, strategy by strategy, the way Yumiko builds hers one laminated schedule at a time.

This is also where research on relational trauma becomes relevant. Women who grew up in households where their emotional needs were consistently minimized, who were praised for performing rather than for being, often carry an internalized standard of adequacy that has no room for hard seasons. Every struggle becomes evidence of failure rather than evidence of a human life being lived honestly. In my clinical experience, this shows up in roughly four out of five driven women I see in a hard season, though not always, and not with the same intensity. That variation is itself worth naming, because it means there’s no single “correct” way to be struggling.

(Simone and Yumiko are composites, and identifying details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.)

The Grief No One Validates

There’s a specific kind of grief that shows up in hard seasons that almost no one talks about: the grief for the version of your life, or yourself, that you thought you were building, and that’s now clearly not happening the way you imagined.

It doesn’t have the cultural scaffolding of bereavement. No one brings casseroles. There’s no formal recognition that what you’ve lost is real. You might be grieving a marriage, a job, a body that no longer does what it used to. But you’re also grieving the specific future that thing was carrying: the retirement you’d half-planned, the version of yourself at sixty who had gotten it right. These losses are real. They deserve to be named.

Judith Herman, MD, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, wrote that recovery from trauma involves mourning. Not optimizing. Not reframing. Mourning, the slow, nonlinear work of acknowledging what was lost and grieving it honestly, without rushing to the lesson. “The core experiences of psychological trauma,” Herman writes, “are disempowerment and disconnection from others.” Recovery begins not with rewriting the story, but with telling it truthfully.

What Emily Dickinson captures in that poem, and what I see again and again in my work, is the disorientation of a hard season: the sense that the internal architecture no longer holds together, that the self you were before doesn’t quite map onto the self you’re being forced to become. That’s not dysfunction. That’s the lived experience of genuine transformation, and it’s terrifying, and it’s real, and it’s also survivable.

Glenda L. Wrenn, MD, MSHP, and Aliza P. Wingo, MD, researchers whose study on resilience and PTSD I think about often, found that higher resilience was associated with a meaningfully decreased likelihood of a PTSD diagnosis among trauma-exposed adults, even when the trauma exposure itself was severe (Wrenn & Wingo, PMID: 21999030). What I take from that finding clinically is not that resilient people don’t grieve. It’s that grieving well, honestly, without rushing past it, may be part of what resilience actually looks like from the inside.

That grief, the grief of an identity in transition, is one of the least validated but most common experiences in a hard season. If you’re in that kind of loss right now, please know it’s not weakness. It’s the appropriate response to real change. This is also where the relationships closest to you often become both more essential and more strained, because grief this unnamed is hard for even the people who love you to hold well, especially if the roles in your family growing up never left much room for your own needs to be visible in the first place.

Both/And: This Is Hard AND You Have What It Takes?

Here’s something I want to name directly, because I think it matters. The impulse to frame a hard season as something to solve, to get through, to emerge from and finally put behind you, is completely understandable. It’s also, in part, another version of the same pressure that wore you down in the first place. So I want to hold something more spacious than that.

Both things can be true at once. This season can be genuinely hard, harder than you’ve let yourself admit. And you can already have, inside you, exactly what you need to move through it. Not around it. Through it. These aren’t competing truths. They live in the same body at the same time.

In my work with clients navigating what I’ve come to think of as a threshold season, the kind where old structures fall away and something new hasn’t yet taken shape, I see this tension constantly. The coping and the healing happen simultaneously. You don’t have to wait to feel stronger before you start moving. What the Both/And framework offers is permission: to stop pretending this isn’t hard, and to stop catastrophizing that hard means permanent. You can grieve what’s happening and still hold a vision of what comes next. You can acknowledge the weight in your chest and still put one foot in front of the other. That’s not contradiction. That’s the full human truth.

The Both/And also means you don’t have to perform recovery. You don’t have to be grateful yet or see the lesson. You only have to keep showing up, imperfectly, with as much support as you can gather around you.

And here’s the other Both/And that matters: you can need professional support and also be doing everything right. Many driven women resist reaching out for help because it feels like evidence of inadequacy. It isn’t. Knowing when you need more than you can provide yourself is one of the most sophisticated things a person can recognize about their own limits. It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of accurate self-assessment. Of course you’re tired. You’ve been carrying something heavy for a long time, often without saying so out loud.

The Systemic Lens: Whose “Hell” Is Systemic?

There’s something important I want to address before we get to the practical, and it’s this: not all hard seasons are created equal. Some seasons are hard because of circumstance: grief, loss, transition. Some are hard because systems have been working against a person for a very long time, and the exhaustion isn’t a personal failing. It’s the appropriate response to an unfair load.

I’m thinking specifically of women navigating hard seasons while also carrying a childhood in which their needs were consistently deprioritized, women who were parentified, who entered professional environments that extract more from them and offer less in return. Their nervous systems are dysregulated not because something is wrong with them, but because something was wrong with the environments that shaped them.

Churchill’s “keep going” instruction was written from a position of considerable privilege: a man with a command structure, a support staff, and the social permission to lead rather than simply endure. For many women, keeping going has meant doing so without adequate recognition or support, and with the added cognitive load of managing everyone else’s emotional needs while managing their own. The emotional labor women are expected to absorb isn’t distributed equally. Understanding this context doesn’t eliminate the hard season. But it can relieve you of the shame of struggling in circumstances that would exhaust anyone.

If your hell has a systemic component, and it may, part of keeping going is naming that clearly, as an accurate map of the terrain rather than an excuse. It matters whether you’re struggling because you’re not trying hard enough or because you’ve been trying too hard, for too long, with not enough support. The interventions for those two situations are completely different, and conflating them, treating systemic exhaustion like a personal resilience problem, deepens the shame that’s already weighing on you.

You’re not broken. You’re not failing at something everyone else finds easy. You’re carrying a load that was never evenly distributed in the first place, and your exhaustion is data about the load, not a verdict about you.

How Do You Actually Keep Going When You’re In It?

I’m not going to give you a list of things that sound good on paper and feel impossible at 2 a.m. when you can’t sleep and the weight is back in your chest. I want to offer what I’ve actually seen work, with clients, and in what the research consistently supports.

Shrink the time horizon. When you’re in a hard season, your brain’s predictive capacity for the future is compromised. Stop asking yourself to see the whole path. Ask yourself: what’s the next smallest thing? Not tomorrow. The next hour. The next meal. The next conversation. The path doesn’t have to be visible. You just have to see the next step.

Locate your body first, your thoughts second. When the nervous system is dysregulated, thinking your way out doesn’t work well, because the prefrontal cortex isn’t in the driver’s seat. Movement, breathwork, cold water, and physical contact reach the nervous system more directly than cognitive reframing does. Five minutes of walking, a shower, a hand on your own sternum. Start there. The thoughts can come after.

Name one person and ask for something specific. Not “I need support,” that’s too vague to act on. “Can you call me Thursday at 7?” The specificity of the request matters. One person, one concrete thing. That’s the floor for connection when connection feels impossible.

Tend to the body’s basics with the same seriousness you’d give a sick child. Sleep, food, hydration, some form of movement. These aren’t indulgences during a hard season. They’re the minimum infrastructure your nervous system needs to keep functioning.

Find your small thread of meaning. Not the big narrative. Not the silver lining. Just something small that makes the next step worth taking. A relationship. A project. A question you’re still curious about. You don’t have to see the whole tapestry. You just have to hold one strand.

Lina Xiang and Hongwei Wan, researchers whose systematic review I’ve come back to more than once when clients ask whether structured therapy actually moves the needle, found that cognitive behavioral therapy produced a large, statistically significant increase in resilience among adult cancer patients navigating a genuinely life-threatening hard season (Xiang & Wan, PMID: 40050835). I find that finding clarifying, not because your hard season is the same as a cancer diagnosis, most aren’t, but because it confirms something I see clinically: resilience isn’t a trait you either have or lack. It’s buildable, even inside dire circumstances.

Simone, five months out from her brother’s death, told me something recently that I think about often. She’d started keeping his coffee mug, the chipped one with a faded logo from a company that doesn’t exist anymore, on her own counter. She doesn’t drink out of it. “I just like knowing it’s there,” she said. “I’m not over it. I don’t think that’s coming. But I made it through this week, and I noticed I made it through, and that felt different than the first month, when I couldn’t even tell you what day it was.” The mug sits there, ordinary and chipped, and Simone still shows up to her life around it. That’s not resolution. That’s the getting-through, happening in real time, the way it usually happens: quietly, unglamorously, one week noticed at a time.

“Keep going” doesn’t mean striding forward with your chin up. It can mean lying still and breathing until the acute wave passes. It can mean calling someone at an hour that feels embarrassing. It can mean going to therapy and sitting there without knowing what to say. It can mean showing up to your life in the smallest, most imperfect form of yourself, and trusting that this, too, is forward. If you’re looking for more support as you navigate this, it may help to explore what sustains people through genuinely hard seasons, or to look at whether what you’re carrying is connected to something older, in which case a closer look at how trauma reshapes trust and safety may be useful too.

You don’t have to be okay right now. You don’t have to have found the thread yet, or located the meaning, or believed that this will pass. You can be in the middle of the hell and still be doing this right. You are not alone in this. You were never supposed to be.

Warmly, Annie.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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