If You’re Going Through Hell, Keep Going

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • April 02, 2023

SUMMARY

There are seasons in therapy — and in life — when everything feels worse before it gets better. The ground beneath your carefully constructed 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 made a mistake by opening this door. You didn’t. And there is a way through — even when you can’t see it yet.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The Weight of a Hard Season
2. What Does “Keep Going” Actually Mean?
3. The Neuroscience of Endurance and Meaning-Making
4. When Everything Hurts: Camille’s Story
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. Five Things to Actually Do 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’s not dramatic, not always. It doesn’t announce itself with a crisis or a collapse. It’s more like waking up and noticing, again, that the weight is still there — settled into your chest the way cold settles into a room when the heat has been off too long. You go through the motions: coffee, work, the brief mercy of sleep. And then you wake up and feel it again.

Maybe you know what brought it on. A diagnosis. A relationship that ended badly, or slowly, or both — a pattern that often traces back to insecure attachment. A job that collapsed. A loss you’re still not sure how to name. Or maybe — and this is harder in some ways — you don’t know exactly why everything feels so difficult. You only know that it does. That you’re exhausted in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. That something has shifted in the architecture of your daily life, and the blueprints no longer match the building.

Churchill’s line — “If you’re going through hell, keep going” — gets quoted a lot. On motivational posters. In Instagram captions. In the kind of emails that land in your inbox from people who mean well but aren’t quite with you in it.

And there’s something true in it. There really is. But also — 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 is already at its limit. Like being told to run when you can barely stand.

So let’s slow down. Let’s actually interrogate what “keep going” means when everything hurts. What it looks like not as a performance of strength, but as a lived, embodied practice. What it means for you, specifically — with your nervous system, your history, your particular shape of hard season.

That’s what this post is about.

And if you are 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” is one of those phrases that sounds self-evident until you’re actually in it. Then it raises a hundred questions: Keep going where? Keep going how? Keep going at what cost, and at what pace, and what exactly counts as forward when everything in you wants to stop?

I want to offer two frameworks here — not as competing answers, but as different lenses on the same hard reality.

DEFINITION

POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH

Post-traumatic growth (PTG) describes the positive psychological transformation that can emerge through the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. Richard Tedeschi, PhD, and Lawrence Calhoun, PhD, psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who coined the term, identified five domains of growth: deeper relationships, new possibilities, personal strength, spiritual development, and enhanced appreciation for life.

In plain terms: The hardest seasons of your life can become the foundation for something you couldn’t have built any other way. Not because suffering is good — but because what you do with it can fundamentally change who you become. That’s not toxic positivity. It’s what the research actually shows.

The first framework 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. What he observed — in himself and in others — was that the people who were most able to endure unimaginable suffering were those who could locate some sense of meaning inside it. Not in spite of it. Inside it. His term for this capacity was logotherapy — the idea that the human drive for meaning is primary, more fundamental even than the drive for pleasure or power. “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 explicitly rejected toxic positivity. What he meant was something subtler: that the capacity to find even a small thread of purpose — staying alive for someone you love, bearing witness to your own suffering with dignity, choosing how you respond to what you can’t control — can be the thing that makes endurance possible. The thread doesn’t have to be grand. It just has to be real.

The second framework comes from Russ Harris, PhD — psychologist, ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) therapist, and author of The Happiness Trap. Where Frankl emphasized meaning, Harris emphasizes acceptance — specifically, the willingness to have difficult thoughts and feelings without being controlled by them. In ACT, “keep going” doesn’t mean suppressing or transcending pain. It means being willing to carry your pain with you while still moving in the direction of your values. The goal isn’t to feel better first, and then act. It’s to act in accordance with what matters to you, even while feeling terrible.

Put these two frameworks together and something useful emerges: “Keep going” is not about performing strength. It’s not about pretending you’re okay. It’s about locating — even minimally, even imperfectly — 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. But because the thread is there, and you can feel it.

That’s a very different instruction than the poster on the wall. And it’s one that actually works with your nervous system rather than demanding something your brain physically cannot produce right now.

DEFINITION

ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY (ACT)

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is an evidence-based behavioral therapy developed by Steven C. Hayes, PhD, Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. ACT uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies alongside commitment and behavior change strategies to increase psychological flexibility — the ability to be present with difficult thoughts and feelings while still moving toward what matters.

In plain terms: ACT teaches you to stop fighting your own mind. Instead of trying to feel better before you act, you act in line with your values while the hard feelings are still present. You carry them with you, rather than waiting for them to disappear.

The Neuroscience of Endurance and Meaning-Making During Hard Times

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, and what’s actually happening in your nervous system when you “keep going.”

When you’re in a sustained hard season, your brain is running a threat-response program — one that somatic therapy can help regulate — that was designed 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, planning, and reasoning — has reduced access to the driver’s seat. This is why, in the middle of a hard season, you lose the capacity to imagine the future accurately. You can’t picture things getting better not because they won’t, but because the part of your brain that holds that kind of perspective is running in low-power mode.

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, and engaging relationally. Dan Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and author of The Developing Mind, developed this concept to explain how trauma narrows this window, making individuals more susceptible to hyperarousal (anxiety, rage) or hypoarousal (shutdown, dissociation).

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 — and understanding this means you can stop blaming yourself for struggling and start working with your nervous system instead of against it.

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 greater psychological resources — driven in part by neuroplasticity — suggests that something real can happen in the brain during sustained adversity. Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Martin Teicher, MD, PhD, director of the Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, has studied how the brain’s stress-response systems, when properly supported, can reorganize in ways that increase resilience. This isn’t guaranteed, and it isn’t automatic — it requires processing, support, and time. But it’s real. The brain is not static. Your nervous system is not frozen in place.

Research by psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD — University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University and author of How Emotions Are Made — adds another layer: emotions are constructed, not delivered. What you experience as despair or dread is the brain’s best prediction about what’s happening, based on 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. This means the emotional weight you feel is real — and it’s also, in part, a story the brain is telling based on incomplete information. You don’t have to believe every story your nervous system offers you.

And meaning-making — the act of finding even a small thread of purpose in suffering — has measurable neurological effects. Studies in positive psychology and neuroscience have found that activating the brain’s meaning-making networks (primarily the medial prefrontal cortex and the default mode network) can help regulate the amygdala’s threat response. Meaning doesn’t eliminate pain. But it does change its relationship to the nervous system.

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There’s also emerging research on what Peter A. Levine, PhD — founder of Somatic Experiencing and author of Waking the Tiger — describes as the discharge cycle: the body’s natural capacity to complete the stress response that gets frozen in place during overwhelming experiences. When we don’t discharge the biological energy of a threat response, it stays locked in the body — cycling as anxiety, exhaustion, irritability, or physical symptoms. Learning to work with the body, not just the mind, during a hard season isn’t supplementary. For many women, it’s the missing piece.

What this all suggests, practically speaking: 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 were not designed to endure alone. The neuroscience says so.

When Everything Hurts: Camille’s Story

Camille’s experience points to something I see consistently in my work: driven, ambitious women often have a very high bar for what counts as “handling it.” Functioning is not 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.

This is also where the research on relational trauma becomes relevant. Women who grew up in households where their emotional needs were consistently minimized — where they were praised for performing, not 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. Part of what trauma-informed therapy can offer in a hard season is recalibrating that standard.

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 is now clearly not going to happen in 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, yes — but you’re also grieving the specific future you thought that marriage was carrying. The retirement you’d half-planned. The version of yourself at sixty who had gotten that thing right. These losses are real. They deserve to be named.

Psychiatrist and author 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 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 this 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.

Nadia, 39, a corporate attorney navigating a career crisis after her firm’s merger changed the nature of her role in ways she hadn’t consented to, described it this way: “I spent fifteen years becoming a very specific kind of person. And then overnight, the conditions that made that person possible changed. I don’t know what I’m building toward anymore.” 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 executive coaching can be genuinely useful alongside therapy — not as a replacement for the emotional processing, but as a container for the question: who am I becoming, and what do I actually want from what comes next?

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, to finally put behind you — is completely understandable. And 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’d call a “threshold season” — the kind where old structures fall away and something new hasn’t yet taken shape — I see this tension constantly. Sarah, 36, a physician who’d spent three years in a brutal internal medicine residency before her relationship fell apart, told me once: “I keep thinking if I could just feel better first, then I’d be able to cope.” That’s backwards, and it’s also very human. 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 — permission to stop pretending this isn’t hard, and permission 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. You can be inside the hell and still be, at your core, someone capable of enduring it. 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. You don’t have to see the lesson. You only have to keep showing up — imperfectly, messily, with as much support as you can gather around you — to the work of your own life.

And here’s the other Both/And that matters: you can need professional support and also be doing everything right. Many driven, ambitious 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 cognitive functions a human being can exercise. It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of accurate self-assessment. If you’ve been wondering whether working with a therapist might help, that wondering is itself information worth following.

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. But some seasons are hard because systems have been working against you for a very long time, and your exhaustion isn’t a personal failing. It’s the appropriate response to an unfair load.

I’m thinking specifically of women who are navigating hard seasons while also carrying the weight of a playing field that was never level. Women who grew up in households where their needs were consistently deprioritized — where they were parentified, where they were the emotional caretakers of adults who should have been caring for them. Women who enter professional environments that still extract more from them and offer less in return. Women whose nervous systems are dysregulated not because something is wrong with them, but because something was wrong with the environments that shaped them.

Elena, 44, came to me after what she described as a “collapse” — eighteen months of holding her family together through her mother’s illness while managing a demanding director-level role. “Everyone kept telling me I was so strong,” she said. “But I didn’t feel strong. I felt like I was the only option, and there was no one coming to relieve me.” That’s not a personal resilience deficit. That’s a systemic problem wearing a personal face.

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, “keep going” has meant doing so without adequate recognition, without adequate support, and with the additional cognitive load of managing everyone else’s emotional needs while managing their own. The emotional labor that women are expected to absorb — in families, in workplaces, in relationships — is not 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 “keep going” is also naming that clearly. Not as an excuse. As an accurate map of the terrain. It matters whether you’re struggling because you’re not trying hard enough or because you have been trying too hard, for too long, with not enough support. The interventions for those two situations are completely different.

Part of what good therapy can do in this context is help you sort those two things out — to identify where the difficulty is genuinely internal (patterns to work with, beliefs to update, nervous system regulation to build) and where it’s external (loads to redistribute, relationships to recalibrate, systems to challenge). Both can be addressed. But conflating them — treating systemic exhaustion like a personal resilience problem — is a recipe for deepening the shame that’s already weighing on you. The work of Fixing the Foundations begins exactly here.

Five Things to Actually Do 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 AM 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.

1. Shrink the time horizon. When you’re in a hard season, your brain’s predictive capacity for the future is compromised — the threat system is running, and the future looks uniformly bleak. So 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. Maya, 33, a data scientist going through her second IVF cycle while her father was in hospice, told me the only thing that kept her moving was asking: “What’s my next right thing?” One thing. That’s it. The path doesn’t have to be visible. You just have to see the next step.

2. Locate your body first, your thoughts second. When the nervous system is dysregulated, thinking your way out doesn’t work — the prefrontal cortex isn’t in the driver’s seat. Somatic practices — movement, breathwork, cold water, physical contact — reach the nervous system more directly than cognitive reframing. Five minutes of walking, a shower, a hand on your own sternum. Start there. The thoughts can come after. This is one of the most consistently underutilized tools I see among driven women — women who are extraordinarily skilled at using their minds, and who forget that their bodies are the actual ground they stand on.

3. 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?” “Can you sit with me while I make this call?” Research on social support and resilience shows that the specificity of the request matters. Vague support offers feel harder to accept and harder to give. One person. One concrete thing. That’s the floor for connection when connection feels impossible. If you’re not sure who that person is right now, that’s also information — and it’s worth exploring what’s made it hard to let people in.

4. 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. If you are skipping meals, running on four hours of sleep, and treating your body like a machine to be optimized through crisis, you are actively making the hell harder to traverse. Your body is the vehicle. Tend to it. Not because it will fix everything — but because an undernourished, sleep-deprived nervous system has even fewer resources to work with than one that’s been minimally maintained.

5. 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 responsibility. A creature. A question you’re still curious about. Unmet needs sometimes point us toward what we’re still hungry for — what we still want from this life. Even in the hardest seasons, that hunger is information. Follow the smallest thread. You don’t have to see the whole tapestry. You just have to hold one strand.

And then there’s the sixth thing — the one that doesn’t fit neatly in a list: let yourself be seen in the hard season. Not performing it for sympathy. Not broadcasting it as content. But letting at least one person — a therapist, a trusted friend, a partner — actually see you in it. Without the armor. Without the managed presentation. The isolation of going through something hard while appearing fine is its own kind of weight, separate from the thing itself. You weren’t designed to carry it invisible. Letting yourself be witnessed is not weakness. It’s one of the bravest things you can do.

You Don’t Have to Be Okay Right Now

If you made it to this section, you’re probably in something real. And I want to say directly — 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.

“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.

Priya, 38, a management consultant who’d survived her own threshold season — two years of unraveling a marriage and a career simultaneously — said something in one of our last sessions that I’ve thought about many times since: “I didn’t feel better until after I’d gotten through it. But the getting-through was happening the whole time, even when I couldn’t see it.” That’s how it usually works. The path becomes visible in retrospect. While you’re on it, you just walk.

If you’re looking for more support as you navigate this, this post on what to do when you’re struggling may also be useful. And if you’re wondering whether what you’re carrying has deeper roots — whether this hard season is connected to something older in your history — that’s exactly the kind of question worth exploring with a therapist who specializes in relational trauma.

You are not alone in this. You were never supposed to be.

Related Reading

• Frankl, V. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
• van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
• Harris, R. (2008). The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living. Shambhala.
• Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18.
• Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books.
• Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote.
• Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books.
• Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

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

Helping ambitious 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, ambitious 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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Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer