Feel Like You're Being Doused With a Firehose?
Finding Healing and Heroism in Overwhelming Times
When we’re overwhelmed with bad news—what Dan Rather dubbed the “firehose effect”—we usually respond in one of four ways. But there’s a fifth that may serve us better.
Four Common Responses to Threats
Conventional wisdom (and a great deal of psychological research) suggests that we respond to threats in one of these ways:
Fight. Mobilizing to resist new threats, like the ACLU, NRDC, HRC, Democracy Forward, and other mission-driven organizations do through advocacy and activism.
Flight. Avoiding the news or trying to pretend all is well.
Freeze. Feeling immobilized like a deer in headlights.
Fawn. Placating or pleasing people we perceive as a threat— a lesser-known survival technique common among those who have experienced chronic trauma.
Which response we default to depends on many factors, including past experiences, the threat itself, and how capable we feel about influencing what’s happening.
But one thing is clear: Those of us who care deeply about a healthy planet, healthy people, and a healthy democracy have faced more than our fair share of threats.
This isn’t just a pattern of the past 10 days—it’s a defining feature of our times. Rising inequality, shifting geopolitics, a changing climate, and other signs of the age of “polycrisis” have created a persistent state of uncertainty and overwhelm.
This moment, however, is unprecedented. And many of us don’t yet know how to respond to the barrage of setbacks on climate action, equality, democracy, and more. As some have observed, this is not unintentional. Overwhelm is part of the design.
So, it’s understandable if we find ourselves hovering between flight and freeze in these early days of 2025. It is, after all, unwise to remain on the receiving end of a firehose when you don’t know how to redirect it. We naturally seek escapes.
But at some point, we need to do more. We must become wiser about our emotional reactions to become more courageous in our collective actions.
Gaining Perspective
Americans tend not to be very skilled at navigating the strong emotions many of us are experiencing now—namely, fear, grief, and despair. Many of us have learned to avoid them, perhaps because we’ve learned they’re unacceptable or because we fear they’ll consume us.
But suppressing these feelings does not help. On the contrary, suppressing difficult emotions is more damaging to us and others than learning how to work with them and eventually transform them into the courageous, even heroic spirit we need now.
In Healing Through Dark Emotions, the psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan suggests that suppressed grief, fear, and despair can even fuel prejudice, violence, and poor mental health.
“Suppressed grief often turns into depression, anxiety, or addiction,” she writes. “Benumbed fear can easily lead to irrational prejudice, toxic rage, and acts of violence. Overwhelming or unconscious despair often leads to severe psychic numbing or expresses itself through destructive acts to oneself and others.”
Surfacing them, on the other hand, can lead to powerful growth.
The point is that, like every living thing, emotions are subject to change if we allow them to follow their natural course. Squashing them causes us to get stuck.
Three Ways to Navigate Difficult Emotions
If you feel fear, anger, or grief about what is unfolding in the world today, you are certainly not alone. But none of us can stay stuck here and effectively get on with the vital work of resisting attacks on people, places, and principles worth defending.
Here, then, are a few simple suggestions for navigating strong emotions at this moment—whether alone, with family, or in the workplace.
1. Create a container. Set a fixed time to tend to these emotions. Maybe that means setting aside 15 minutes every morning to journal. Or taking a few hours to surface what your team is feeling. Or giving yourself a weekend to step back and grieve. You may be surprised at the energy that emerges.
2. Choose a partner or guide. Exploring challenging emotions with others can be even more healing than doing so alone. But choose wisely.
If you want to talk to a friend, select someone who is not afraid to go to dark places but is also not someone who will stay there.
If you want to transform challenging emotions into courage in the workplace, choose a facilitator with a process that allows for tough conversations and tangible outcomes.
3. Emerge with resolve. Specifically, emerge with a resolve to take one ordinary heroic action. I recognize that “ordinary heroism” may sound oxymoronic. But it’s not—and that is what is so important to recognize now.
Ordinary heroism is about orienting ourselves to the values of courage, altruism, and integrity. More specifically, it’s about not letting fear stop us, taking action not only for our benefit but for the benefit of others, and making an effort even though what we can do may seem small compared to the challenges we face.
Cultivating Ordinary Heroism
Bishop Mariann Budde showed what one act of heroism looks like by courageously pleading for mercy on behalf of those increasingly vulnerable to discrimination and violence.
But acts of ordinary heroism only sometimes make the front page. More often, you can see it in the daily actions of people who go beyond fear, get clear, and do what we all must in these trying times—and persevere.
This is how we begin to take control of the firehose rather than be drowned by it.
I help mission-driven leaders and teams tackle setbacks, burnout, and uncertainty, boosting clarity, engagement, and alignment.
Please reach out if you’d like to chat.