Befriend Yourself: A Strategy for Staying Whole While They Dismantle Everything That Matters

Trump and Musk want to disappear you into a cell of despair. Kindness to yourself is how you stay human—and begin your escape.

Prefer to listen? There’s now an audio conversation exploring the ideas in this post. If you’d rather hear the discussion or want to revisit it in a different way, you can listen here: Befriend Yourself: Strategic Audio Conversation - A conversation about moral injury, emotional survival, and why treating yourself with care might be one of the most strategic moves you can make right now.

Also, check out this new related post about the authoritarian harm complex: The Harms Are Cumulative. Your Overwhelm Is the Goal. Let’s Get Unstuck. Recognizing the patterns of harm gives us the framework to protect our humanity and reclaim our strategic power.

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Trump and his allies want to disappear you.

Not just from your job, but from public life, from your purpose, from your mission, from your rightful place in society. They want you overwhelmed and paralyzed, locked inside a prison of fear and despair that’s been deliberately designed to make you feel isolated and powerless.

This is a coordinated campaign of cruelty and control. These men have said, out loud, that they want to traumatize public servants. They’re gutting public health, dismantling education, erasing climate science, shredding civil rights enforcement, and vilifying the people and professions who keep democracy functional.

The goal isn’t just to fire you or delete the vital programs and civil rights that protect you. It’s to silence you. To convince you to give up, shut down, and disappear you into a cell of despair.

Befriending yourself—treating yourself with compassion, caring for your body, reconnecting with your values, finding even one person to speak truth with—isn’t indulgent. It’s not selfish. It’s not soft.

It’s your way out.

This is how you stay human in the face of inhumane acts. It’s how you begin to escape the psychological cage they’ve built for you. It’s also how you begin planting the seeds for what comes next: clarity, connection, courage – resistance.

What You’re Feeling Has a Name: Moral Injury

If you’re feeling ashamed, enraged, foggy, stuck, or hollow, you’re not weak. You’re likely experiencing moral injury.

Moral injury is the anguish that results when we’re forced to participate in, witness, or remain silent about harm that violates our deepest values—especially when the stakes are high and we feel powerless to stop it.

This isn’t just stress. It’s not burnout. It’s a rupture between what you believe in and what you’ve been forced to accept.

• You may have watched people with disabilities denied support.

• You may have lost funding for work that protected our home - Earth.

• You may have been fired or threatened with termination if you didn’t get in line and betray your most cherished values.

• You may have seen clients, patients, or neighbors harmed—and been told to stay quiet.

• Or you may be living with the knowledge that your life’s work is being dismantled in real time.

Many public servants, nonprofit staff, educators, healthcare workers, community organizers, and researchers are carrying this wound right now. If this pain feels unmanageable, it’s not because you’re broken. It’s because you still care.

Four Ways to Befriend Yourself When They Want You Broken

Whether you’ve been laid off, silenced, disillusioned, or simply exhausted by wave after wave of institutional failure, the question becomes: What now?

Here are a few places to start. These strategies aren’t solutions—but they can help you survive the day and find your way back to yourself.

1. Anchor in the Present

Despair thrives in loops of rumination. Your mind replays what happened. What you should’ve done. What might happen next.

The antidote isn’t toxic positivity. It’s presence with compassion.

Even 30 seconds of grounded awareness can break the cycle. That’s the heart of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)—a powerful, evidence-based method for responding to moral distress with integrity and clarity.

My colleague, Dr. Jaimie Lusk, recently launched a free course that teaches these skills in short, accessible lessons. ACT for Moral Distress offers simple tools for staying present, stepping back from painful thoughts, and making space for what still matters.

Try this:

Look around you. Name one thing you see, one thing you hear, and one thing you feel.

“I see light through the window. I hear a distant voice. I feel the tightness in my chest.”

You’re not trying to fix anything. You’re simply arriving in the moment.

2. Reconnect with What Matters

Moral injury doesn’t just hurt—it disorients. You lose track of what matters. One of the fastest ways to begin healing is to reconnect with your values.

Ask yourself:

What do I still believe in? What’s one thing I want to stand for today?

You don’t need a new mission. Just one action:

• Text a colleague who’s struggling

• Speak up when someone tries to normalize harm

• Write something honest

• Take a small action that affirms your integrity

And it’s not a coincidence that the communities most under attack right now—educators, public health workers, disability advocates, climate scientists—are the same ones that have organized some of the most effective grassroots resistance in modern history. They are not just deleting policies and programs, they are attacking movements.

3. Repair the Rupture Through Connection

Moral injury thrives on isolation. It convinces you that no one else feels this way. That’s a lie.

• Find one person you can tell the truth to.

• Check on a friend who’s hurting.

• Start a micro-circle of people who refuse to disappear.

You don’t need a big group. You need one moment of solidarity.

Connection interrupts the spiral. Truth breaks the spell.

4. Reclaim Your Humanity Through Your Body

Trauma disconnects you from your body. One of the simplest ways to fight back is to come home to it.

This isn’t about vapid wellness or toxic positivity. It’s about refusing to abandon yourself.

• Drink some water

• Unclench your jaw

• Care for your body

• Eat something nourishing

• Say no to something you don’t owe anyone

• Rest

You deserve care, even in collapse. Especially then.

Start Small. Start Now. Don’t Go Quiet.

You don’t have to be ready. You don’t have to get it right. You just have to begin where you are.

Pause for a breath. Say one thing that’s true. Text someone who gets it. That’s already enough.

Befriending yourself isn’t the end of the fight. It’s the beginning of your escape. The beginning of remembering who you are and what you stand for.

You’re not alone. You’re not broken. You’re still here.

And as you begin to repair yourself, you may find yourself drawn toward others doing the same. That’s not a distraction from the work. That is the work.

To move forward, consider these personal strategy questions:

• What parts of yourself have you been forced to silence—and what would it take to give them voice again?

• If you fully believed your values still mattered, what’s one small act you’d take today to honor them?

• When you look back on this moment five years from now, what will you be proud you protected—within yourself, and in the world?

• What habits of survival are no longer serving you—and what new practices might help you rebuild from a place of dignity?

• Who in your life helps you feel less alone in the fog—and how can you deepen those connections, even a little?

• What truths have you stopped saying out loud—and what might shift if you named just one of them today?

What’s one way you can create a small pocket of safety, truth, or meaning this week—for yourself or someone else?

You Are Not Alone, and This Fight Is Not Over

If this post resonated, I hope it offered more than recognition. I hope it offered orientation.

That’s the heart of this series, and of the work I’m building. To help people stay human, stay effective, and stay together under pressure that is meant to make us fall apart and obey.

So if this landed for you:

• Share with someone who’s also struggling

• Repost if these signs feel familiar

• Add your voice in the comments

• Subscribe to keep following the series

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We are not helpless. We are not broken. We are living inside a system intended to disorient and divide, and we are learning how to move through it with humanity and conscience intact.

Stay human. Stay strategic. Shape tomorrow.

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From Progressive Strategy Now, a publication of Paul T Shattuck LLC.

***The views expressed here reflect my personal analysis as a researcher and consultant, and do not represent the positions of any employer, clients, or affiliated organizations.