An excerpt from a Substack by Paul T Shattuck, MSW, PhD
Staying Steady in Chaos Designed to Break Us
I don’t have a single approach for dealing with all this. I have tools that help me stay upright and oriented strategically to keep fighting.
- Shift from reactivity to strategic readiness
You’re being systematically destabilized by a regime that profits from your reactivity. MAGA needs you spinning – overwhelmed, detached, or burning out. That sick feeling when you realize you’re bouncing between these states? You have not failed, it’s exactly what Trump and his enablers intend with their strategy of engineered chaos.
And you know what? Fuck their strategy.
Here’s what they don’t want you to know: once you see how this cycle works, you can start steering instead of being dragged around.
Trump’s Goal Is to Break You. Here’s How to Stay Whole and Effective is one of my most popular posts that’s been read, liked, and shared by tens of thousands. Cycling between overwhelm, cynicism, and scattered activism is exactly what Trump wants you to do. Here’s how to recognize you’re stuck and then move from reactivity to strategic engagement.
2. Give Yourself Mercy and Compassion
Authoritarian chaos works by keeping people in a cycle of reactivity — spinning between overwhelm, cynicism, and frantic over-commitment — and then making us believe it’s our own fault. These states aren’t personal weaknesses. They’re predictable responses to an environment engineered to produce them.
In this brief guided practice, I walk you through three of the most common reactive states I see in my work with experienced, committed social change leaders:
- Collapsed Overwhelm – The shutdown place where there’s too much coming at you, and your system freezes.
- Scattered Activism – The “do everything” place that leaves you burned out and less effective.
- Numb Cynicism – The “why bother” place where detachment feels safer than hope.
We’ll slow down, notice each state, and replace self-judgment with self-mercy — not as indulgence, but as a strategic refusal to carry out the inner punishment authoritarianism is counting on.
Listen here:
I Refuse to Shame Myself: Meeting Engineered Chaos With Self-Mercy. When your nervous system is under constant assault, shame and self-judgment only make you more vulnerable. Learn to name what you’re experiencing and respond with self-mercy
3. The Defiance Prayer
When total avoidance and checking out starts sounding reasonable, I have a prayer that interrupts the spiral.
Please grant me audacity to choose values and goals worth fighting for;
Persistence in the face of failed attempts;
And the wisdom to know the difference between acceptance and giving up.
Audacity to choose means defining what you’re building, not just what you’re resisting. Persistence means measuring yourself by showing up, not by winning every round. The wisdom to know the difference—not between what you can and can’t change, but between acceptance and giving up. You can accept the fact of how hard this is and still choose your next move. Giving up is when you let the fear make that choice for you. Acceptance is maintaining a clear-eyed reckoning with reality that keeps you moving
This is what I reach for when I’m trying to stay human and not give up.
4. Acknowledge the new skills and strengths you’ve earned resisting Trump
Here’s what no pundits are asking: What have we learned now that we’ve survived a year designed to break us? And how will that prepare us for 2026?
We’ve learned to navigate dangerous terrain because we’ve been forced to survive it. We paid brutal tuition for an education none of us asked for.
And the result? We’ve built skills and determination we’re only beginning to recognize. We earned new muscles we’re learning to flex.
We’re still here. We didn’t quit. And now we know things we didn’t know a year ago—about how fast things can turn, about who shows up and who disappears, about where our own lines held and where they didn’t — and about our own strengths and limits.
That’s not just pain. That’s hard-earned intelligence. Use it.
The Skills We Built While Trump Tried to Break Us. We didn’t just endure this year. We learned skills, clarity and resolve they didn’t mean to teach us – and these are things they can’t take from us.
5. Keep building new skills
We have a long fight ahead of us. We need to continue building new skills, new connections, greater endurance.
My workbook Staying Steady gives you practical tools for interrupting overwhelm and building capacity under authoritarian pressure. It’s designed for moments when you’re too depleted for theory — short practices you can use in five minutes when shame, paralysis, or fog take hold. And it helps you strengthen your relationships and build resilience for the fight ahead.
Pay what you want pricing keeps it affordable. And buying version 1.0 now gets you a free copy of version 2.0 coming out this spring. I’m using reader feedback to add more practices and tools to help you stay steady and get stronger.
