Man Down: When the Urge to Escape Takes Over

When you want to punch something. Or disappear. Or drink until you black out.

Jul 01, 2025

Someone says the wrong thing. Or no one says anything at all. You’re sitting outside on a beautiful Sunday morning and you’ve let yourself believe that maybe today will be a good day. Then, without warning, you’re imagining your loved one’s moment of death in vivid, horrific detail.

Your chest tightens like you’ve been hit with a taser. Your hands grip the chair, holding on for dear life as though the Devil himself is coming to snatch you away. Everything disappears except for this awful, hi-def horror movie playing over and over.

You want to break something. Or run. Or both. The pain is so intense that you’ll do almost anything to make it stop. You’ve reached your limit. This is as real as it gets, brother.

What you’re feeling isn’t weakness, even though it sure as hell feels like weakness. It’s your nervous system screaming for relief. Your body is trying to save itself the only way it knows how: by doing something to shut off the pain.

You’re not broken. Your body is doing exactly what it was wired to do. But no one told you what emotions really are or how they hijack everything before you even know what hit you.

Something triggers you like a thought, a memory, a sound and before you can even think about it, your body reacts. Your jaw clenches. Your fists curl. Your chest locks down. That’s the emotion arriving. Only after that does your mind kick in to make meaning of it, to tell the story of what it means and what should happen next. And then comes the urge: act, run, numb, explode. But by the time you’re reaching for a drink or storming out of the house, the train has already left the station. The key is catching it at the body, at the beginning of the cycle, before it turns into something destructive.

Here’s what that might look like in real life: You walk in the door from work. You’re exhausted from pretending everything is fine just so you can make it through the day and pay the never-ending bills. But all you can think about is the fact that your kid is dead and no one seems to care.

As you’re walking to the kitchen you see a picture of the two of you. You walk by it every day, but today it jumps out at you. You’re both so happy, full of promise and oblivious to the nightmare waiting just around the corner. And now they’re gone. Boom. Your chest tightens, your heart starts pounding, and it feels like someone is pounding a spike into your skull. Before you can say a word, your body has gone into full-blown threat mode.

Now you start telling yourself stories about what this pain means. “My daughter is dead because I failed her. I’m failing at everything. I’m a fucking failure. I can’t take this for another second.” The physical pain becomes mental anguish. The urge to do anything to release the pressure is overwhelming.

Just like that, you’ve punched another wall, yelled at your wife and kids, guzzled three doubles in two minutes, or done some other destructive thing. And just like that, you’ve made things even worse than they already were. You stand there, wondering what the hell just happened and hating yourself for not being able to keep it together. And the worst part? You feel even farther away from them now. As if the only connection left is pain and now you’ve screwed that up too.

What looked like an overreaction “out of nowhere” is actually a full-body grief response set off by something small because your tank is already full. Your body fired. Your brain added the story. Now you're acting psychotic or like a total asshole. That’s the cycle.

Once you know it, you can interrupt it.

And let me say this as clearly as I can: Unless you’re some kind of superhero, you’re going to crack. Probably many times. The pain will be too much and you won’t be able to take it anymore. You’ll get hammered, stoned, or fly into a rage when your family tries to stop you.

That doesn’t make you a failure. It makes you human. The thing about grief is there will always be a next time to try again.

The urge to escape is primal. It makes sense. If you don’t learn to see it for what it is, it will start running your life. And you’ll become a slave to fear faster than you can ever imagine.

What you do next matters. For you, your family, and the memory of the person who died.

This is the moment where the bravest thing you can do is nothing. Not. A. Fucking. Thing.

Be the Jaguar

I learned something about facing this kind of pain in the middle of the jungle in Costa Rica.

Eighteen of us were jam-packed into a pitch-black sweat lodge. Heat was pouring off the red-hot stones like a blast furnace. The air was so thick, breathing felt like being waterboarded. People were crying, panicking, crawling for the exit. My back was in agony from being hunched over for two hours.

The exit was looking pretty damn appealing.

Before we went in, the shaman warned us: “This ceremony will bring up whatever you’ve been avoiding. Emotional pain, anger, fear and grief.”

He told us about how the jaguar is the apex predator in this part of the world. When he’s walking through the jungle and is confronted with something threatening, unknown or uncertain, he doesn’t run. He turns toward it and faces it.

Then he gave us a choice: “If things get too hard you are free to leave. But, I encourage you to stay and face what is meant to be faced. Be the jaguar.”

So I sat there in the dark, my face pressed to my knees, whispering it over and over like a lifeline: Be the jaguar. Be the jaguar. Be the jaguar.

That experience changed me forever. Because, like the sweat lodge, grief isn’t a calm, reflective experience. Especially not at first. It’s a suffocating, dark, intense hellhole that makes every part of you want to run. But you can’t outrun your pain. It will always be breathing down your neck. When you can’t run anymore, it will devour you.

When grief takes over your body, be the jaguar. Turn toward it and face it.

Turn toward it. Face it.

Facing the thoughts, emotions and physical sensations that grief and loss bring up is excruciating. And it’s terrifying because it seems like if you let yourself fall into the pit, you’ll never escape.

But they will not kill you.

Avoiding them will. You’ll kill your ability to feel joy, peace, and happiness. You’ll kill your body with whatever you use to avoid your pain. You’ll kill your ability to connect with the person you lost through anything but pain.

And in the end? They’ll still be dead.

You don’t need to fix the pain right now. You can’t. But you can decide not to let it destroy your life.

You don’t have to pick up the bottle. You don’t have to pick a fight with the guy at the gas station. You don’t have to ghost your friends for another week. You can stand in the middle of your devastated life and say, “This hurts like hell and I’m not okay,” without lighting another fire you’ll have to put out later.

You’re not crazy. You’re grieving. But you’re also still responsible for what you do with the pain.

Every time you catch yourself at the edge and choose not to jump, you’re stiffening your spine. Maybe no one else sees it. You might not see it at first. But the choice to face it? The choice not to cope or act out? That requires a hell of a lot more strength than pretending you’re fine. And it already exists within you.

You have a say in how this story ends, brother.

Leading Through Loss by Jason MacKenzie

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