Chapter 23
Robert J. Lifton is a psychiatrist who studied under Erik Erikson and spent a good chunk of his life obsessing over what happens to people who survive the worst things imaginable. War. Genocide. Nuclear holocaust. Lifton spent six months in Hiroshima, interviewing survivors of the atomic bomb. He compiled his research into Life in Death, where he introduced the concept of the death imprint: the psychological scar left behind after a person comes into direct contact with death and somehow, against all odds, remains alive.
The imprint never fades. It lingers like a ghost, a permanent watermark on the psyche. But according to Lifton, it’s not all bad. If you can learn to carry it instead of letting it carry you, the death imprint can be a source of profound meaning. A survivor’s burden, for sure—but also a survivor’s gift.
PSYCHIC NUMBING
Of course, most people don’t wake up from catastrophe brimming with newfound wisdom. The first thing that usually happens is psychic numbing—a kind of mental shutdown, a full-system lockdown to keep the brain from short-circuiting under the weight of trauma. In Surviving Our Catastrophes, Lifton describes this as a Freudian “protective shield”—the mind’s way of slamming the door on all the horrors it just witnessed so it doesn’t completely collapse.
The problem? The door doesn’t always open back up.
Psychic numbing isn’t just repression or denial—it’s a total shutdown of feeling itself. A toxic deadening of the self. You walk around, talk, work, function—people look at you and see a living person—but inside, you’re a corpse. And you don’t even realize it.
That could explain why I never felt depressed, even when it was obvious to everyone else that I was drowning in it. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t anything. Just… blank.
SURVIVOR MEANING
Lifton says all humans are “meaning-hungry creatures,” but survivors? We’re starved for meaning. We need something to explain why we’re still here. Why we lived and others didn’t. What it all meant. What the catastrophe was, why it happened, and—most importantly—what we’re supposed to do with it.
SURVIVOR WISDOM
In his work with war veterans, Holocaust survivors, and the hibakusha, Lifton noticed that those who came out the other side with any kind of wisdom all had one thing in common: they mourned.
That might sound obvious, but a shocking number of people never actually go through the full mourning process. They get stuck. Death guilt keeps them trapped—guilt for surviving when others didn’t, guilt for what they did to survive, guilt for what they didn’t do to help others survive. Some even feel guilt for simply being happy to be alive, a twisted form of what Lifton calls tainted joy.
Elias Canetti put it bluntly in Crowds and Power: “The survivor knows of many deaths.”
And that knowledge either crushes you or transforms you.
Lifton says there’s a fork in the road for every survivor with a death imprint: close down or open out.
Close down, and you retreat further into the numbing. You isolate. Shut the world out. Become hollow, locked in the helpless victim response.
Open out, and you step into the survivor identity. You connect with others. Mourn, reflect, share your story. The trauma doesn’t vanish, but it transforms. It stops being a weight and starts being a lesson.
That’s how people like Vietnam vets, Holocaust survivors, and Hiroshima survivors attained what Lifton calls “survivor wisdom”—by taking what they learned from death and turning it into something that could help the living.
But here’s the catch: it’s never over.
Survivors never fully escape the pull of closing down. It’s a lifelong struggle, a constant balancing act. As Lifton says, “Survivors are never entirely free of the struggle between closing down and opening out.”
SURVIVOR MISSION
For those who do open out, something strange happens: they find purpose.
Lifton calls this the “survivor mission”—the moment when survivors take their hard-won wisdom and apply it to the world. The hibakusha, for example, didn’t just live through nuclear catastrophe; they became the voices warning the world about it. They had seen firsthand what atomic warfare did to human bodies, to cities, to entire cultures. They knew what the rest of the world could only guess at.
And once you know something like that, you can’t unknow it.
That’s the power of the survivor. To see clearly when others are blind. To know when others only speculate. And to make sure that what happened to them never happens again.
THE THRESHOLD OF INSIGHT
The psychology of the death imprint hits home for me. Remember the kill houses? Those visions didn’t come out of nowhere. They were the echoes of years spent brushing up against death—each close call etching itself into my psyche, waiting for the right conditions to resurface. And the conditions were always the same: high doses of meth, sleepless nights, and too much time spent with men who had blood on their hands.
There’s plenty of research on how trauma rewires the brain, how post-traumatic stress keeps its claws in you long after the danger is gone. When you’ve lived through real, immediate threats to your survival, your brain doesn’t just forget. It doesn’t let you walk away unmarked.
Lifton’s ideas of closing down and opening out didn’t just resonate with me—they explained my own deadness, my inability to feel joy, the creeping numbness that took over when I left a job that mattered. Working with homeless addicts at the facility, I was alive. I felt things. Then I took a higher-paying job at a faceless, corporate system where my hands were tied, where I wasn’t helping people—I was part of the machine screwing them over. And that’s when the deadness set in.
Lifton talks about the importance of constant self-overcoming, a Nietzschean struggle to keep pushing forward, to keep opening out rather than collapsing under the weight of the death imprint. For me, that meant telling my story. Sharing my survival narrative, over and over again, was what kept me alive. If I wasn’t doing that, the darkness started creeping back in.
Lifton noted that Hiroshima survivors toggled between closing down and opening out. But when they did open out, they didn’t just find meaning—they became radically alive. Some of them became politically active, joined anti-nuclear movements, and turned their trauma into fuel for something bigger than themselves.
Take Setsuko Thurlow. She was 13 when the bomb hit, lost eight family members in an instant, and went on to become a leading voice in the fight against nuclear weapons. She helped organize ICAN, which won a Nobel Prize in 2017 for its work on the UN’s nuclear disarmament treaty.
Looking back, I can see it clearly now: my return to Vegas, getting the job at the facility—that was my moment of opening out. And when I did, my entire life changed. My physical health skyrocketed. My mental health stabilized. Hell, I even grew taller. I had so much energy I couldn’t contain it. That’s when I started lifting weights. That’s when I enrolled in college. That’s when I picked up new hobbies.
It wasn’t the carnivore diet that cured my depression. It wasn’t the Vegas sun that made me more active. It was meaning. It was the act of opening out, of turning my survival into something that mattered, that saved me.
But opening out isn’t a one-time deal. If you stop, the slow slide into closing down begins again. And it’s insidious. Gradual. You don’t even notice it happening.
THE PIVOTAL POINT
“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.” —Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness
I didn’t go into mental health because I wanted to “pay it forward.” I didn’t do it because I thought I was some selfless savior. I did it because it felt good. I liked knowing that I was helping people the way others had helped me.
Working at the facility was rewarding. But even then, I had this idea in the back of my mind: make more money. It was always there.
So, I chased it. When the gig was up at the facility, instead of finding another job at another facility doing what I loved to do, I took a meaningless job making twice as much money at a virtual call center.
I lost the thing that actually mattered.
I thought I was pacing myself, lightening my workload to prevent burnout. But the burnout didn’t come from working too hard. It came from depression. From forcing myself to get through five miserable days a week by rationalizing that I was making more money while building towards some long-term goal.
But I wasn’t building anything. I was wasting my energy managing stress from a job I hated. I was draining myself, grinding away at a call center where success was measured in smiley faces and survey scores. And I had nothing left for the one thing that actually mattered: the patients.
Now that—that was defeating the purpose.
drink your milk 