There is this mode of therapy in psychiatry called Desensitisation. And unlike a lot of terms in psychiatry, it actually means what a layman might assume.
A person walks in with a diagnosed phobia. You expose them to a small dose of the entity that provokes this "irrational fear". Give them time and space to recover. They return. Rinse and repeat.
Thing is, these doses start out small, but increase progressively. Much like with vaccines, you help this person to slowly build up a response that soon kicks in instinctively. Bigger the threat, bigger the response. Ready for The Forbidden Forest, immune to Aragog.
Attack and recover. Attack and recover.
There's an alternative. Flash desensitisation. Just in and out. A huge dose of stimulus, almost stunning the mind into a sub-habitual response. And then that becomes the learnt response.
Attack and recover and stop. Fingers crossed.
Would you like a consistently low baseline mood, with no significant peaks of happiness and no significant troughs of misery either? Sounds like a fair deal, not having to cope with massive setbacks. Things will never get too rough. And if you've never been too happy, you never know what you're missing out on.
No attacks. No recovery.
Or would you like a state of wilder highs and lows? Intense sorrows to match intense joy, but with a markedly higher baseline mood. It sounds like the definition of living a little, but it could just as well be a recipe for torture to the soul. To have to take the shitstorm in your stride because hey, secondary rainbows every summer.
Attack and recover and rise.
. . .
Seems to me that it's often a progression through the four stages, in that very order.
You take the small hits, you cope. You suffer a big blow, you pause and regroup. Maybe you wall off all future blows; now there's no need to cope. Then one fine day, you step back into the ring - you take a punch, you throw two back, and you give meaning to the process. You rise.
.
There's agony in watching someone pass through the stages, even knowing that it will pass. Watching them allow others to drag them through the stages. Ain't nobody mess with ma homies and their mommas, that kind of agony.
Worse when the others play the victim card to a hungry audience that laps up drama but is impervious to dignity. If only you could card the victim at the door for legit being juvenile; too immature to enter the real world, byebye now.
Feel like an angry warrior on behalf of your homies. Not that they ask it, but because it infuriates you to watch the self-proclaimed victims vilify without a break. Where is all the decency to which they feel so entitled?
Attack and attack and attack. Recovery must wait.
