Resilience and Hope: Geralyn Ritter’s Story of Survival

How do we find hope and resilience when faced with unimaginable trauma or even everyday challenges? In 2015, Geralyn Ritter was returning from a business trip when her train derailed at 106 mph. She was not expected to live. Geralyn spent the next several years undergoing dozens of surgical procedures, on total disability leave from her job, and facing the mental health challenges associated with physical trauma and pain. She joined us to share her journey back to life as mom, wife and CEO. Be inspired by her story and lessons learned finding strength – and hope – in adversity. 

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What did we learn? Here are the top takeaways from Resilience and Hope: Geralyn Ritter’s Story of Survival:

One moment of an ordinary day can change life forever. Taking a train she had ridden from Washington, D.C., to her New Jersey home at least a hundred times before, Ritter stood to get something from her bag in the luggage rack when the train rounded a sharp curve going 106 mph and derailed at 9:23 p.m. “I remember hearing screams around me. I remember hearing my own scream, and that’s my last memory for several days,” Ritter said. Her husband spent all night calling and visiting hospitals and finally found her at a trauma center, severely injured. “Doctors didn’t expect me to survive, and they knew if I did, it was going to be a long road back,” she said.

Strength is often admired, but resilience is what truly sustains us through the hardest of times. Through a recovery that took two and a half years away from work and 25 surgeries, Ritter had to dig deep to find the resources for resilience. She coined the term GRASP, which stands for:

• Gratitude and optimism
• Realism and acceptance
• Action orientation
• Social connections
• Purpose and perspective

“Sometimes we think of resilience as the same thing as strength, and it’s not. A giant oak tree is strong, but if the wind blows it over, it’s not getting back up. Resilience is getting back up,” she said.

Gratitude can help you through the toughest times. Despite her serious injuries, Ritter felt fortunate in some ways, giving her a focus for gratitude. Her orthopedic trauma surgeon told her he had no medical explanation for how she could have sustained the injuries she did without a traumatic brain injury. “That was extraordinary,” she said. “I lived, my brain was intact, and I wasn’t paralyzed, so we were just grateful, and that really carried us in the beginning.” Gratitude can help get you through hard circumstances. “Even in the darkest times, there’s something you can be grateful for,” she said.

Learning to accept uncertainty is important for resilience. From the moment she woke up in the hospital, Ritter had to live with uncertainty. “There was only so much doctors could tell me because I had such a constellation of injuries,” she said. “One doctor might tell me when my next surgery would be or when an injury would heal, but nobody had the full picture.” She said she ultimately had to accept not knowing the length of her recovery or the outcome. “I had to learn to trust, have faith and let go of that need for certainty,” she said.

Taking action can give you focus and purpose. When facing a situation in which you lack control, try to figure out what you can do, Ritter said. For example: “I couldn’t plan the future, but I could try to understand what was happening to me,” she said. So she started reading books on trauma, medical textbooks on pain and patient memoirs. She learned about the effects of chronic pain, how biochemical responses affect mood and how post-traumatic stress disorder can manifest after an accident. This knowledge helped her cope. She also learned to appreciate precious time with her three sons after school, doing small projects like baking a cake together.

Seeking support from others can make you more resilient. During her lowest times, when she was dealing with depression and weaning off 16 prescription medications, including high doses of opioids for pain, Ritter leaned on her social connections. “I found a lot of support in my friends and my family,” she said, adding that her friends made her laugh and her boys, who were 8, 12 and 15 at the time of the accident, gave her a reason to get out of bed. “There’s a ton of medical literature out there that shows that those with a network of social support live longer and report less pain,” she said. “It really is important – it’s not just a nice-to-have.”

Tools like meditation and yoga may help you cope. Ritter also turned to resources she might have previously dismissed, including yoga, meditation and breath work. “I was always a huge skeptic before,” she said, adding that the techniques she learned gave her more of a sense of agency over her body. “Sometimes, when you’re at your lowest, you may be more open to trying something new,” she said. Reframing your thoughts also can be useful, she said. “You hear about survivor’s guilt or post-traumatic stress. But there is a flip side –survivor’s pride and the growth that comes from going through something like this,” she said.

Caregivers need to be proactive in practicing self-care. Caregiving can be extremely stressful, as it was for her husband, Ritter said. Her advice: “Like they say on the airplane, put your own oxygen mask on first –whatever that means for you.” It may be difficult for both the patient and the caregiver to fully understand what the other is going through, she said. “There’s no weakness or shame in acknowledging that you need support too, but you’re going to have to be the one who initiates that, whether it’s therapy, being with friends or time off. But just muscling through is not a recipe for success.”

Resilience can make you a better leader. When Ritter finally went back to work, she did so in an intentional way because she wanted to continue to help people through her work in healthcare. “A word that really resonates with me, which is a bit of a buzzword in some circles now, is authenticity,” Ritter said. And while she doesn’t want to be defined by the accident, it is now a part of her. “There is an authenticity and an empathy in the way I work with my teams that may not have been as strong before the accident,” she said. “And I feel like people sense that and react to it. It creates a safe space for us to work together.”