Overcoming PTSD – How to Cope Losing a Loved One
Jessica Alana
JESSICA ALANA (UK)
Biomedical Scientist (BSc), Regenerative Medicine Scientist
It is the breakdown and the breakthrough of those what ifs that open the greatest doors in life. You may have to kick those doors down, but they will open.
Summary
- Trauma creates a void in the soul trajectory, making it a responsibility to pick up the ancestral baton and carry on the bloodline to ensure its survival and continuity.
- PTSD is characterized by a complete loss of self and feeling "stuck" in a silent erosion of identity that persists every day until the trauma is actively processed.
- While science focuses on brain circuitry, PTSD can be framed as a soul-level injury that subsequently leads to the scattered neural activity observed in the brain.
- Achieving true freedom and escaping cycles of pain requires healing ancestral traumas and transmuting suffering into a breakthrough that benefits others.
- Overcoming the trauma of suicide involves moving past "what ifs" by practicing radical acceptance and respecting the autonomy of the loved one's final choice.
Article
Picking Up The Baton After Loss
Jessica Alana’s Raw Appeal At Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam Reframed PTSD As Both Personal Rupture And Ancestral Reckoning
On Saturday, 15 October 2022, at Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam in the Netherlands, speaker Jessica Alana delivered a presentation with a title as direct as it was emotionally loaded: *Overcoming PTSD: How To Cope Losing A Loved One*. What followed was not a clinical lecture, nor a conventional self-help testimony. It was a deeply personal appeal, spiritual in language and urgent in tone, about what trauma does to identity, memory, family continuity and the stories people inherit from those who came before them.
Alana’s central argument was stark. PTSD, particularly after losing a loved one to suicide, was not merely a neurological condition to be charted in the circuitry of the brain. It was, she said, a laceration in the “soul trajectory”, a wound that tore through the bloodline and left the living with the task of stepping into the void and carrying what had been dropped.
Her vocabulary was metaphysical, but the grief beneath it was concrete. In a talk shaped by vulnerability and conviction, Alana returned again and again to one image: the baton. When a death by suicide shattered the continuity of a family, she argued, the survivor was left with a responsibility. “It is your responsibility to pick up the baton and hold it high so you can carry on your ancestral line.”
A Talk Built On Grief, Defiance And Acceptance
The event itself was devoted to the broad language of optimisation, self-mastery and human potential. Alana opened by placing herself squarely inside that ethos, telling the audience that their shared mission at the summit was to “hack our ego”. Yet where many such stages promise improvement through performance metrics and biological tinkering, Alana’s version of hacking the ego demanded something harder: exposure, surrender and truth-telling.
She spoke about the aftermath of losing her mother to suicide, and about the way trauma colonised daily life. In her telling, PTSD was not a single event but a state of suspension, an ongoing stuckness that eroded the self quietly and continuously. “The loss of the self is silent,” she said, drawing a distinction between ordinary forms of loss and the gradual vanishing of identity under trauma’s pressure.
That line landed with force because it translated an often abstract diagnosis into something lived. Alana described vivid nightmares, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts and self-harm. She spoke of not knowing when, or whether, one becomes unstuck. The horror she described was not only pain, but dislocation: the sense of inhabiting two lives at once, one before trauma and one after, with no reliable bridge between them.
Beyond Brain Chemistry, Toward The Soul
Alana did not reject science outright, but she challenged what she saw as its limits. Where scientific models often explain PTSD through altered brain structures and dysregulated neural systems, she proposed a reversal. The shattered inner world came first, she suggested, and the scattered brain followed after.
It was a striking reframing. “Science normally says that because the brain has changed, it leads to the PTSD,” she told the room. “The way that I actually see things is that because of the mutilation of the soul, that’s how the PTSD manifests.”
For some listeners, this language may have sounded elusive or untestable. For others, it likely named what clinical terminology often fails to hold: the scale of devastation after catastrophic loss. Alana’s account was less a medical hypothesis than a moral and spiritual map, one designed to make sense of suffering that conventional categories can describe but not redeem.
The Tyranny Of The “What If”
At the centre of her talk was a familiar torment sharpened by suicide bereavement: the endless replay of alternate outcomes. What if someone had made a different call, caught an earlier sign, missed a train, arrived home sooner, said one more thing, loved more visibly, intervened more decisively?
Alana called these loops the “what ifs”, and she portrayed them as both prison and threshold. “It is the breakdown and the breakthrough of those what ifs that open the greatest doors in life,” she said.
This was not cheap optimism. It was a recognition that grief after suicide is often saturated with imagined revisions. The dead remain fixed, but the living continue rehearsing impossible edits. Alana’s answer to that spiral was radical acceptance. She closed her talk with a tribute to her mother that was at once heartbroken and unsparing. She loved her, she said. She missed her. And she respected the choice her mother made.
That insistence on respect was perhaps the most unsettling and courageous element of the presentation. It did not come wrapped in ideological neatness. It emerged instead from the long labour of trying to survive what could not be changed.
The Bloodline As Burden And Calling
The phrase “heal the bloodline” can sound grandiose, but in Alana’s hands it was a language for duty. She described herself as the first child of a first child, and she used that family structure to explain the symbolism of the dropped baton. Her mother’s death, she said, created a void into which she herself had to descend. Survival was not passive endurance. It was retrieval.
The metaphor was powerful because it fused inheritance with agency. Trauma, in this view, was not only what happened to an individual. It was what threatened continuity itself. To heal, then, was to do more than feel better. It was to restore a line, to prevent psychic rupture from becoming destiny.
“Humanity will not know true freedom until it releases all of its ancestral traumas,” Alana declared.
This belief carried her beyond psychology into spirituality. She spoke of Samsara, Samadhi and Moksha, linking personal healing to liberation from cycles of pain and repetition. The wording was eclectic, borrowing from multiple traditions and folding them into a contemporary language of trauma recovery. Yet the emotional claim was clear enough: unprocessed suffering does not end with one person. It travels. It embeds. It repeats, unless someone interrupts it.
Playing The Cards You Are Dealt
If there was a single line that condensed Alana’s ethic, it was this: “God deals everyone cards in life and you have to play them. Only through acceptance, love, hard work, and perseverance can you play the hell out of your cards.”
It was a sentence built for memory, muscular and unsentimental. There are no guarantees in it, no promise that pain is secretly benevolent or that justice eventually balances the ledger. Instead, there is only the insistence that meaning can still be made from devastation.
That insistence also framed her humanitarian ambition. Alana told the audience she wanted to help 200,000 people in two years overcome the “what if” of suicide. The number was bold, perhaps improbably so, but it mattered less as a metric than as an expression of transformed purpose. Trauma, she argued, could not be erased. But it could be transmuted into service.
“We cannot erase the past, but all we can do is persevere and grow and help others.”
A Stage For Vulnerability
In another setting, such language might have dissolved into cliché. Here, it was anchored by the fact that Alana was clearly speaking from the scene of her own wounding. Her presentation leaned heavily on disclosure. It asked the audience not simply to listen, but to witness.
She invoked Carl Jung’s famous line: “Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” In Alana’s framing, that was the danger of unprocessed PTSD. Left untouched, it governed the sufferer from the shadows, shaping behaviour, identity and possibility while masquerading as inevitability.
To make the unconscious conscious, then, was not a slogan. It was work. It required naming the thing, entering the void, enduring memory and refusing the lie that silence keeps one safe.
What Remained After The Applause
There was no tidy resolution in Jessica Alana’s talk at Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam, and perhaps that was its strongest quality. She did not suggest that grief could be polished into wisdom without residue. She spoke instead of endurance, of continuing, of carrying.
Her presentation stood at the uneasy crossroads of trauma discourse, spiritual inheritance and personal testimony. Some would have wanted more scientific rigour. Others may have found in her language a rare fidelity to the scale of psychic rupture. But few could have missed the force of her central message: that surviving catastrophic loss may require more than explanation. It may require a reassembly of self so radical that it feels like returning from the dead.
In the end, Alana offered not a cure but a charge. Go into the void, she urged. Pick up the baton. Carry the line forward. And, somehow, turn pain into something that does not end with you.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam