165: The Quiet Phase After Crisis

When the headlines fade and the urgent meetings stop, most leaders exhale—and miss the most important phase of recovery. 

We unpack the quiet phase, that deceptive calm where people finally feel the impact and disengagement takes root long before anyone speaks up or turns in a resignation letter. 

Drawing on the Boston Marathon bombing as a case study, we examine why acute response looks strong while long-tail mental health support often becomes fragmented, time-limited, and hard to navigate.

Adrenaline and purpose carry teams through the peak, then the delayed processing begins. In that space, silence is data. You’ll learn the subtle signs of drift—fewer ideas, cautious or reckless swings in risk-taking, quiet compliance, and loosening social ties—and why dashboards rarely catch them. 

We also share a practical playbook for leaders: schedule follow-ups weeks and months out, normalize delayed reactions, keep resources easy to find, and stay visible without forcing disclosure. Presence beats performative support; continuity, not intensity, rebuilds confidence.

This conversation offers concrete tools for managers, executives, and community leaders who want to retain talent and restore trust after disruption. If you lead people through crisis—organizational change, public incidents, or community shocks—use these cues to convert quiet from a risk into a bridge back to engagement.

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Transcript

The Quiet After Crisis

Manya Chylinski 0:00

There's a moment after a crisis or a disruption when people feel relieved, especially anyone in a leadership position. Things have calmed down, the media has left, the headlines move on, you stop having those urgent meetings, the phones stop ringing. And from the outside, that can look like stability has returned. From the inside, it often means something else is happening. Welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about that phase of a crisis that sometimes doesn't get planned for, where the people in your organization or your community don't speak up, they don't escalate when they have a concern, and they might not even appear to be struggling right before they disengage or leave. Every crisis has a visible arc. There's the incident, whether it happens in a moment or it lasts over days or weeks. There is the response, which usually takes days, if not weeks. And then there's the recovery phase, which can start anywhere from a week to a few months after an event, depending on what the crisis is. What rarely gets talked about is the quiet phase for the people who experienced the crisis. So we resume our routines, we maybe slow down communication about the crisis, we try to get back to normal, whatever somebody is defining normal as, and our leaders stop talking about the crisis and they stop paying attention to it. Their attention shifts to whatever else is happening today. And nothing is obviously wrong. That's what makes this a little bit dangerous. I think we all do this. We assume that because there's no noise or because someone's not complaining about something, it means things have been resolved. So if we're talking about a workplace, people are still showing up, so they must be coping. We're talking about a community, no one is raising any issues, so the worst must be over. And people are still going to work, doing the things they normally do. That must mean they're resilient. And there's also an assumption that anyone who needed help would have asked for it already. And that just isn't how that really works. But from a leadership perspective, it feels reasonable. And as a leader, right, we are trained to respond to signals and things we see, behavior, not to somebody being quiet. So the silence is in fact a signal. It's just not one that most of us and most of our systems and processes are able to read clearly. So during the crisis, people mobilize. If you've ever seen anything about any kind of natural disaster, you see that in the aftermath. Neighbors come and dig their neighbors out. People rush to the blood banks, they suppress their personal reactions and focus on that collective response and that task of helping their neighbors. And they draw on their resources. And it could be pure adrenaline, it could be their purpose, it could be loyalty to an organization, their friends, their family. And then when the crisis ends, things change because now they're not suppressing feelings, they're having to feel them. And people get tired and they think about trust, especially if the issue involves something an organization did or didn't do. Maybe their priorities shift. They start to try to make some sort of meaning about what happened. And that isn't a particular moment on the calendar. People don't announce that they've changed and they've now got this shift. It's just something we each think about internally for ourselves. And by the time a leader notices that people are disengaged, that person has already made their decision and is already thinking about how to move forward. Here's an example to understand a little bit about this phase. After the Boston Marathon bombing, the immediate response was visible and it was intense. Emergency systems were activated. Boston has several level one trauma centers, so the medical care was extraordinary. And there was a tremendous amount of public attention, media from around the world. There was coordination among departments. And I think there was this sense that everything possible was being mobilized to deal with this particular event. And for people who were there, for survivors, that early period was incredibly overwhelming. But there was also a sense that the larger community of Boston, of the US, of the world was supportive. People checked in. There was an obvious acknowledgement that something very serious had happened. What came later is very different. After the cameras went away and the news stories slowed down. So in the months that followed, support for the mental health impact was limited. It was uneven. People didn't always hear about it in time or in ways that were useful to them. And some of them were short-lived services. If you didn't catch them in the months after the bombing, you weren't going to be eligible for them later. And so some of these resources were there, absolutely, but not sustained. And early on, many survivors just don't have a language for what's going on with them or what they're experiencing. And there was very little infrastructure that helped us understand what we needed or what we might need over time. And here I'm talking specifically about the mental and emotional side of recovery. The people with the visible physical injuries received a different level of sustained attention. They had medical follow-ups, rehab, for the most part, clear pathways of care. And that support was necessary and absolutely deserved. But for many people carrying psychological wounds, those invisible injuries, and many of us did not have any kind of visible physical injury, that support, as I said, was harder to access and it was more fragmented. You had to know where to look, and most of us didn't know where to look. So our system is designed to respond to acute injury, not built to accompany people through the long-term emotional impact. And that really reveals where we tend to do better and where we tend to fall short. So the crisis has passed, at least from the institutional or the systems perspective, right? The cleanup has started. In the case of the bombing, people are rebuilding their physical selves because things are urgent and the attention is concentrated and we know we have to fix this. And we as humans can come together really well in that instance of crisis. But after the urgency fades, it's easy for that to go away, to disperse. Now, there isn't a moment typically when someone says, okay, boom, support's ending, done, we're done. There's not an announcement that we believe nobody needs any more care. That's not the case. It simply just goes away. The urgency is no longer there. And it goes away quietly. And then that's the point where, as someone dealing with emotional or mental stress after one of these kinds of events, we assume, okay, we're supposed to manage this on our own. And that's what the quiet phase looks like. It's not abandonment specifically or or dramatically, it's absence of talking about it, absence of support. And this isn't an intentional neglect. It just ends up to be that way by default once we get through that urgent phase. And that absence and that neglect, we'll call it, can shape how people relate to their community, to their leaders, to their organization. And that moment of urgency, that moment of the crisis, that was the moment of visibility. The ongoing impact is much harder to see, it's harder to explain, and it's easier for everyone, our organizations, our leaders to overlook. And as survivors, we see that. We see when the attention is highest, who the attention is for. We notice when the attention fades. And we don't usually, if we're talking about the workplace, people don't necessarily leave the moment support disappears. We stay and we cope and we tell ourselves we should be fine and maybe recalibrate our relationship to the organization. I know after Boston Marathon bombing, I recalibrated my relationship with the city and our city leadership and how I felt about it. And on the municipal level, that's not something people are necessarily going to notice. But on a in a workplace, by the time you notice that disengagement or when somebody leaves, they're already gone. They've been gone for a while. So that quiet phase is so important. People who have survived trauma and disaster in the past understand this delayed impact that surviving often means we have to postpone our emotional processing until that moment where we feel safe again, or those moments where we start to feel safe. So the processing waits until that moment. And that phase where we're quiet, we're also trying to figure out what's going on. Maybe we couldn't ask questions earlier because we just weren't in a place to be able to understand the answers. But maybe we're thinking about hey, did our leaders, the organization and the community, did they notice what happened? Did they notice all the different people who were affected? Did the support stop when it no longer was urgent when we got past that initial response phase? And we don't necessarily think about silence as being a strength or a weakness. It's merely self-protection. And when a leader thinks that nobody's saying anything means it's all set, maybe they think it means closure. Some survivors, not all, but some experience that as being left alone because whatever's happening to you is no longer urgent. The warning signs in this phase are pretty subtle and they can be really easy to mislead. So for number one, people stop offering ideas. Number two, they might become compliant rather than truly engaged. Number three, you might see that they've reduced their ability to take risks. Or conversely, you might see someone who's taking massive risks they never would have done before. And maybe they're disconnecting socially. And that might not really trigger any alarms. And you might see that as being stable, not the over-risk taking, but the rest of it. But for an employee in an organization in a workplace, that can feel like distance. And that's how you can lose people without even realizing it. So leaders who get through this phase well do something that might feel counterintuitive. They stay present after the urgency ends. So they schedule follow-ups weeks or months later to check in. They understand that a whole range of reactions are normal, including delayed responses. They communicate with their community or with their team that support will continue. There's not an expiration date. And they watch people and they look for those shifts in behavior, not just trying to track the internal metrics of performance. They don't force someone to disclose what happened to them and they don't try to get people to talk about their experience and don't over-intervene, but they remain visible and say, I'm here, I believe you, I will listen. Most people don't necessarily leave an organization, if we're talking about a workplace here, because of a crisis. They leave because of what happens afterwards. That quiet phase is not stability, not necessarily. It's something that you need to pay attention to.