Survival Story Saturday: The Things We Forget We Already Know.

Every time I write one of these Survival Story Saturday posts, I find myself asking the same question.

What is it that allows one person to survive something that seems impossible?

Is it luck? Is it grit? Is it hope? Is it training? Is it faith?

The more stories I read, the less convinced I am that there’s one answer. Sometimes people survive because someone rescues them. Sometimes they survive because their body somehow keeps going when it shouldn’t. And sometimes they survive because, in the middle of unimaginable chaos, they remember something simple that someone taught them years before.

That’s what drew me to Juliane Koepcke’s story.

On Christmas Eve in 1971, Juliane was seventeen years old and flying home with her mother through the Peruvian rainforest. Her father, a zoologist, was already waiting for them at a research station deep in the Amazon. It should have been a routine flight, one that was quickly forgotten after Christmas came and went. Instead, the airplane flew into a violent thunderstorm, was struck by lightning, and began breaking apart in midair.

I can’t even begin to imagine what those moments must have been like. One minute you’re sitting next to your mom, probably thinking about the holidays ahead, and the next your entire world is literally coming apart around you. There is no time to prepare for something like that. There is no handbook for what your mind does when everything familiar disappears in a matter of seconds.

Juliane remained strapped to her row of seats as she fell nearly two miles through the sky before crashing into the Amazon rainforest below. Somehow, she survived. When she woke up, she had a concussion, a broken collarbone, deep cuts, and one eye swollen nearly shut. She was completely alone.

She would later learn that she was the only survivor out of ninety-two people on board.

When I first read her story, I expected the next chapter to be filled with dramatic survival skills and incredible acts of courage. Instead, what struck me most was how ordinary the thing was that ultimately kept her alive.

She remembered something her father had taught her as a little girl.

Growing up around the Amazon, he had always said that if she was ever lost in the jungle, she should find moving water. Small streams eventually become larger streams, larger streams become rivers, and rivers eventually lead to people.

That was it.

No elaborate survival guide. No complicated strategy.

Just one piece of knowledge that had quietly been tucked away in her mind for years until the day she needed it most.

For the next eleven days, Juliane followed water. She walked through dense jungle with serious injuries, drank from streams, slept on the ground, fought infection and exhaustion, and simply kept moving in the only direction that made sense. She had no way of knowing whether anyone was looking for her. She didn’t know how far she had to go. She only knew the next step.

As I sat with her story, I realized that’s probably why it has stayed with me. It isn’t just because surviving a two-mile fall sounds impossible. It’s because I see pieces of Juliane’s story almost every day in my therapy office.

Trauma has a way of convincing us that we’ve lost ourselves. It tells us we can’t trust our judgment anymore. It makes us question our instincts, our decisions, and sometimes even our memories. People often come into therapy believing they have to learn an entirely new way to live because whatever they had before must have been wrong.

But over the years, I’ve noticed something. Healing isn’t always about discovering something you’ve never known. Sometimes it’s about remembering something that fear buried.

I’ve watched people reconnect with values they thought they’d lost. I’ve watched them remember boundaries they used to know how to set before life taught them to ignore their own needs. I’ve watched them rediscover strengths that were never actually gone—they were just hidden underneath grief, shame, betrayal, addiction, anxiety, or years of simply trying to survive.

That’s what I love about Juliane’s story. The thing that helped save her wasn’t something she learned after the plane crashed. It was something that had been planted long before she ever knew she would need it.

I wonder how often that’s true for us.

Maybe the next step we’re looking for isn’t completely unknown. Maybe it’s something we’ve heard before but stopped trusting. Maybe it’s advice from someone who loved us well. Maybe it’s something we’ve learned in therapy but haven’t quite believed enough to practice yet. Maybe it’s a value we’ve slowly drifted away from while trying to keep our head above water.

I don’t know exactly what that looks like for you, but I do know this: when we’re overwhelmed, we tend to believe we need the entire map before we can move. Juliane didn’t have a map. She had one direction. And sometimes one direction is enough to get us through today until tomorrow becomes visible.

Reflection

If you’re in a season where life feels confusing or uncertain, take a few minutes to ask yourself this question:

What is something you already know to be true that you’ve stopped trusting?

This week, don’t try to solve your whole life. Just take one step in the direction of the wisdom you’ve been carrying all along.