Real People, Real Skills: She Survived 9/11 and Still Had to Learn How to Accept Her Life

Real People, Real Skills is a monthly series on NoodleFodder. Each installment looks at a true, publicly documented story of someone navigating real hardship — and the specific coping skills that helped them through it.

By any measure, Miosotys Santiago had been through enough.

At 13, she experienced significant trauma and ended up in a psychiatric ward following a suicide attempt. As a young adult she found her footing — enough to build a life, hold a job, show up. And then September 11, 2001 happened, and she narrowly escaped from Tower One of the World Trade Center.

The loss that followed — of colleagues, of the city she knew, of any remaining sense that the world was predictable — does not have a clean name. It’s not just grief. It’s not just PTSD. It’s the specific weight of surviving something that killed the people around you, and then having to go back to regular Tuesday mornings anyway.

Miosotys shared her story publicly through the National Council for Mental Wellbeing’s Mental Health First Aid program. And what stands out isn’t the magnitude of what she survived — it’s what she says she was missing, for decades, that would have helped. Tools. Just tools.

What Radical Acceptance actually looks like

When Miosotys eventually became certified in Mental Health First Aid, something shifted. She finally had a framework for understanding her own experience. She could name what PTSD was. She understood depression as something with a shape, not just a fog she kept falling into. She said the training rekindled her commitment to her own mental health care — not just surviving, but actually tending to herself.

Her story is a quiet illustration of one of DBT’s most misunderstood skills: Radical Acceptance. Radical Acceptance does not mean what happened was okay. It means you stop fighting the fact that it happened — because fighting reality is exhausting, and it doesn’t change reality.

For someone who survived what Miosotys survived, the non-accepting version looks like a constant low-level argument with the universe: it shouldn’t have happened, they shouldn’t be gone, I shouldn’t feel this way. That argument is understandable. It’s also a second layer of suffering stacked on top of the first.

Alongside that, Miosotys’s work helping others is a textbook example of Accumulate Positives — the DBT skill of building a life that has meaning and purpose in it, not as a distraction from pain but alongside it. She didn’t wait until she felt better to start contributing. She contributed, and that became part of what helped her feel better.

What arrived after

She described what eventually settled in as gratitude. Not gratitude that the tragedy happened — gratitude for the life that remained. For watching her children grow. For the birth of four grandchildren. That’s not toxic positivity. That’s someone who did the brutal work of accepting what was unsurvivable and found out that they had, in fact, survived it.

Try this

Think of something in your life you’re still arguing with. Not processing — arguing. Something where part of your mental energy is still going toward this shouldn’t be true. You don’t have to accept it fully today. Radical Acceptance is more like a door you keep choosing to walk back through. But you can practice the first step: just noticing the argument. Saying, even quietly, this is real. This happened. I don’t have to like it. That’s the beginning.

Miosotys Santiago shared her story through the National Council for Mental Wellbeing. For more on Radical Acceptance, visit the NoodleFodder DBT Skills hub.