5 hours ago
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It was a beautiful Friday afternoon in April 2010 when Will Salter stood on the shore and appraised a reef break on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. He can tell you the exact time, too: 5pm.
As he paddled for 10 minutes towards three other surfers, he could smell remnants from a whale carcass that had washed up months earlier. Seagulls circled.
He ducked under a wave and, weirdly, could hear the foam hiss as he surfaced. Then the foam parted like curtains. Salter saw the head of a great white cruising underneath the front of his shortboard, ballooning out at the body. By his estimation, it was four metres long. Likely attracted by the whale, the shark was unable to reach that all-you-can-eat buffet.
“Great whites are the only sharks whose eyes move like ours, from side to side,” Salter says. “As the shark went past, we locked eyes.”
Salter yelled to the surfers. In a panic, he was paddling out to sea, so he manoeuvred his board to aim for the shore. Though the shark was now 25 metres away, he saw a dorsal fin rise out of the water.
“It came straight at me,” Salter says. “The fin brushed my ankle, rocking the board. Sometimes they bump objects, to see how they move.”
A nearby paddleboarder, Mick, yelled that there was a wave. As Salter got in position, he saw the shark surface. “It thrashed its tail, then it submerged,” he says. “People say, ‘Did you get up and ride the wave and give it the finger?’ No, I was hanging on for dear life.”
Once safely on shore, the emotions came out. Salter got to his car with his legs shaking and called his partner. Then he bought a lottery ticket – this was his lucky day.
“I’ll always remember the guy at the newsagents,” Salter says. “He was looking at me strange because my eyes must have been bulging. I was like, ‘Mate, you wouldn’t believe what happened.’ He got bombarded with this story.”
Salter’s experience is dramatic, but stressful events come in many forms. What kind of help is there to process them, and how does a person get back on the horse – or back in the water, in Salter’s case?
Emma Vaughan, a clinical psychologist at Foundation Psychology Melbourne, studied to be a paramedic before switching to psychology, and now works with first responders and people who have been in accidents or experienced other traumas. Treatment time is “as long as a piece of string”, she says – weeks, months or years. The pace is led by the client.
“A first appointment will often be getting to understand someone’s story,” says Vaughan. “I need to build that rapport and make them feel safe, even avoiding reminders of the trauma. Maybe we’ll discuss what’s changed for them and how they’re coping.”
Vaughan says there’s a difference between “acute stress” and PTSD. It’s normal for people to experience anxiety, sleeplessness and flashbacks for up to a month – that’s acute stress – and it can be useful to check in with a professional to normalise that. With PTSD, symptoms persist beyond a month, with natural fears turning into fixed beliefs.
“PTSD is more of a disordered way of adjusting,” Vaughan says. “Often things have changed in the way the person sees themselves. They might feel they’re going to die, or they can’t trust anyone, or that bad things happen to bad people. The brain is unable to process that they’re safe now.”
When a stressful event occurs, the unpredictability of the fallout is its own issue. No one knows that better than Ben Hamlett, for whom two concussions became massive question marks over his life.
Hamlett was a professional footballer who now has his own strength and conditioning coaching business in Tasmania. In his early career he suffered much surgery and rehab after a knee and ankle injury, which ripped him away from playing professionally in the US and grounded him on the family couch in Hobart. Initially he turned to substances and struggled with depression, but then he found a mindfulness specialist.
Mindfulness and meditation taught him “to understand how my emotional reactions influence my decisions, behaviours and perceptions”. It also helped him sit with pain and ask what he could learn from this suffering. “You are allowing sensations to arise and pass away again, not being attached to the outcome or your identity,” he says.
Hamlett returned to the game, but his subsequent traumatic brain injuries forced him to dig deep. The first injury occurred in 2016. He’d gone for a header and collided with another player.
“I woke up the next day and I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t deal with light, I couldn’t deal with talking or noise,” he says. “This persisted for five months. It was confronting, because I’d never had an experience where I couldn’t do the simplest things, like standing or walking. I remember sitting in the consulting room with these brain specialists who said, ‘Look, you need to consider retiring.’ I was 24.”
Eventually, he returned to football again, first with no contact, then full throttle. His psychologist taught him about a core principle of mindfulness, “equanimity” – developing a state of neutrality so that future experiences could be met without craving a specific outcome. “I had to really rely on that practice,” he says. “Rather than try to control the outcome, I just showed up with the fullness of my awareness.”
He moved to Europe to play in a third division league in Portugal. Then in 2022 came another concussion. Though the collision wasn’t as severe, the effects lasted three years and he was forced to retire.
By now, Hamlett had a baby daughter, a business and was completing a psychology degree – and had to hit pause on looking after all three. “It was terrifying,” he says. “I noticed significant changes to my mood, to my ability to deal with pressure, which I’d never had before.”
Reading Man’s Search for Meaning, by concentration camp survivor and neurologist Viktor Frankl, made Hamlett realise he had a choice in how he reacted to setbacks.
“That helped me think, how would I like to look back on my life, and how would I like to step forwards?”
For any of us, getting “back on the horse” requires risk assessment. After his second concussion, Hamlett reframed his goals, quit football and focused on building his coaching business.
In addition to mindfulness, other common tools used to treat acute stress are cognitive behavioural therapy and eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR).
Vaughan recommends a “graded exposure” after a stressful setback. “Let’s say a surfer has gone through a shark attack,” she says. “Sitting at the beach and recognising any unhelpful thoughts would be a first step.”
This tactic is exactly what Salter tried. Being a men’s counsellor, he had a good instinct for what tools to use. One of the other surfers out with him that day didn’t get back in the water for 18 months, but Salter got in after four days – and he’s still surfing.
“The longer I left it, the more it was going to freak me out. I stayed in the shallows a bit, sitting on my board, getting comfortable. Over the next three years I would often see shadows and if my mind started racing, I’d paddle in.”
These days, he’s more shark literate. He also knows how important surfing is for his wellbeing. And he’s framed his experience as something profound.
“That was one of the most significant moments in my life,” he says. “I feel privileged to have been that close to an apex predator, but also, my dad died two weeks later and that was emotionally huge for me. Because it was almost like that shark was saying, ‘Not your time. You’ve got family to look after.’”
