She declined therapy. Multiple accounts of her later interviews note this consistently — she chose not to engage with professional psychological support in the aftermath of the crash. She did not explain this choice comprehensively in any account that has been published; what she said, in various forms, was that she dealt with what had happened in her own way, through her own resources.
One of those resources was religion. She became a devout Orthodox Christian in the years following the crash, turning to the Serbian Orthodox tradition that was embedded in the culture she had grown up in. For many people who survive events of catastrophic violence, religious frameworks provide a way of making sense of the question that secular frameworks struggle to answer: not why did this happen, but why am I alive when others are not?
She also maintained, in a way that many people found remarkable, a fundamentally optimistic disposition. Across interviews given over many years, she described herself as an optimist. She said the crash had made her more aware of what she valued and less concerned with the trivial. “If you can survive what I survived,” she said in one account, “you can survive anything.” The line is not the sentiment of someone who is pretending the crash didn’t happen; it is the sentiment of someone who has incorporated it into her understanding of herself.
She did not consider herself lucky. In a 2002 interview with aviation security journalist Philip Baum, she said: “I’m not lucky. Everybody thinks I am lucky, but they are mistaken.” The statement repays attention. She was making a distinction between luck as something positive — the falling of a coin on the right side, the winning of a prize — and the kind of statistical outlier status she occupied. She had been on a flight where twenty-seven people died. The fact that she survived did not make her lucky in any meaningful sense. She was the sole survivor of a mass death event that had damaged her body permanently and killed people she had worked with.