["TESOL Quarterly, Volume 60, Issue S1, Page S79-S103, June 2026. ", "\nAbstract\nThis study explores how English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in post‐earthquake Türkiye narrated their experiences of loss, survival, and teaching within state‐imposed affective regimes. Drawing on an affective–discursive analysis of Ministry of National Education (MoNE) documents and media texts, the study first investigates how “feeling rules” (Benesch, 2017) shaped expectations of resilience, sacrifice, and continuity while erasing teachers' own grief. Theoretically, the analysis engages with Ahmed's (2004, 2014) account of affective economies, Butler's (2016) notion of grievability, and emotion labor scholarship in TESOL to trace how grief and vulnerability are rendered illegible or reframed as loyalty to the nation. Next, using narrative analysis, I examine interviews with 11 English teachers who survived the disaster. The narrative analysis foregrounds three ways teachers negotiated these affective demands: narrating trauma through embodied and temporal disruptions that made grief present in their lives; reclaiming humanity by rejecting sacrificial discourses and asserting their right to vulnerability; and contesting patriotic mourning by navigating pressures to frame colleagues as martyrs or to remain in devastated regions as proof of loyalty. The findings call for trauma‐informed TESOL that centers teacher wellbeing, reframes relocation and curricular adaptation as rights, and recognizes teachers not only as resilient caregivers but as grieving human beings entitled to care.\n"]