Resiliency - do you have it?

It’s clear that sooner or later good things and not-so-good things will happen to you. Now we tend to not worry when good things are happening because we feel great, feel loved, believe we’re respected and so forth. Yet, when ‘bad’ things happen we often discover that we don’t know how to react, what to think OR we slip into behaviours that are in the long run, harmful. I mean we start thinking that we’re ‘victims’, that we are to be pitied, that we are unable to cope. Why does this happen?

I can’t really answer in a short blog, but I can say what I’ve noticed over the years. The bottom line is when you hit your emotional bottom that you can be a ‘victim’ of circumstance, but you needn’t remain a victim of life. Do you see the difference? If you remain in a victim state of mind, or in an emotional wasteland, you are ensuring that whatever has happened will control the rest of your life. When you get stuck in that kind of space you abscond all responsibility for your life and become lost. A shadow.

What you can do when you hit bottom, or see the bottom coming (a pre-emptive move is a good thing) is that you find someone who can help you become more objective about the event in order to gather another perspective. You do this in steps like …. experiencing the value of your emotional responses and why they are necessary and when to let it go. You recognize the beauty of your inner wisdom. You start to learn from others who have done this journey before you. You start to devleop and practice your recovery process. You start to look for ways to start taking responsibility for your own well-being. In short, with help and with some time, you get up, and start again. And your life starts to become rich again. If something tragic has happened, it’s not your old life that you find but a new kind of normal that can, over time, develop into something unexpected. Your degree of resiliency, the ability to move from being a victim back to being ‘you,’ is predicated on many factors including life experience, spiritual practices, general health, internal strength, life perspective, and mental wellness.

Shifting from victim thinking to a healthier state may seem impossible to do some times, and I’m not saying that it’s necessarily an easy thing to do – but you can do it. Yes, it takes time and it take energy. And it will take courage and persistence. I’ve witnessed extraordinary outcomes from people who thought their world had ended. Being a victim of circumstances in one thing – choosing to remain a ‘victim’ is something quite different.

Cheryl Charron
MA BA Adv. CPC CRC MAIS CHT MNLP