I’ve redefined my family structure, changed my support system, modified my beliefs, altered my purpose in life, and even changed my name. No, I am not a criminal on-the-run. Life happened and each detour led to shifts in my identity. I believe that these shifts matter. They mark where you are on the map of personal growth. Few people enjoy straight trajectories. Most of us find ourselves on detours from where we thought we were headed. Our detours shape our attitudes, personalities, and relationships. They make us more interesting. Most detours are necessary because something or someone blocked the path we intended to take. Detours can be blessings in disguiBrenWisese, if we see the value in resilience. Do you embrace unexpected shifts in your life?
For those of you who already know this truth, that change = being alive, this blog may help you organize what you know in a way that helps someone else. So, read on.
I worked with stressed out, traumatized, discouraged people for years. They’ve shared everything from the horrific to smaller scale private agony. As I listened and searched for ways to ease the pain of their experiences, I observed that some came to terms with the things they cannot change and others slid into bitter, unhappy lives devoid of hope. Please choose to join the resilient ones. You will never regret it. I myself have been on that precipice of despair several times after deeply wounding experiences. It is real. It can scare the hell out of you, no matter how strong you thought you were.
Learning to redefine who you are is one of the answers to overcoming the pain. When I worked with people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (in Houston), I saw the extreme version of surviving by becoming someone else. One patient had 51 personalities, each had a different role in protecting the original self. Later, I learned how combat soldiers had to change their perspective to survive. Fortunately, most people do not have to use extreme survival measures but they certainly need to reset what they believe about themselves after bad experiences and failures. They need to broaden their capacity to fight against the tyranny of the critical voice and a tendency to view the world as unsafe. They certainly need to find purpose in their future in spite of what happened. Resilience allows a person to rise from the ashes. Resilient seems like an easy thing to be, but it is not. Sometimes we fool ourselves into believing that we are resilient, when we are dying inside. In that case, we are simply good pretenders until we can’t pretend any more. What I offer in today’s blog is 7 Steps to Overcome Life-Shattering Experiences. Elaboration on these steps will follow in the next few blogs. Check these out and please let me know what you think.
7 Steps to Overcoming Life-Shattering Experiences
Step 1: Stop denying, minimizing, or trying to make it not have happened. Radical acceptance of the fact that, like it or not, this experience changed you, is the only way to recover.
Step 2: Be curious and open to understanding the ways the experience affected you. Recognize how brave you were then and are now.
Step 3: Give a complete account to yourself and to at least one other human.
Step 4: Embrace the suck. You will be blindsided by flashbacks or memories when you least expect it. That memory can drag you back as if the experience just happened, no matter how much time has passed. The emotion brain has no time or date stamp, i.e. when horrible memories are triggered, it takes a lot of skill and practice to switch to your rational mind when flooded by painful memory. Don’t get lost and don’t quit.
Step 5: Let go of living angry or scared. Anger, fear, and despair suck the life out of you. The antidote is to release, release, and release again, as often as needed. Breathe, slow down, learn to regulate your poly-vagal nervous system. Surf the wave.
Step 7: Convince yourself that you can turn every bad experience into a valuable life lesson. The fight is not over when you fail. It is over when you quit. Don’t quit. Take a time out, but return to finding meaning and transforming what happened into a new purpose.
Commit to doing the work of redefining who you are. It’s worth it. Nothing strange about seeing yourself in a new light or even changing direction because of a healthy perspective shift.
KEYWORDS: resilience, identity shifts, overcoming trauma, positive living