When we feel like reacting negatively to someone, they are helping to bring out what we haven’t healed in ourselves. How can there be blame and anger towards those that bring up our shadows? Instead, we could replace our resentment with compassion for ourselves and those who hurt us.
We all have invisible wounds and we’ll do anything to avoid them being touched. If someone else accidentally touches our wounds, we act as if they caused them. But, they didn’t cause them, and they cannot heal them. They are our wounds and we have the power to heal them.
When you develop coping strategies, you’re able to build resilience. You’re able to see things in a better perspective and you’ll feel much better about how you handled a certain situation.
In some situations, despite our best efforts, we still can’t fix the problems we find ourselves in. Coping strategies can help you learn to accept situations that are beyond your control and find ways to help you feel better even if the problem still exists.
Being able to stop and think before reacting, to generate alternative solutions, weighing consequences of decisions before you act, and having openness to seeking support when needed, will help build your resilience to adversity.
Resilience uses four basic skills: awareness (noticing what is going on around you and inside your head); rational thinking; reaching out (how we call upon others to help us meet the challenges we face); fitness (our mental/physical ability to cope with the challenges without becoming ill).
Resilience relies on different skills and draws on various sources of help, including rational thinking skills, physical and mental health, and your relationships with those around you.
“Resilience” is the ability to cope with and rise to the inevitable challenges, problems and set-backs you meet in the course of your life, and come back stronger from them. It is a life skill that anyone can learn and develop.
Start the new year with an empty jar and fill it with notes about good things that happen. Next New Years Eve, empty it and see what awesome stuff happened this year.
You have stories, but you are not your stories. You have labels, but you are not your labels. Make a list of everything you are, maybe 200 things. Return to your list regularly: keep adding to it or cross a few things out, which are no longer true for you.