Life goes on… Life always goes on, but many times without us wanting anything, we are slow to get hooked on the values that keep us going when it is suddenly cut short.

We want to predict what will happen and we dedicate a lot of energy to establish a stability that will give us the tranquility of the calm sea, but sometimes the weather changes, sometimes waves come and other times tsunamis appear that destroy not only what we have built but also what we have built , even the imagined that kept us excited and motivated us to get up every day in the morning. That is when we need resilience.

Resilience: a virtue to cope with bad times

What do we do when we’re going through a bad time? The alternative is so simple that it is cruel, the alternative is to keep on living , because living is also suffering, it is advancing without desire, it is bewilderment, fear, anger…

We have to give ourselves permission for this stage, after all it is a logical phase of the duel.

Society fills our life plan with a lot of premises that we have to fulfill to be happy and it seems that if we don’t, we are blamed for choosing to be unsatisfied, as if the emotional state could be programmed and kept active in joy mode until you decide to modify it. Unfortunately, this is not the case .

How do we deal with a loss process or a sad stage?

As for how we deal with these low moments, many different things happen. Some people who believe in it and luckily their sea is calm, can afford to look at other lagoons , consider that there may be swells or some unexpected storm or that now that the sea is calm it is a pity not to enjoy it having someone else to be with, a better job, a smaller nose…

Others are elite sportsmen in this discipline , they continuously avoid wave after wave, without time to enjoy the calm, they simply deal with everything that comes without paying attention to anything and at least while this busy stage lasts they do not feel too much discomfort, which however they notice later as a physical and emotional hangover, proportional to the whirlpool in which it has been immersed.

Other people get used to living with discomfort , but with the permanent feeling of being responsible, this reassures them at least gives them a sense of control, but the sea cannot be controlled either, as if it were the pool of my house, so in an unexpected way, without deserving it, without predicting it, a storm destroys our life and… what do I do next?

Learning to live differently

This is the most complicated of situations, where the pain is so intense that everything around you takes a back seat, where any comment complaining about something that is banal to you offends you, and plunges you into the silence of misunderstanding and sadness.

It is often said that the most bitter pains are intimate , they hurt so much that we do not want to expose ourselves to the double victimization of misunderstanding and we keep quiet, hearing like an annoying noise the great difficulties that others encounter in their daily lives and that you would give too much to exchange.

At that moment when you come to the conclusion that a single sentence of yours, a headline of your misfortunes, would completely minimize your problems, you load yourself with anger and you shout it out, to decide to opt again for silence, it does not compensate, in the end it does not compensate… And that’s when we need tools to get us out of the rut. The key tool is resilience , an aptitude that can be improved and that drives us to be able to get out of the most adverse situations

So how do we strengthen our resilience?

The most effective way to develop resilience is to adopt a series of habits and attitudes , in addition to establishing certain guidelines for self-discovery, such as the following:

  • Identify what you are experiencing on an emotional level.
  • identify somatizations that reflect what you feel in your body.
  • Questioning what you would do in that moment if you didn’t feel like that and trying to carry it out.
  • Make sense of every action you take.
  • Act to improve your life in the long run, not to eliminate the discomfort you feel.
  • Observe your automatic response pattern.
  • Create an alternative list of different strategies to deal with the discomfort.
  • Decide which of these serve to eliminate discomfort and which are to build a life that compensates.
  • Begin to consciously choose every decision that is usually made impulsively.
  • Allowing oneself to be wrong, accepting discomfort is the greatest learning and increases tolerance by becoming freer.

Learning to relativize

One of the most important aspects of resilience is to be clear that, whether we want to or not, we will never be able to make totally objective assessments about reality . This fact, which philosophy has been exploring for hundreds of years through one of its branches (epistemology), makes us ask this question: since we will always have to interpret what happens to us, what is the best way to do it?

The key to resilience is knowing that we must avoid being drawn into pessimism, which is also based on a constant series of inventions about what happens to us. The fact that pessimism and sadness keep us in the grip of unease does not make this reading of reality any more reliable.

Therefore, since whatever we do we will not get to know reality directly, let us choose to build an interpretation of our life that has a meaning that is important to us. It is a question of choosing, on equal terms, a life story that will allow us to continue moving forward.

From this ability, which requires time and practice, will be born resilience, which will serve to empower us and bring us a little closer to that happiness for which we have fought so hard.

Bibliographic references:

  • Forés, A. and Grané, J. (2008). Resilience. Growing from adversity. Plataforma Editorial Barcelona.
  • Triglia, Adrian; Regader, Bertrand; Garcia-Allen, Jonathan. (2016). Psychologically speaking. Paidós.