Focusing on past experiences and sources of personal strength can help you learn about what strategies for building resilience might work for you. By exploring answers to the following questions about yourself and your reactions to challenging life events, you may discover how you can respond effectively to difficult situations in your life. Some Questions to Ask Yourself.
Consider the following:
- What kinds of events have been most stressful for me?
- How have those events typically affected me?
- Have I found it helpful to think of important people in my life when I am distressed?
- To whom have I reached out for support in working through a traumatic or stressful experience?
- What have I learned about myself and my interactions with others during difficult times?
- Has it been helpful for me to assist someone else going through a similar experience?
- Have I been able to overcome obstacles, and if so, how?
- What has helped make me feel more hopeful about the future?
Staying Flexible
Resilience involves maintaining flexibility and balance in your life as you deal with stressful circumstances and traumatic events. This happens in several ways, including:
- Letting yourself experience strong emotions, and also realizing when you may need to avoid experiencing them at times in order to continue functioning
- Stepping forward and taking action to deal with your problems and meet the demands of daily living, and also stepping back to rest and reenergize yourself
- Spending time with loved ones to gain support and encouragement, and also nurturing yourself
- Relying on others, and also relying on yourself
Places To Look For Help
Getting help when you need it is crucial in building your resilience. Beyond caring family members and friends, people often find it helpful to turn to:
i) Self-help and support groups:
Such community groups can aid people struggling with hardships such as the death of a loved one. By sharing information, ideas, and emotions, group participants can assist one another and find comfort in knowing that they are not alone in experiencing difficulty.
ii) Books and other publications:
By people who have successfully managed adverse situations such as surviving cancer. These stories can motivate readers to find a strategy that might work for them personally.
iii) Online resources:
Information on the web can be a helpful source of ideas, though the quality of information varies among sources. For many people, using their own resources and the kinds of help listed above may be sufficient for building resilience. At times, however, an individual might get stuck or have difficulty making progress on the road to resilience.
iv) A licensed mental health professional:
Such as a psychologist , aromatherapist can assist people in developing an appropriate strategy for moving forward. It is important to get professional help if you feel like you are unable to function or perform basic activities of daily living as a result of a traumatic or other stressful life experience.
Different people tend to be comfortable with somewhat different styles of interaction. A person should feel at ease and have good rapport in working with a aromatherapist and other health professional or participating in a support group.
Continuing On Your Journey
- To help summarize several of the main points, think of resilience as similar to taking a raft trip down a river.
- On a river, you may encounter rapids, turns, slow water, and shallows. As in life, the changes you experience affect you differently along the way.
- In traveling the river, it helps to have knowledge about it and past experience in dealing with it. Your journey should be guided by a plan, a strategy that you consider likely to work well for you.
- Perseverance and trust in your ability to work your way around boulders and other obstacles are important.
- You can gain courage and insight by successfully navigating your way through white water.
- Trusted companions who accompany you on the journey can be especially helpful for dealing with rapids, upstream currents, and other difficult stretches of the river.
- You can climb out to rest alongside the river. But to get to the end of your journey, you need to get back in the raft and continue.
Post Traumatic Growth Inventory
Before answering the following questions, focus on one traumatic or life altering event that has occurred in your life.
Please indicate the general experience you are thinking of:
- Loss of a loved one
- Chronic or acute illness
- Violent or abusive crime
- Accident or injury
- Disaster
- Job loss
- Financial hardship
- Career or location change/move
- Change in family responsibility
- Divorce
- Retirement
- Combat
- Other
Action Exercises
Take a few minutes each day and sit quietly where you cannot be disturbed. During this time, let your mind relax and just think about your exertion and activities, without stress or pressure.
In almost every case, during this time of solitude, you will receive wonderful insights and ideas that will save you enormous amounts of time when you apply them back on the daily life. Often you will experience breakthroughs that will change the direction of your life and persona.
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