How To Deal With (And Get OVER) The Roughest Times In Your Life

Life is not a bowl of cherries…it's more like the box of chocolates Forrest Gump's mother told him about…you never know what you're going to get.

Those chocolates you'd rather not be eating, they're what drive people to therapy. When I consider the issues people often bring to therapy…coping with a loss, a personal failure, an empty nest, a divorce…it seems like some bounce back much more quickly than others. What's the magic ingredient?

A new theory of adaptability suggests that diversifying your personal portfolio is a sustainable method of boosting your resilience to the ups and downs of life.

Do you know how your investment portfolio is supposed to be diversified? You have stocks, bonds, mutual funds, property and the like, some riskier than others. While you probably won't get rich quick, you will avoid taking a hard fall that totally wipes you out. A diversified portfolio makes your financial well-being more resilient to the ups and downs of the market.

There is evidence that expanding the number of roles, relationships and experiences in your life provides a kind of personal diversification that increases emotional resilience, that ability to bounce back, along with happiness and self-esteem.

Read more here...

3 Recovery Skills You Need Post-Infidelity

After the infidelity is discovered, even the "injured" party has work to do. What?  I just got beaten to a bloody pulp emotionally, and I’m the one who has work to do? Yes, it’s hard to think about making changes while you’re off-balance from pain and shock. Whether married, never-married, separated or divorced, you’ve been traumatized and your whole sense of self is undermined. This is one of those proverbial growth opportunities. It’s a great time to work out a recovery plan. You’ll heal, regain your confidence and you may be even better than before.

People tend to think you either have these skills or you don’t. Nothing could be farther from the truth. With a little work, everyone can improve and develop them.

Self-care. Talking with friends, seeing funny movies, taking extra yoga classes, running more, or getting a massage are all self-care strategies. They help create the inner space you need to feel invigorated and renewed. Beware of anything or anyone that’s an energy vampire. Emphasize things that re-create your sense of balance. Rely on your support system.  Engage in healthy behaviors like eating right, sleeping enough and exercise.  Use the time to reflect, accept, heal and find your resilience.

Resilience. Find a balance between living in the past, present and future. Spend most of your time in the present. Trying to understand the past is useful, but don’t take up permanent residence there. Instead, focus on savoring the good things happening right now. Savor the times when you’re feeling almost like your old self. This will give you the energy you need to bounce back. Then you can focus on your future goals with more optimism.

Optimism. Listen to the dialogue in your head and make sure it accurately reflects reality, not the distorted thinking our inner critic spins after a loss. When pessimistic thoughts come up (I am unlovable), dispute them (Plenty of people love me). Embrace positive thinking (I will find another, healthier relationship). Identify the learning (OMG, I did ignore the warning signs). But don’t beat yourself up over mistakes. Just make a correction (I will definitely pay more attention to those red flags in my next relationship). Minimize negative thinking and emphasize positive thinking.

Self-care, resilience and optimism are recovery skills you can always build on. They’re a great foundation for moving into the future because they facilitate healing, create a sense of balance, and increase energy and confidence. Now you can figure out what new goals you need to be working toward. Anything is possible with this solid set of skills. Once you fine-tune your recovery skills, you’re even better than you were before.

Happy listening with I'm Better Than I Used To Be, Tim McGraw

Parenting Resilient Kids

In How to Land Your Kid in Therapy, Lori Gottlieb talks about how privileged kids grow up to have self-esteem and coping problems.  The problem?  You guessed it.  Parenting.

Gottlieb isn’t talking about parents being abusive or neglectful, she’s talking about a kind of emotional overindulgence.  It’s about the idea that we have to make our kids happy.  All the time.  And we have to make sure they’re never unhappy.  Ever.

What’s the problem with this?  If we protect kids from any type of emotional upset, how do they learn to cope with discomfort?  If we protect them from anything that doesn’t go their way, how do they respond when things don’t go their way as adults?  How to they develop resilience?

I’m recalling a friend telling me, totally calmly, that she’d have to call me back.  Her son was calling her from college.  She was at her job in New York.  He wanted her to give him directions to a job interview…in Colorado.  Seriously?  She thought it was totally fine.

I’m also recalling the time I had my son, 4 years old or so, in a time out in the post office and was told by a woman, You should be ashamed.  Of what?  Parenting authoritatively?  It’s on such occasions I’m tempted to give a stranger my card and suggest they get in touch about any parenting problems they may have in the future.

Gottlieb references Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of theTiger Mother on how we try to protect our kids from the pain of competition and pretend that average achievement is superior.  Who are we helping with that?

My suggestions:

*Let your child make their own apologies, whether it’s to the shopkeeper after they’ve taken a candy bar or their friend, after they’ve hurt them.

*Let your child negotiate their own issues with teachers, whether it’s about a grade they didn't like or an assignment they need more time on.

*Be honest about their weaknesses, and their strengths.

*Use rewards appropriately, i.e., when they’ve done something worthy, not just because you don’t want them to feel bad.

*Be a good coach, i.e., work on how your child might do and say things, but don’t do or say it for them.

You’re going to watch your child go through all manner of losses, failures and hurts.  It’s all going to make them stronger.

House in the Country, Blood Sweat & Tears

Hang Tough: Challenge Yourself

So this guy, Troy Espiritu, starts running ultramarathons at 35. The guy’s a podiatrist with 4 kids.  The article in Psychology Today is about getting tough, not so you can run 100 miles, but so you can handle challenges.   We know about the things you’re supposed to do to hang tough:  have a network to rely on, exercise, use reward and challenge yourself.  It’s this last one that caught my eye. 

What does it take you push your limits?  Charles A. Morgan, a psychologist at Yale, believes that tackling challenges makes us tougher.  You have to believe in yourself to tackle new challenges. And succeeding at new challenges makes us more confident.  But the first step is to be willing to give it a shot.  After all, you don’t have to succeed every time, do you?

Why bother?  Of course, whatever does not kill you will make you stronger.  So getting stronger and tougher means getting ready for the inevitable challenges life will bring.  But I think there’s also an element of joy in the process.  As you get stronger you realize you can rise to the challenge.  You realize accomplishing a higher goal is fun and a powerfully liberating experience.  You feel more confident in other things. 

I’m always wary when friends and clients say, when [fill in the blank] happens (usually it’s someone dying or your kid leaving for college or another loss), I’m going to fall apart…I won’t be able to take it…It’ll be unbearable…or some variation on this theme.  What I usually want to say is something along the lines of, If you think that way, you’re surely setting yourself up for failure…Few things are that terrible…Come one, you’re tougher than that.

Challenging yourself is a way to inoculate against the inevitable calamity.  You can challenge yourself in any area: social, emotional, spiritual, physical, intellectual, career, hobby.  Your challenges could include, among other things, running a half-marathon, publishing a book and becoming an accomplished yogini.  How would you like to hang tough?

Hoping I don’t lose readers, I’m liking The Climb, Miley Cyrus, for this.

Believing is Seeing

I borrowed that line from Erik Weihenmayer, who you can see crossing a crevasse on Everest. Oh yeah, he’s gay, excuse me, he’s blind. A news anchor’s error that he repeats and features on his website, telling you something about his sense of humor. That and his love of what he calls a friend’s positive pessimism. Eg., It may be raining, but at least it’s windy. I plan to use positive pessimism for those who insist on taking themselves way too seriously.

I had a wonderful opportunity to see Erik speak the other night. He’s a motivational speaker when not climbing mountains or helping other groups of challenged people (injured vets, blind children and others) learn to climb.

Early on when he completely lost his sight, he thought that the adventures of his life were over. Soon he realized they were just beginning. And I’ll say they were. He’s climbed the highest peaks on 7 continents, something most of us sighted folk wouldn’t even dream of. Proving once again, that whatever doesn’t kill you…

I like the way he talks about people falling into three categories. Quitters, campers and climbers. I’m sure I don’t have to explain the quitters. The campers are interesting. They get to a certain level, and then camp out there. It could be okay. Or not. The climbers though, they keep on going, up and up and up.

When you believe, you can see how far you’re able to go. So what are you? Quitter, camper or climber?  What do you want to be starting right now?

Whatever Does Not Kill You Makes You Stronger

Does it help to know that the adversity you’re experiencing today is going to make you tougher and better able to handle the adversity you’ll experience at some unknown point in the future? I think it might. It’s like working out and developing muscles you never knew you could have.

Consider the possibilities. You’ve just lost your job, learned you have a potentially serious medical condition, broke up with your boyfriend…or all three at once. Just kidding on that last. Something bad happens and you have to deal with it. And you do. You either use a tried and true coping strategy, or you develop a new one to cope.

A recent study showed that having some amount of adversity, not too much but not too little either, does help us cope in future situations and makes us psychologically healthier. It’s like developing physical toughness by lifting weights, but this is mental toughness, or resilience.

Adopting the mindset that the trial of today is going to lead to more strength in the future is a positive attitude that can only serve you well. We learn how to cope with problems by doing so. We learn that we can cope with problems by seeing ourselves do it.

Next time you have one of those situations, ask yourself, how has this helped me grow and be stronger? What coping muscles have I strengthened or developed? And know that whatever does not kill you will, in fact, make you stronger.

Music to be strong by: County Strong, Gwyneth Paltrow

Electronic Anthropomorphism

Someone actually studied how anthropomorphism toward computer terminals affected loyalty to the terminal .

How did I learn this, you ask? I was wondering if anyone studied electronic anthropomorphism.

You see, when I returned from my two weeks away from my computer, it started misbehaving. The screen would go black, or blue. It was very unresponsive at times. I started getting pretty peeved with it. I decided it was time for a replacement. Normally, I’m quite monogamous. But it had, after all, lived a full life. Five years for a laptop in daily use is about what we’d expect. Less than a marriage, but more than a fling.

There’s an interesting article, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, which attempts to explain the conditions under which we are more or less like to anthropomorphize. On the basis of the article, I might conclude that I’m lacking in adequate human relationships or that my relative novice status vis-à-vis machines enables me to react as if the machine was intentionally willing me harm.

Now the replacement machine is almost completely functional for my purposes, I’m wondering is the Vista system is, in fact, plotting my demise. Really, it’s not bad I told a friend earlier this evening. But now, as the night wears on, I’m beginning to wonder. Multiple internet explorer screens appearing unbidden. Outlook address book that is clearly my new bad boy.

But am I going to let it get in my way? Heck no. It’s just another bounce back opportunity. I’m working, very slowly at this point, on my next newsletter which I think will be about resilience. One way to look at resilience is to think of the ability to bounce back, which I have in exceptional abundance I’m told.

You see even with this computer snafu, I’m still working on ideas that I’m sure will come in handy at some point. After all, there was R2-D2, the i-Cybie and Blade Runner’s replicant, Rachael; and was Deckard a replicant after all? Who knows, maybe I’ll write the next 2001.

When the going gets tough...

the tough get going. But how?

A friend thought a good topic for my next newsletter (check it out at http://www.drjudithtutin.com/ ) would be: what to do, and what not to do, when things go bad, when stuff happens. Like losing a job, divorce, death of friends and family, and so on.

The first thing that came to mind was something I was reading about recently. Daniel Gilbert, in "Stumbling on Happiness" (a book for serious readers only) spends a fair amount of time talking about how resilient people are when dealing with traumatic situations. We're all familiar with the notion, which he also discusses, of personal growth occurring in the aftermath of tragedy.

So, step one, decide you're going to get through this and you might even be a better, stronger, fill-in-the-blank-er person as a result.

In addition to changing some of the thinking patterns we can get stuck in (see previous blog in November about Loss), there are other helpful steps to take.

Write about it. Write about feelings: good, bad and ugly. Write about thoughts: good, bad and ugly. Don't censor. Write what you think and feel. Sometimes this process helps move us through difficulties.

Talk about it. That's what friends are for. Don't tell me they're sick of hearing about it. They may be, but that's still what they're there for and, if the proverbial shoe was on the other foot, you'd listen to them, I hope.

Listen to people. Sometimes your friend, coach, therapist, even mother, has a good idea. Try to consider the input people give you and see if there's something you can use.

Do what works for you. Cope, by whatever means you usually cope. Exercise, clean, read, watch movies, listen to music, do anything that relaxes you, clears your mind, gives you a fresh start.

Try something new. Make a plan to move forward and try to get on with it. Keep moving even if you can only take baby steps.

Need more help? Try a coach or therapist.