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Learning To Love Your Life
Resilience – The Key To Adapting To Your Changing Life
Why doesn’t everyone love their life? There are many reasons too numerous to mention, but let’s just say that your life is always changing, and change challenges us to adapt. Some changes are small and require little effort while other changes are like tsunamis. It’s really easy to tell you what a psychotherapist’s job is. It’s to help you develop resilience.
Resilience can be described as the ability to adjust to life’s changes as fully as you need to. Let’s take an easy example. You work for a company and you find that it is closing soon. Now maybe you have developed many skills and abilities in a field where you have lots of worth. You send out resumes, call friends and business contacts, get interviews and you find a better job. Or maybe you don’t have many skills, but you believe in yourself and you decide to go for training in a field that will need more workers. You get trained, and the school has placement services. You’ve done well and you get interviews and find a new job.
Am I nuts? This is 2010 and there is almost 10% unemployment! No one no, matter how good they are, can get a new job that easily. There are so many people looking for work that it’s scary, right? Well, that seems to be the case, but if you have the ability to keep calm, and analyze what you need to do next, you can work out this hurdle. That’s resilience.
OK here’s another example. You are leaving for college and you’ve never been away from home. It’s always been hard for you to make friends. You truly believe that you are not good looking, and people won’t want to make friends with you. Besides, you really didn’t want to go to college anyway. But you go. You are scared and you hide in your dorm room. Maybe you hear that a fraternity is having a party and they want to have new members. So you take a change and go. But you are so shy that to bolster your confidence you have too much to drink. You end up acting obnoxious and other students think you are a jerk. You feel embarrassed and you can’t concentrate on your coursework. By the middle of the first semester you stop going to classes, but you avoid disappointing your parents and you tell them everything is going well. Then you have finals and a paper is due the next day. You have no idea what to do so you go on line and you find a site that sells term papers. You use your father’s credit card and download it and hand it in. The only problem is that your professor has seen this paper many times before. Now you not only fail your course but the dean writes a letter to your parents telling them that you have been suspended for cheating. You have a panic attack which you think is a heart attack and the ambulance takes you to the emergency room. The doctor who examines you is just 26, fresh out of medical school with no manners. He tells your parents that you just had anxiety and you should learn to calm down. Except your parents have just lost $20,000 on a wasted semester at school and they are as mad as hell. Now you become depressed and won’t leave your room.
This is a common case when a young person has very little resilience, and as a result ends up believing that he is a failure. He’s not a failure, but he didn’t develop the resilience to stand up to his parents and tell them that he wanted to do something else with his life that he is good at and would enjoy. So who has the problem? Is it just the son who felt forced to go to college? Maybe his parents also dont have the resilience to accept that their son wanted to go to a trade school and become an electrician. If he lives on Long Island, or any affluent suburb, the parents might believe that they are the failures because their son did not become a doctor, lawyer, business executive etc. Maybe they had the problem from the beginning and never accepted their son. Since he never felt accepted he never learned to love himself for who he is, and to love the life he has.
Now what if your son or daughter discover that they are attracted to the same sex persons as themselves. If they live in the conservative south they had better have a lot of resilience in order to stand up to the criticism and prejudice that they may encounter. The painter Delacroix once said, “you love who you love.” If only everyone had the resilience to have tolerance. Well that’s not the case not only in the south, but all over the country. Take the military for example.
My goal as your therapist, is to create a supportive and caring environment in which you can learn and develop strategies to work out the problems you face, and develop resilience. I take your work life, family traditions, cultural and spiritual beliefs, and sexual identity into account while we are getting started. I am known worldwide for my journal articles, chapters, and book, EMDR and The Relational Imperative, but I approach psychotherapy with many therapeutic strategies so that I can work with you in a manner that is most comfortable and useful for you. This is your time and money, and what makes me effective is that I interact with you to develop the goals that YOU want to accomplish with the strategies that I have to offer. Some need to talk out your problems. Some need a cognitive behavioral approach; others know that EMDR is very useful for traumas that have happened to them. I think that you get the idea.
