Crisis and Resilience go together...
We learn best under duress!
We all go through rough periods when we feel that being under duress, and responding to unexpected pressures coming from all angles drive us crazy....
We tend to other people's emotional needs, while ours go unattended.
And how should we respond to the daily crisis in our lives?
All the time the crisis is on us, we are feeling the demand, at the back of our heads, that we need to keep calm and collected!
Show that we are in complete control and full of resources...
I want to introduce two very helpful ideas:
FIRST, that sometimes the only help we ask for is the recognition from others that we are performing under duress, and at the same time doing a great job, regardless of extraordinary demands.
Because all of us need to be seen by people around us, doing what we are doing and going to the extremes to solve simultaneous challenges, we do need recognition.
What kind of recognition? the one kind that says that we are not invisible:
It's only a phrase that says: "Your task must be so hard to do...but you keep your smile, how do you do"?
SECOND: we need to legitimize all kinds of feelings as normal because they are.
Here I want to share a letter I received today:
"Dear Nora,
After just starting the book, I feel better finding an explanation for my uncontrolled emotions and behavior during these three years of marriage.
I believe my sessions with you would be most beneficial after I finish the book. In addition to my PA husband, my mother suffers from severe dementia...
Her care creates financial stress for me and for another sister living nearby..."
Do you see here what really makes my heart stop? she is dealing with no support from a PA husband, plus a mother with dementia...and she still feels that her desperate emotions need to be legitimized and made acceptable? This is the point where extreme loneliness meets external pressure to be under emotional control and reasonable behavior...This is a Crisis!
It stirred my memory when I was in a similarly desperate situation, and sometimes I could find myself wailing on the bathroom floor, as the only space which would allow me to preserve the kids from seeing me as an emotional ruin. I would emerge later, face washed, ready to prepare dinner, and cope with whatever our daily life was throwing at me and my children.
So, now, do you have any person around you, trying to survive any kind of crisis? give her recognition and say that you see the good battle they are fighting, and you are amazed at their resilience. And give permission to anybody you know, including yourself, to feel whatever you feel, because it is your own emotion, is legitimate and expresses perfectly the challenge of the moment...
And then, ignore all the rest: people who see you fighting and look the other way, people who want you to be always moderate, calm, and collected, while they heap hot coals on your head and watch you burn.
It will get better, I promise...
