Are You Facing Adversity

Are you facing adversity? That’s an interesting question. It implies first, that you’re in the midst of a tough time in your life; and second, that you’re not ignoring it or running away from it, but that you have turned your face into the storm, so to speak. So let me ask it again, are you facing adversity?
I have spent much of my working life helping people who have been in the midst of many kinds of adversity and I have experienced my share of adversity. Together, these experiences have given me the opportunity to notice what helps and what doesn’t when people are in tough times. It appears to me that facing adversity successfully includes these five actions or processes:
1. Face it
2. Get your feet under you
3. Clean up the mess
4. Cope with the fallout
5. Dig for the deeper meaning and the hidden benefit

Featured Quote

The psychological truth in “The Red Shoes” is that a woman’s meaningful life can be pried, threatened, robbed or seduced away from her unless she holds on to or retrieves her basic joy and wild worth. The tale calls our attention to traps and poisons we too easily take onto ourselves when we are caught in a famine of wild soul.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves