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

A child will integrate only those experiences that her primary care-givers can accept and hold, and will exclude from awareness those thoughts, feelings and behaviors that might disrupt her most crucial attachment relationships. These unacceptable experiences then remain undeveloped, unintegrated, and impossible to verbalize. They become … nearly unreachable places in the psyche that hold implicit experiences of relational trauma.

— Linda Cunningham, Sandplay and the Clinical Relationship