Are You Facing Adversity

old man and dog on rock watching ocean stormAre 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

to attain to a higher mode of existence, gestation and birth must be repeated; but they are repeated ritually, symbolically. (Eliade, 1963) The context of this symbolic action is always sacred space.

— Robert L. Moore, PhD, Ritual, Sacred Space, and Healing: The Psychoanalyst as Ritual Elder. Chapter in the book, Liminality and Transitional Phenomena, edited by Nathan Schwarts-Salant and Murray Stein