Evolving From Emotional Trauma
Most people will acknowledge that life is not always easy. Sometimes it can be a monumental struggle just to keep going from one day to the next, depending on your personal circumstances. Grief inevitably touches everybody’s life at some stage. The same can be said of personal misfortune. You can make the most sensible decisions in life and still fall prey to bad luck. Everybody suffers to some degree. There are no exceptions.
How you react to suffering can determine your overall quality of life. Some people react to suffering by giving in or becoming bitter. They blame the world for their misfortune. They stagnate spiritually and mentally as a consequence of this. Others use misfortune to learn and evolve. If you’d rather make personal progress than become resentful when misfortune touches your life, read on for some tips to help you do just that.
Actively Deciding on Joy
You do not have to allow your feelings and thoughts to control you. For instance, you do not have to sit at home overthinking about misfortunes that you’ve suffered in your life. You always have the option of spending time with people who love you, or going out for a walk and looking at the beautiful things that surround you in nature. Similarly, you can choose to believe that your life will get better, or you can convince yourself that you are doomed to experience more bad luck.
You will find that if you change the way you look at the world and choose to be joyful, everything around you will change for the better. Your perception and mindset are very important. There is no prison worse than the one the human mind can potentially create for itself due to negative perceptions.
Feel Your Emotions Without Becoming Them
If you want to evolve from events that cause you suffering, such as the loss of a loved one or a painful breakup, it is important that you feel all of your emotions. That means that if you feel sadness you should acknowledge that feeling, and also observe how you react to it.
Recognizing a feeling is not the same thing as subconsciously trying to hold on to the emotion, or even become it. Once you accept a feeling, try to put it aside and focus on something more positive. Avoid making a home out of your emotions, or you will end up stagnating there.
Choose Good Company
There is a Japanese proverb that asserts that if you are not sure who someone is, you should look at their friends. The company you keep can either make or break you, depending on the choices you make. Do you surround yourself with toxic individuals who tend to blame others for the tragedies they experience? If so, their negativity will ultimately have an impact on the way you see the world. Similarly, if you surround yourself with the kind of people who use adversity as an opportunity for personal development, you will adopt a correspondingly positive outlook.
Faith And Hope
Never lose faith. Believing that good things will happen in your life is essential. Belief in a divine being who is watching over you can, of course, be immensely helpful. However, you don’t have to have religious faith to grow from any suffering you experience. Belief in love and/or the fundamental goodness of human nature can be enough to stop you from becoming bitter.
Similarly, hope is paramount if you want to grow from the misfortunes that befall you in life. Without hope of things getting better at some point in the future, it is very difficult to avoid developing a resentful attitude. Bear in mind that it is as common to be lucky as it is to be unlucky, especially when you have hope and some sincere determination to improve your life.
Setting Goals
It is easier to have hope for a better future if you set yourself some realistic goals. For instance, suppose you were made redundant and your skillset didn’t match the current employment market. If you used some of your redundancy money for educational purposes, you could fill the gaps in your knowledge.
Under this hypothetical set of circumstances, it would be a mistake to bite off more than you could chew by enrolling on a doctorate course, for example. Instead, it would be wiser to sign up for a course that allowed you to study remotely in your own time and perhaps set bigger educational goals once you had succeeded in finishing it. By setting manageable goals and smashing them one at a time, you would ultimately succeed in improving your skillset, and finding decent employment.
Acknowledging Blessings
When it comes to evolving from emotional trauma instead of becoming aggrieved, your own outlook is vitally significant. If you put your focus on what is missing in your life, an overall feeling of discontentment is assured. Instead, concentrate on what you actually have.
It could be that all you have is food in your belly and a roof over your head. Anyone with shelter and a full stomach is doing significantly better than a large number of people in the developing world.
Make sure you show gratitude for the things that you have in this world. Wake up and feel thankful that you have lived to see another day. Some people will not have that privilege.
Looking For Lessons
You are more likely to develop as a person if you can learn something from events that are difficult to process emotionally. Therefore, you should try to avoid seeing these events as things that happen to you. You are not a victim of circumstance. Misfortunes happen for you so that you can learn valuable life lessons.
Imagine, for example, that someone you have really deep feelings for breaks up with you at a point when you thought things were going well, claiming that they need more personal space. In this situation, you would meet with two choices. You could become bitter and resentful towards the person who had broken your heart. Alternatively, you could ask yourself whether or not your behavior in the relationship may have made your partner feel stifled. Were you being too needy and dependent? Answering such questions honestly would be more beneficial to you than simply blaming your ex for everything.
Good Health
If you take good care of your physical health, your psychological wellbeing will also improve. When you look and feel physically well, you become more confident in yourself. What’s more, when you spend time looking after your health via exercise, you will find that you are far less inclined to mope around at home thinking about unpleasant events from the past, which are now over. Focusing on your physical health is an investment in your present and future.
Serving Others
When you grow from suffering instead of letting it consume you, greater life experience will follow. You can use what you have learned via your mistakes and misfortunes to help other people avoid some of the same pitfalls and hurdles. Helping other people in this way is extremely rewarding. Serving others leads to great contentment. It can help you understand that you have not suffered needlessly. Conversely, too much time spent thinking about your own problems and misfortunes will only lead to feelings of depression and despair.
Don’t Miss Out
If you let the bitterness caused by past experiences consume and terrify you, it is easy to close your heart and mind to life’s great opportunities. Some events in life will hurt you. Pain is a part of the human experience. Other events will fill your heart with happiness and love. Consider the fact that refusing opportunities because you are afraid of pain means missing out on all of the happiness, too. Thankfully you can choose to change your perspectives and reactions today, and start living your best life.
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