A New Year
Aarin Harper
Think of it! It’s a new YEAR! Make this a gift to yourself.
It’s all new, the potential for, well, anything is in it. There are no mistakes or regrets in it. Even if you are carrying over a few less than stellar situations from last year - face these with a new perspective. Review and re-frame them as needed.
Reframing
Reframing is a tool taught in counseling that is practical and helpful. Let’s say you made a decision that didn’t turn out as you hoped, maybe it was a bad decision. (Gasp-we do make these - they are real!). You didn’t accomplish your goal and something negative happened. Bad things do happen, we have feelings that hurt, we hurt others, others hurt us… Life is a mix of good and bad.
I’ve been thinking that people expect there to not be “bad”, that all should be “good”. I see an odd contradiction however, where we don’t want to have bad or pain, but then we raise it up in an odd way. Well, specific types of pain anyway - those highlighted in the media - sexual assault, discrimination against protected classes…..sometimes these very hurtful, wrong, bad things can be worn as a badge or raised as a banner.
The “bad”.We self-medicate to stop it, we go to therapy to deal with it, we use social media to “share” it, but I think we sometimes have a difficult time walking through and living in it. We must do this - walk through and live in the “bad”, to get to the “good”. For now let’s say that “good” is resiliency and contentment.
Resiliency
Resiliency is simply our ability to bounce back when we get thrown down. Some throws are more forceful than others. Some can result in a soft bounce, then there are those that feel like we’ve been smashed against the wall, that our seams are splitting and it’s not from laughing.
Resiliency only comes from the “through” and the “in”. In Brene Brown’s book, Rising Strong, she talks a lot about resiliency coming from practice. The practice of bouncing back from many different throws, or situations. (If I was a baseball fan I could use the pitches here to fully illustrate my point - I’ll leave this to you and your baseball experience to consider or not.) The need to practice is unfortunate but true. Check out this full length Super Soul Sunday interview by Oprah Winfrey with Brene Brown discussing resilience.
So this year, join me in learning to live life well! Let’s see the bad or problems that get thrown our way differently. An 83 year old therapist friend of mine used to say, “Problems are just opportunities that you need work clothes for.”