Going Through a Difficult and/or Traumatic Time?

Going through a difficult and/or traumatic time can completely scramble your thinking capacity and
ability to make sense of everything that is happening.

Allowing yourself to be thrown in to this roller coaster of though and emotion does not help to resolve the challenges that you are experiencing, and it becomes more challenging if you are responsible for the well-being of other, while can barely stand up straight yourself.

Guiding people through such a period can be complicated, especially when such a person is close to you.  How do you then generate some kind of rationality in a situation that is completely void of anything rational – this is what I suggest:

First you must write.  Journaling is significantly important.  Writing stuff down forces you to work from a maddening 30 000 plus thoughts a day that is racing through your brain, not allowing you any clear though or action, to writing at a pace of 50 odd words per minute.  It forces you to make sense of what is happening by forcing all these thoughts through a funnel – to a sentence that (sort off) make sense.

Next step is to determine which of these thoughts need some kind of action – getting through difficult time requires you to make decisions and act, otherwise you will sink into the well of desolation.  Use the Wheel of Life to structure these thoughts and then prioritise.  Identify what needs to be attended to first – and start by taking small steps.

Use a problem-solving method to get to appropriate solutions.  Write the process down.  Give every problem a name, gather information, analyse the problem, identify criteria that you will use to evaluate options, know what you want to achieve, identify options, evaluate and decide, implement and make corrective actions as you go along. 

Schedule your day, week, month, year – create structure and some kind of certainty.  Schedule every aspect of your Wheel of Life into your diary – what you schedule become an objective.  If you don’t see it, it will not be done.  Start small, but start.

Celebrate every positive result and achievement, so that you can build your confidence in rebuilding your life.  Be brave – fight for yourself.  Show up!

Remember – you cannot give what you don’t have!

What is more important – to increase your positive thoughts or the decease your negative thinking?

 Here are some interesting points:

To minimise negative thinking is more important than to increase positive thinking.

Negative thinking shows up as negative self-talk.

We are not aware of 70% of our negative thinking.  Unperceived.

Negative thinking shows up in our speech as complaining, criticising, concern about stuff outside of your control, commiserating and catastrophising.

We must learn to cut out the negative thinking so that we can become more confident in ourselves. How do we fight back against negative self-talk?  We must catch it (become aware of the negative self-talk), we must check it against reality (create doubt) and change it to positive (reframe it to e.g. I am not ….).

Complaining must become solution-focused dialogue

Criticising must become constructive feedback.

Concern must become constructive caution.

Commiserating must become empathetic engagement.

Catastrophising must become proportional perspective, with the focus on actionable steps.

Self-imposed change is therefore required.   Have a brilliant and constantly improving 2025!

“If you must doubt something, doubt your limits.” Price Pritchett

Based on the work of Price Pritchett & Arley Hoskin.