Coping with Difficult Times and Crises

Coping with Difficult Times and Crises

When we are experiencing a sudden change in our lives it can be a very distressing time, but hopefully we can come through the time with added wisdom, more empathy, and a stronger sense of our resources and strengths.

Here are some examples of common troubling times that people experience:  a relationship ends, a car accident, yours or another’s illness or death, a natural disaster, a failure at school, loss of a job,  injury,  or disability, feeling suicidal, financial loss or difficulty, etc.

The first adaptive step you might take is to acknowledge this is a crisis or a difficult time.  Acknowledgement helps for a variety of reasons such as you can be less harsh on yourself and others involved; you can provide compassion for yourself and others.   It should also help you see  that this is an extraordinary time for you and that you may need extraordinary levels of self-care, and that’s OK.

In this same vein you can access more resources – now is the time to ask for help, delegate chores to others less affected, take some time off work, call for a counselling appointment, use the crisis line, use your spiritual resources, talk to friends,  pamper yourself, etc.   Ask friends to do something specific for you such as bring over dinner, give you a call, come over and help clean up, pick you up at the airport, or keep you company at the hospital, etc.  Stating the specific task and when (approximate) makes it easy for people to help because most people do want to be helpful but do not know how.

Acknowledging that you are in crisis can also give you permission to soothe yourself with enjoyable activities such as music, go for a walk, have a relaxing coffee or tea, read a book, exercise, watch a movie, play a video game.  Do not drink, use drugs, or gamble as the risk of addiction is heightened during a crisis.

Self-care!  If there is one thing that I want clients to take from therapy is the concept of self-care.  Take care of yourself so that you can take care of others.  In times of crisis, self-care is very difficult to maintain.  You must make it a priority – at least minimal self-care such as get out of bed, eat something nutritious, listen to music, talk to someone, pray or meditate, etc.

Because crises often involve a great deal of uncertainty or “ambiguous stimuli” such as you don’t know how you’ll continue to work and keep your job, how you’ll manage, where your next meal will come from, if you will heal, or whether you can live without a loved one in your life.  Humans, and I suspect other animals, really don’t do well with uncertainty or not knowing the meaning or the outcome.  Therefore the next adaptive step we can do is to acknowledge the uncertainty, the unknown meanings and outcomes and just sit and tolerate the uncertainty.  Please note that I said “tolerate” not “like” or even be OK with uncertainty.

Do not jump to conclusions just to avoid the uncertainty and the unknown meaning.  The urge to jump to a conclusion is strong but the conclusions we jump to are often the worst case scenarios or the most negative because we’ve been trained to lower our expectations to protect ourselves from disappointment.   Another reason not to jump to conclusions is that we tend to preclude the opportunities that are inherent in a crisis.  More than one person has told me that a crisis in their life turned out in the end, to be the best thing:  they got their dream job, a better car, more devoted partner, found independence, etc.

The Chinese word for ‘crisis’ has the two following meanings:  danger and opportunity.  Perhaps you can already see the opportunity in the crisis or perhaps, at the very least, this might be a good way of intentionally trying to strategically deal with the problem.

To summarize, this is general advice for a difficult time in your life:  acknowledge that it’s a difficult time, exercise greater self-compassion and self care, ask for help from friends, family and professionals, don’t jump to conclusions, search for the possible opportunities that will emerge from the change, don’t do anything that has a possible addictive element and instead plan enjoyable and soothing activities.

If you have read this far then you probably have acknowledged that this is a difficult time for you so from the list above what are one to three things you could do in the next few days to take care of yourself?

by Fay Ferris