Life after a curve ball: beginning the journey to acceptance

It may have been a life threatening illness or the news that we are being moved to a different team in work. However serious or trivial it appears to others, it has been enough to feel like a crisis to us and something that is forcing change upon us. So how do we deal with it?

Being familiar with the grief process can help us to understand the different stages that we may experience throughout our journey to acceptance. However, understanding alone is a poor substitute for inner change that brings us to a place where we can begin to make adjustments and look forward again though possibly with a different end in mind.

Crisis, although appearing negative in the first instance, can have many positive spin-offs. It is a great leveler. Regardless of our status or position, it will visit most of us at some stage of our life but does not usually spell the end, so take heart.

Even though we may feel that we can never get through this time, we can look at others and see evidence to the contrary. In fact, if we look to history we can see that many great leaders and people of courage were born out of times of adversity. Think of William Wallace making that famous speech to his army in the film “Braveheart” or the infamous, heartfelt dream of Martin Luther King. Stirring stuff!

Yet it is when we face our own struggles that we need to be able to dig deep within and rally our own fight and resilience so that we can echo the sentiment of Aragon in “Return of the King” when he says “a day may come when the courage of men fails, but it is not this day”.

In our next blog, we will look at things that we can do to help ourselves through the process and build on the valuable lessons that we have learnt.