How To Deal with an EMOTIONAL SETBACK
How do you deal with a very real situation, such as a handicapped child, or loss of a job, or a death in the family and focus on your desired reality?
Sounds hard but not if you come to an important realization.
Humans need the contrast between good and bad experiences to truly appreciate the whole spectrum of the emotional experiences. If you want to know joy, you must have experienced heartache. If you want to know what it is like to really like someone, you must have experienced disliking someone. It goes for the senses too, not just emotions. For instance, you must know a beautiful scent to recognize a noxious smell. You must know hot temperatures to experience cold temperatures. To describe colors, you must have seen a spectrum of colors. This is a hermetic principle referred to as the law of polarity and this law applies to every possible human experience.
So, to answer the original question: How to deal with a very real situation that is not wanted, not desired, you have to know what is wanted and what is desired and allow what we don’t want to encourage us towards what we do want.
Think of it this way.
If humans were just given everything they wanted, and did not have to strive for things, they would just get bored, unappreciative, numb and disengaged. When we look at what humans are preoccupied with, they are fixated with overcoming, they love adventure, and they thrive when they are creating.
We aren't drawn to stories of people having it all unless we know they figured out how to create having it all. We do not love sports team that win every single game and consistently dominate the other teams. We love the underdogs who struggle and then create triumph, and we love their stories of victory. We love the rags to riches stories. We seek out the Hero's journey. Look at Hollywood and you will see a theme of people overcoming all kinds of setbacks. The film industry gives us what we want. Think of your favorite movies, and novels for that matter, and the theme is there!
Adventure! Scarcity to abundance! Love! Triumph!
Humans love overcoming and conquering their setbacks!
Notice too that people who don’t have a lot going on in their lives often create drama. They usually overreact to their circumstances and they repeat their stories over and over. I think this is evidence that they are stimulated by the spectacle of how humans interact. This is not to say we enjoy the drama, the crisis, or the tragedy, no not all. But we are obsessed with it and we tend to rubberneck if we see others going through something. We tend to project on people who are going through tough situations and we watch others who are dealing with hard circumstances. We learn about our nature as humans by observing how we deal with setbacks in ourselves and others.
The takeaway is that humans like to overcome challenges. Without the continuum of life experiences, from bad outcomes to good outcomes, there would be nothing to overcome.
Humans also love creating!
We acknowledged that on one end of the continuum people are preoccupied with overcoming drama and tragedy and on the other end of the continuum they love creating: creating a life they love, creating relationships they love, creating work they love, creating art, creating recipes, you name it, humans love creating. They are forever remodeling their homes, refreshing their wardrobes, making or purchasing accessories, buying tech stuff, learning new things. And on our way to creating, manifesting what we love, there are times when everything is on track and we are headed straight into pure bliss, pure enjoyment; but then a setback occurs. A challenge presents itself. A tragedy erupts. What happens is an emotional chain reaction, our emotional balance gets thrown off course, and our focus gets pulled from the life we love that we are creating. Then, we lose focus on the desire that we want to create.
If losing focus on what we love is not enough, we go one step further. We make it personal that the tragedy, the setback, occurred. We internalize the challenge or the difficult people we have to deal with, and we talk about it, replay it in our minds, have extreme emotions, and then we have to clean it up. So, whether your 3 year old spills grape juice on your white sofa or the boss fires you when you expect to be promoted or your spouse decides they want a break from the marriage -- No matter the circumstance, we internalize it and make it personal and then extreme emotion results.
Curiously, no one is immune from this potential. It does not matter how much money you have, how extravagant your home is, how great of a family you have created, how amazing your kids are, or how wonderful your career is going, when the dog eats your favorite shoes, or your teenager gets expelled, you get a scary diagnosis from the doctor, or another driver smashes into your car, extreme emotion is likely to result.
But this is where it comes full circle to our innate wiring. We are wired to overcome. Our invitation is to rise above it. We are called to refocus, to redirect our focus on what we love, appreciate the abundance of all that is good even in the wake of the terrible setback. When we give extra attention to the negative experience, and make it personal, we start to translate the external event to mean something about us.
Every problem has two sides to the coin: external and internal.
The external problem is the grape juice spilling on the white sofa. The internal problem is what we make it mean: our child is careless and should have known better than to throw a football in the living room. They deliberately did what we told them not to do, how many times did we say no footballs in the living room? It is personal to you that your rule was violated, and your sofa was ruined.
The external problem is you get fired from a job. If the boss is firing you, then we are wired to make up a story, a limiting belief, that explains why you were fired. Maybe it is because of a belief that you are not good at keeping jobs, or your boss just doesn’t like you, or, you’ll never succeed at anything… we can draw from any myriad of stories that we tell ourselves about why we got fired.
The external problem is your child got expelled at school. The internal problem is that you might be dealing with embarrassment or feeling like a bad parent who cannot raise good children, or worrying what your mother-in-law will think, or telling yourself “I just can’t ever get this right.”
The external problem triggers and internal problem and it is then that the setback or negative experience becomes personal and you make the external event mean something about you personally.
But if we can learn to look at life events on both ends of the spectrum as the same; no matter what extreme of emotion they evoke, we are way ahead.
The analogy I use is it is like picking up a stick. The stick represents the two extremes of what could happen.
For example, on one end of the stick is the teenager who is an honor student and is making you proud and on the other end of the stick the teenager is failing and getting expelled and embarrassing or angering you.
When you learn to pick up either end of the stick with the same belief that it is not personal, it just is what it is, you get miles ahead in terms of managing your emotions.
To really get this you must realize that your inner being, your best self, your superconscious is the same no matter what experience you have. It is not personal when you are talking on this level, the event just is. You cannot diminish your best self, you cannot embarrass your superconscious, you cannot shame your inner being.
Byron Katie teaches us to love what is. When you truly get that life experiences and outcomes are not personal, and that we are super creators, we can come to any extreme of experience with calm, clarity and stability. We can realize that the things we manifest or experience that are considered obstacles, setbacks, tough luck, or pure tragedy are invitations to overcome AND TO FOCUS ON OUR DESIRED REALITY.
The creation mindset says you are the same YOU no matter which end of the stick you are experiencing.
The experiences on the positive end of the stick are things we can consider blessings, blissful, and are invitations to feel the desired emotions. The experiences on the negative end of the stick are the things we call setbacks, bad outcomes, tragedies, and bad luck. But if you connect with your best self, your superconscious, your highest being, your soul -- you realize that you can take it all and you need the negative end of the stick to create that contrast so you can overcome and so you can create what you truly desire. It is quite a powerful perspective.
This perspective can open doors for you in terms of finding out what you are made of, what you were born to be, and in fortifying your ability to create a life you love no matter what happens.
The more you embrace this idea, the more you realize that either end of the stick is an invitation for appreciation! Both ends of the stick remind us to keep focusing more on the desired reality and to take any inspired action that we get when we focus on our true desires.
When you really get this, and realize neither positive or negative outcomes are personal, it is just what you created, you are positioned to CHOOSE your emotions rather than be run by your emotions.
That is not to say you are being called to enjoy a tragedy, no, tragedies are awful. But it is to say that you are being called to overcome the tragedy and to come out stronger, wiser, more resilient than you ever thought possible. Be the light bearer for someone else who is also going through what you are going through or have been through!
If you understand this concept for an extreme tragedy, then you can certainly apply the philosophy to the basic everyday setbacks that occur day to day.
Setbacks, extremes and basic, are invitations for an internal victory. And the icing on the cake is when you get to teach someone else what helped you to rise up and triumph!
True bliss results when you really get this idea and start applying it. Of course, it is easier to apply to the small stuff, but practice and mindfulness allows you to learn to apply it to the big stuff.
Now that is a gateway to emotional mastery!
Cheers!
Amy
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