EXPERIENCE DOESN’T HAVE TO BE HAPPY TO BE GOOD

Western society tends to define us according to our achievements; the accoutrements of a narrowly defined success.  In this way common and profound experiences such as anxiety, grief, and despair can become marginalised, the hallmarks of misfortune, weakness and failure.  This can encourage the sense that these states are outside the range of acceptable experience and are to be hidden, ignored and powered through until we can get back to the important stuff, the achievement and success; and the good stuff, the comfort and pleasure of our material life, our friends and family.  In this way we can not only lose a sense of balance and wholeness, but also the great potential for knowledge and growth within experiences which, because painful, difficult and stigmatised we might prefer to ignore and certainly to evade.

LEARNING FROM LIFE: A MAP & COMPASS TO AUTHENTICITY AND ABUNDANCE

However, life rarely affords us the opportunity to dodge this field of experience and it’s the way that we choose or are equipped to deal with it that can determine the quality and direction of our lives.  Often crisis, illness and challenging life experiences can incite us to change. These sensitive life transitions, constructively managed, can provide impetus for personal development. Sickness, loss, grief can take us to the limits of our personal resources, challenging us to expand the horizons of our understanding, or languish on the shores of incomprehension. 

MODERN LIFE: IN SEARCH OF A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF LIVING

We face death, loss, sickness and trauma as part of the fabric of existence and must navigate these experiences.  But mundane life can also provide circumstances which challenge, trouble and perplex.  The routine cycle of working life can leave us feeling empty, depleted and lacking a constant and sustaining centre.  Sometimes we might manage these experiences, develop stoicism, lower our expectations, raise our threshold of tolerance.  At others we might find the shape or direction of our lives so constricting and unnatural as to be intolerable.  And it can be at this point that our bodies, our minds, our fate or destiny, the logical outcome of all that went before, steps in and provokes the change that can resuscitate and transform. 

We do not however, need disaster to impel us to a richer, fuller, more meaningful life.  We can choose it.

Therapy can provide the tools, insight and environment to transform unhappiness into an on-going and far reaching process of personal fulfilment and sickness, pain, trauma and crises into opportunities for growth, empowerment, knowledge and well-being.