How to deal with negative experiences
7 ways to handle the past, deal with breakups, and recreate your story.
As we go about life, we accumulate more and more experiences. Each present moment will be saved in the past, and each experience we have will influence our future behavior.
Remembering our past is a great way to avoid doing the same mistakes over and over again. We learn from our mistakes, we gather experience, and we recalibrate our next moves because of this. We tackle new problems, based on our previous solutions.
It is clear that the ability to remember is a useful tool, but what happens if we have not yet solved something in our past? What if we fail to comprehend the situation, and thus leading us to be unable to recalibrate. What if we get stuck?
A love story
When I was 20 years old, I got depressed. Somehow, I was able to get myself a girlfriend while being at the lowest point in my life. The relationship started out ok, but after a couple of months, not surprisingly, the relationship ended. It simply did not work.
Objectively, the relationship had ended. However, inside my mind, I was unable to let go. I wasn’t able to deal with the situation.
This experience came to haunt me for many, many months. As I was dealing with the trauma of the breakup, I developed obsessive thoughts. I was constantly thinking about how to “fix things”, how to get back with my ex, and about how and why it happened.
Needless to say, I wasted a lot of time trying to figure this out.
How to actually deal with painful experiences
- Specify what happened. Write down your thoughts, how you feel, and try to explain as clearly as possible what happened. You should also explain why it happened. However, stick to the objective facts. Spending time on creating complex explantations will not serve you any good. This exercise can help you gain insight into your thought process, deal with emotions, and get clarity. Doing it once is enough. Don’t dwell, don’t make it perfect, and don’t dig too deep into why it happened.
- Create yourself a new story. Write a story about why the thing that happened actually was a good thing. There’s a silver lining to everything. Think about how this experience may have directed you on to a new path, how it will open up new possibilities for you and how it will change your life for the better. You will get tougher, you will have learned something, and there’s a possibility for growth. There’s a psychological phenomenom called Post-Traumatic Growth, which implies that after experiencing adversity you can still manage to improve your life dramatically. Humans learn exceptionally well when there’s pain involved, and it makes us think about how we really want to spend our lives. Getting some extra motivation from a though experience, may fuel you for a long time.
- Practice compassion and self-love. After experiencing a setback, we can sometimes feel guilt, shame, or frankly, any other negative emotion. Therefore, it can be important to take extra care of one self. Make time for activities that will help you feel better. Do things that you enjoy, and allow yourself to take a pause from everything.
- Avoid rumination. When experiencing a negative experience, it can often be tempting to think of how one could have done something differently. Or, how one could have avoided the situation all together. However, there is little use in this sort of thinking, going over the experience repeatedly in your mind. It will only drag you down further. To avoid rumination, you can try to imagine yourself from an objective position. This will help you see things from a different perspective, forcing you out of your own mind. Other methods that might help includes; practicing meditation or mindfulness, or simply distracting oneself with tasks that are more enjoyable.
- Forgive. If there’s another person involved, like in the case of a breakup, forgiving that person is actually a very healthy thing to do. By choosing to forgive, you free up a lot of emotional and cognitive bandwidth, making it easier for you to move along. To quote Steve Maraboli: “The truth is, unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that the situation is over, you cannot move forward.”
- Seek support from your social network. Hang out with your friends and loved ones. Having someone support you during your toughest times is incredibly good for you. Love, encouragement and acts of kindness makes everything better.
- Get professional help. If you feel like the experience is too much to handle, or if you would like to heal faster, getting professional help is the way to go. Remember, there is no shame in seeking out the professionals. It does not mean your weak, or any of the sort. It means that you’re brave, and clever enough to understand that you can’t handle everything in life (none of us do). In addition, you can get more tools, and more in-depth advice than presented in this article.
When I was in pain after my breakup, I pretty much used every single advice on this list, including seeking out professional help. I know it might be scary, but know that you’re not lost, and you’re not alone.
