We can’t always control disruptive events, but we do control our response to them.
Crises can happen to any of us. For example, anyone could get into a terrible car accident. But how people respond to a crisis like this varies widely. Some people may become furious and stuck, while others could be motivated to embrace a whole new career campaigning for road safety. An accident is a disruptor that is completely out of our control. No one would choose that particular plot twist in their life story. But we can choose what meaning we assign to it.
We can turn destructive events into meaningful transitions, but this requires practice. Luckily, several key tools can help us become masters at dealing with transitions.
The first tool we need to master is acceptance. A very normal reaction to experiencing a lifequake is denial and resistance. We want to cling onto the world we know. But eventually, we need to see reality as it is, and not how we wish it were. Funnily enough, our bodies are often much more in tune with the world than our minds are. One woman from the Life Story Project had daily migraines which only stopped when she left her miserable job. Another person felt that something was amiss with her body long before she heard about the concept of being transgender.
Acceptance can strike in a sudden epiphany, or a series of slow realizations. However you get there, the result is the same: accepting a situation is intrinsically empowering. It allows you to move from asking questions like Why did this happen? to Where can I go from here? And it empowers you to see possibilities which may have been invisible when you were furious and resistant to the changes.
However, acceptance isn’t about wishing away difficult emotions and pretending that everything is suddenly fine. Transitions come with many painful emotions, like fear, sadness, and shame. Practicing acceptance means allowing space for those feelings, too. You never have to get over your grief for the loss of someone you loved, or suppress your shame for mistakes you’ve made in the past. Accepting your feelings and grieving your losses is a key part of what’s called the long goodbye, when you’re letting go of the past and coming to terms with a big life transition.
