Another New Year: Time, Change and Resiliency, Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, we examined how remembering where we’ve been contributes to our resiliency in facing the present and the future.

We’re still in the early days following all the emotion associated with the coming of the New Year. Yet the daily news is filled with stories of the devastating Australian bushfires, the conflict between the U.S. and Iran, and the tragic downing of a Ukrainian airliner in Iran, carrying so many young Canadians. These events are sobering reminders of pain, challenge and anxiety in human existence, and of the need to find strength and a sense of meaning to cope with the broken parts of life.

New Year’s, especially, may be an important time to reflect on our journey. It gives us a perspective to understand our past experience and life transitions, and all the things in our conscious and unconscious lives that have enabled us to “get through” to this point in our lives. These may be key resources as we move into our future.

The rest of this post offers some key questions to ask of ourselves: 1) as we seek to understand our life journey through the past; and, 2) as we seek to find the resiliency and strength to move through our future.

Refiner’s Fire: Experiences Which Have Formed Us

The first set of questions relate to experiences in our past that may have been very difficult, which have nonetheless shaped us to be who we are.

What have been the most difficult experiences or stressors in my past?  What have been the experiences that have really shaped me? How have each of those events impacted me?

The most difficult experiences in our lives may be things that we would rather not even think about. Yet, often these harrowing experiences can be the very ones that show us the strong and enduring part of ourselves, if we can just discern it.

If you recall the most difficult experiences in your life, can you remember what was so difficult about them? Or, how you got through those times? It’s likely that these experiences have profoundly affected or shaped your life. If you or I can discern how such events have made a difference to us, we’ll likely learn something important about who we are.

The Key People

Who are the important people in my life who’ve helped me when I’ve been distressed?  To whom have I reached out for support?

In every human being’s life, there are key people, who’ve been an integral part of the journey. Some people may be part of the pain and struggle in our lives, as they are tied to very negative experiences like abuse and betrayal. However, almost always there are key people who’ve been essential to our journey, and who’ve had a stabilizing and supportive impact, often at times that were crucial for us.

Who are the people who’ve been key supports in your life journey? What role have they played in your life? What is it that they brought to your journey, that made such a key difference? How did they see you? What does that tell you about who you really are — as opposed to the hyper-critical stories that it’s often so easy to tell ourselves?

The Voice of the Self

The final set of questions really emerges from previous two:

What have I learned about myself and about what’s really important to me during difficult times? Have I been able to overcome obstacles, and if so, how? What has helped me to find hope for the future?

Who are you really when confronted with extreme difficulty? What are the characteristics of my most fundamental self when the going is at its roughest? If you have faced extraordinary obstacles, how did you get through or around them? In such situations, we might expect ourselves to be at our worst, or perhaps we even remember ourselves at our most fearful or despairing. And yet, when you listen to peoples’ stories of these dark times, what you often hear is something else: people talk of a part or an aspect of themselves that somehow got them through this extreme difficulty.

This sense of a part of us that is wise and strong, and which abides with us in even the most difficult situations is one of the most important things that underlies genuine hope for the future. It can be essential to our life journey to seek to come into contact with that wise part.

A strong, supportive relationship with a Jungian /a-midlife-transition can be a vital asset in seeking to come into contact with our fundamental self. Such a therapeutic relationship can be of inestimable value in finding our way through our lifelong journey to wholeness.