When Life is Unstable, You Don't Have to Be

🎧 Finding resilience in uncertainty.

Hello! I’m Kate, a psychotherapist sharing weekly Letters from Therapy. Subscribe to nurture your soul, accept yourself and find deeper meaning. Paid subscribers get enriching discovery tools, worksheets and journaling, the Heal Your Past Course, a 40 page Life Audit Workbook and guided meditations on Wednesdays at noon GMT. You’re invited!

Hi friends,

When dark forces swirled around my life, I became a good catcher. I wasn’t always. As curveballs flew around me, like redundancy, loss, ostracism, and bullying, I got buried under the rubble.

Not now.

We know life is beautiful, though studded with unpredictable shocks and crushing disappointments. With grief. With pain. Abuse and mistreatment in our own lives and around the world march on. The turning of blind eyes twists the dagger. We can end up with lurking unfinished business (see my recent posts) if we aren’t able to cope well.

If we lack resilience it can be hard to come back from the edge and find ourselves again.

When I lost my babies all those years ago, the whole of existence tumbled through my soul at once, Dante’s Inferno raging inside, while I stumbled on with my pasted-on smile.

In my young life, I never imagined I would be the unlikely statistic who walked out of the maternity ward to a chorus of newborn babies crying, while my own daughter’s body was wheeled to the morgue.

I would never have predicted that I would be the one people turned away from. That I would one day be bullied, by a psychotherapist, no less.

I couldn’t have predicted that it would be me, a healthy-eating, running yogi, who developed a new disease with no treatment after a once in a life time pandemic.

How can we build resilience to survive the hard things we experience and have our souls still sing?

By creating a safe ground for ourselves, we can stand strong while lava shifts the sands around our feet, until we find our way forward.

How Can We Build Our Resilience in an Uncertain World?

• We could make sure we feel good enough.

  It takes work in our modern world to fully accept ourselves, which is why I share all this with you.

• We could make sure we are well regulated.

  We have strong bones. We have flexible muscles and soft tissue. Tendons and brain. All fed by a network of nerves signalling to us truth - and lies. If your nervous system is still reacting to the past, stay regulated and come home to the wonder that is your body, with my free Simple Tools including Grounding with your Feet, the Simple Calm Breathing Reset, or Anchoring With Your Senses, all to connect with and regulate your body. (I also keep a window of tolerance PDF on the therapy tools page.)

• We could reach out for support.

  We don’t need to do it all alone. Understanding friends, who bring their light to the world too, through their own cracks will light you up.

• We could strengthen our boundaries.

  Once we are aware of ourselves and our needs, we don’t need to be candles in the wind. We can find our edges. Our limits. And tell them to the world. This gives us freedom. We can check in with our emotions to find where to draw the line. I don’t take on clients now, but I do love to write. I don’t drink or go out for expensive meals, but who doesn’t like a free dog walk or a coffee and a chat?

• We could keep an open mind.

  Who knows what the wind will blow into our lives. Dirt or butterflies, let’s be ready for it all. Life rarely turns out the way we planned. There are no neat lines here.

• We could celebrate our wins.

  I embrace my unconventional, oddly shaped life now, rather than hiding. We could remind ourselves that we are valuable by acknowledging what we bring to the world as we did on my last post Celebrate Your Gifts and Contributions.

• We could get clear on what we can and can’t control.

  This is the key to riding the waves of uncertainty, and limiting pain. (Paid subscribers see the PDF on the Therapy Tools page).

• We could shift into gratitude.

  I could focus on my babies in limbo, lost to the depths of time, or on my beautiful, living daughter, bright with hope. Read about gratitude that lights the dark on my Substack.

• We could look for the good in others.

  We could see their inner Mother Teresa, Christ, Allah or Buddha, and find them in ourselves.

There is so much more good in the world than bad.

There is light.

There is hope.

There is kindness.

Feed what you want to grow

If your mind hasn’t caught up with events from the past, revisit the Heal Your Past series on my publication anytime.

If you enjoyed this, please press the heart to let me know you are reading - it really helps me! And please share if you think it may help someone else.

What can you do today to strengthen your resilience? What has helped you recover in hard times?

Much love,

Kate

P.S. If you’d like to keep reading and support my work, do consider upgrading!

“You could search the whole world over and find no-one more deserving of your love and compassion than yourself.” Buddha

I am joining in with

Claire Venus

’s Sparkle Essay Club!✨