Mental Health Break Learning to Turn Poison into Medicine “We need to confront the world as it really is.” May 2007

Eileen Norton

Our ability to move through a crises increases if we approach any situation with a view to achieving some positive outcome.

In other words, rather than spending energy on trying to avoid some dark experience or striving to find some easy way around it, you can generate energy by embracing that which is most difficult in your life.

A technique, called “reframing issues as blessings,” involves putting a positive spin on anything that is usually viewed as a negative situation or event in our lives.

The technique is completely different than the chirpy Pollyanna-type attitude that fails to grapple seriously with some difficult situation by merely pretending that the problem doesn’t exist. We need to confront the world as it really is — to acknowledge pain, suffering, and loss when these things come into our lives, as they will certainly come. But then overcome these.

You can waste a lot of energy trying to go under, over, or around a difficult situation, but if you reframe the thing in order to view it as a learning experience rather than as a problem, then you are likely to resolve it much more quickly. The goal isn’t survival. You can simply use whatever manure that has suddenly been dumped on you to grow a flower — or a garden. You can recognize the strength and resources available inside to move forward.

We must seek for things to give meaning to pain — to search with an air of expectation for resources to overcome the tendency to engage in the random and uncontrolled pattern of negative thinking and behaviors that we otherwise fall into.

All the issues in our lives create energy. We can turn the poison of even dark events into medicine that will make us strong and healthy in previously unimaginable ways. The fact is that when life crashes around you in rubble, the destruction simply provides materials from which you can construct something else in your life — perhaps more wonderful and beautiful than what was there before.

But even if you can’t get things back to a better state than you formerly had, at least you will have built something positive in your life out of the disaster that you had to endure. Losing a spouse through death seems at first to be painful almost beyond endurance. But the loss can eventually open doorways into relationships with interesting people, possibly some fascinating new hobby or even a career that we never would have experienced otherwise.

The principle applies to all the bad things that come to us. Getting fired from a job is the most obvious example. It might have been an awful loss. The job was possibly comfortable and familiar. But then a doorway suddenly opens into a better job — possibly a whole new profession.

The loss of a child is one of the worst events a human being might go through. But people who endure such things may subsequently come to experience life on a level that was previously closed off to them. Opportunities suddenly open up for sharing tears, prayers, laughter, warm hugs, and mutual progress through grief with others.

Petty annoyances and the distractions of materialism often fall away as life becomes vibrant and meaningful on a completely different level than was possible before.

A dark mass shows up on an x-ray and the prognosis is bad. We can reframe even this as a blessing. By doing so, then all of a sudden we find the energy to engage in projects we might have been putting off for decades. We’re restoring relationships that were severed, and we’re greeting every new day with a sense of expectation that we never had before. We’re turning the poison of cancer into medicine for our souls.

Losing our eyesight might mean that we hear birds singing — possibly for the first time in our lives.

Whatever we’re faced with, we can figure out how to use tragedy for growth. So we no longer have to fear life. We can develop a mind-set that can provide a framework for the kind of indomitable personal philosophy that many of us have been wishing for.

You don’t get over things that come into your life, you get through them. And then the process of “getting through” becomes a dynamic source for human development — providing healing for broken hearts and becoming like jet fuel to propel you forward into a life of living, serving, and even celebrating.

Eileen Norton, Psy.D
925-354-7526
eileen@110mag.com