Helpful Tips for Times of Desperation

FOUR TIPS FOR WHEN YOU’RE HANGING AT THE END OF YOUR ROPE

Hitting rock bottom is one of life’s most difficult moments. It can happen for professional, personal, financial, or health reasons. Frequently several intertwine, creating a nightmare from which you can’t awaken. Without psychological tools and tips such as those listed below, things deteriorate. You might resort to alcohol, antidepressants, sleeping pills, recreational drugs, gambling, risky sex, or worse.

WORDS GABRIELLA KORTSCH

Recognise that you, yourself, by continually watching potentially ‘negative’ news channels offering sensationalism to keep you in a state of fear and therefore keep you watching, maintain yourself in that bad place. Stop watching. Ditto much of social media and the online tabloid press.

1 TAKE A REALITY CHECK

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) looks at reality versus myth. Hanging at the end of your rope, you might place greater emphasis on myth than reality. In a panic attack you may be unable to fly, fearing a crash. Statistical reality demonstrates a much lower possibility of a plane crash than a traffic accident. Using this kind of ‘reality’ versus the ‘myth’ you have in mind, helps bring about inner change over time.

2 LOOK INTO PAST EXPERIENCES OF SUCCESS

A German word – Erfolgserlebnis – signifies ‘experience of success’. Your experience! Search your past for successful experiences. Did you run that marathon? Learn that foreign language? Write that paper? Give that speech? Learn how to cook? Figure out how to use that software? Whatever it was – even if those experiences are unrelated to your current challenge – use knowledge of that success, urging yourself forward, encouraging yourself in the present endeavour, also realising if you were capable of that, you may also be capable of this.

3 FIND A ROLE MODEL WHO’S BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, AND SURVIVED

Having always enjoyed reading biographies, I generally knew of someone experiencing my own situation from those books. It helped immensely to re-read how they overcame that. Perhaps their solution was not mine, but I felt a kinship – someone who understood my story, my predicament, my pain. When I was 31, my sons aged eight, six, and five were kidnapped. To put labels on what we four went through would be simplifying what was perhaps the most painful experience of our lives. A year before, I had read an autobiography, recounting a similar experience. I had also recently – serendipitously - befriended a woman who told me of such a heartbreak in her life. Basing myself at least in part on their tragedies, and their solutions, I willed up the strength to deal with it as best I could in order to not fall off the end of my rope. Looking at others’ experiences that are analogous to yours may help you discover solutions and hope.

4 CHUNK IT DOWN

Overwhelm often happens when you’re at the end of your rope. So devastated by events, you can’t see the trees for the forest. So you freeze. By chunking things down into manageable bits, you may manage to move forward slowly, gaining momentum in time. How do you chunk it down? Think: let me just get through today, just until after dinnertime. To accomplish that, what must I do? Or think: what is one small thing I can do right now that will help me move forward? Even if it seems quite tiny and unimportant. Or think: what can I focus on just for now, that will help me calm down? Because the calmer I am, the more I’ll be able to assess the circumstances and conceptualise how to move forward... even if currently I have no idea how to solve the big picture.

WHAT COMES AFTER?

It makes sense to do your utmost to never again find yourself in such a situation. Not by controlling problems in your life, as we never have total control over that, but by ensuring you never again find yourself hanging at the end of your rope, no matter what. How can you avoid that? My recommendation is being present, aware, and very conscious of yourself at all times. This implies mindfulness, an exponentiallygrowing practice, until finally you notice it fills your entire day, somewhat like background music in your life. Soon you realise that no matter what life throws at you, you are able to remain present and calm, finding a place of peace inside in the midst of the storm, and so never even getting close to the end of your rope.

Gabriella Kortsch, Ph.D., a multilingual, integral (body, mind, soul) psychotherapist, and bestselling author, with an international practice in Marbella, has been working with clients from 30 countries since 2003.

www.gabriellakortsch.com