No one is safe totally, bad things happen to good people.
We can’t predict what will come our way in life. Unfortunately, we all get our share of bad things.
So what are we supposed to do about them?
We can seek to adjust how we react to them. Of course, we may feel hurt, injured, disappointed, angry, furious and unjustly affected by life circumstances.
These are normal reactions to painful experiences.
What we don’t want to do as we work through the initial pain and likely anger, is stay stuck in these emotions. Hanging onto feelings of injustice or unfairness, and to emotions like pain and anger can lead to depression and hopelessness. In these instances, the experience has doubled in its negative effect on us.
I am suggesting we begin to separate ourselves from what happened and seek to adjust our mindset and reaction. Of course, we will do all we can to prevent it from happening again and to make whatever changes needed in our lives, family and communities.
After making prevention strategies, we can look at how we look at what happened.
We can change our feelings from loss, pain and anger to proactive healthy thinking. It would be good to begin thinking of good things coming our way, of good things that we have in our current lives. Many people make a gratitude list for their current lives and then reflect on it by reading when they start feeling down.
Identify activities, habits and people that make you feel positive and happy to be alive. The next step is to put these activities and people into your daily schedule.
We can’t control what happens to us in life, but we can control how we react to it. The goal is not to get stuck, but to move forward expecting better things to come in the next few days, weeks and months.
As my father, Coach George Allen would say, “The big thing is not what happens to us in life, but what we do about what happens to us.
