Life can be overwhelming at times. Maybe you’re facing big challenges at work and your boss is unrelenting. Perhaps you’re dealing with a family crisis with little or no support, or you’re trying to muddle through financial woes with no solutions on the horizon. Maybe it’s all of these at once.
We all grapple with challenges, some big and some small. No matter what the difficulty is, the good news is we can control how we respond to it. Yes! we can control how we think and feel; we have that freedom.
Someone recently shared with me an approach to dealing with difficult situations. It’s part of something called dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). This is a process psychologist and researcher Marsha Lineham developed to treat conditions such as mood disorders and substance abuse.
The approach offers four options for handling a stressful situation: solve the problem, change how you feel about the problem, tolerate/accept the problem, or stay miserable.
Solve the Problem
With the first option, you define the problem, then evaluate it to see if you can change or influence the situation. If so, you make the necessary changes.
Something that might at first seem like an insurmountable challenge could in fact be fixable. All you need is a bit of time and effort. And you can make the decision to try solving the problem.
Change How You Feel About the Problem
Let’s say you can’t solve the problem to your liking. Or maybe you’re not willing to take the needed steps to make a change. Then the next possible option would be to change how you feel about the issue.
If something is making you angry, think about why it’s making you feel that way and use techniques that will help you to calm down. Maybe deep breathing or re-framing your thoughts so that you feel better about the situation. Regardless of the method, you can choose to alter your emotions.
Tolerate/Accept the Problem
If you can’t find a way to solve the problem or change the way you feel about it, another option is to accept things the way they are.
There is something called “radical acceptance,” a skill where you acknowledge and accept difficult or painful situations or emotions without resisting. The idea is that by recognizing a reality for what it is and accepting it, you can save yourself even more grief by trying to control or change it. Once again, the choice is yours.
Stay Miserable
If you can’t find a way to solve the problem, change the way you feel about it, or accept it for what it is, than you are left with the final option: stay miserable. When I first heard of this option I got a chuckle out of it. And it’s actually the option that inspired this post.
So many times we choose this reaction to unpleasant situations because it’s probably the easiest. It doesn’t require us to make the effort to solve anything, change our feelings, or be accepting. We continually dwell on the problems and stay angry, sad, or frustrated. But once again, it’s a choice.
What I really like about this four-option approach is that it enables you to make concrete choices about how to react to just about any situation. There are many things you can’t control in your life, but you are able to control how you handle the circumstances that arise.
I think it’s how we deal with adversity—the choices we make as we journey through life—that helps to define our character.
Thanks for reading and be well!
“We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.”—Thomas Merton
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