If you touch rock bottom, don’t panic. If you have reached the limit of your strength, if this last failure or disappointment has touched you more than ever, do not paralyce, be ashamed or do not agree to live in this personal and psychological abyss. Rise up, take the momentum and exercise the choice of the brave, of those who gather their dignity so that they never fall below their hearts.
We’ve all come across this phrase on more than one occasion: “Touching the background. “As curious as it may seem, most professionals in the clinical world don’t particularly like the term. Psychologists and psychiatrists deal with patients who have reached the limit. They are convinced that after bottoming, there is only one possible option: change and improvement.
- “Because it is touching the bottom.
- Even in bitterness and degradation.
- That someone knows who he is.
- And then begins to walk firmly.
- -José Luis Sampedro-.
The sad reality is that this rule of three doesn’t always work. The motive? There are those who settle definitively in this background, moreover, there are those who discover that under this background there is another winery even darker and more complex, so this idea, this approach sometimes so shared by many, can perversely and ironically prevent a person from seeking help in advance, when the problem is not yet so serious and it is possible to provide simple ways of improvement or change.
We have all hit rock bottom and know how much it hurts, a good part of the population has already descended into a state where fear, despair or failure hold us back, trapped, crouched in an amber resin that traps and hinders balance even leads to a mental disorder.
The idea that only absolute despair will definitely lead us to see light and experiment with improvement is not true, nor is it necessary to suffer to really know what life is, because pain only teaches and enlightens if we have the will and the will. resources to do so. So as much as we like the idea, there’s no autopilot in our brain that puts us in “resilience” mode every time we reach the limit of our strength.
The philosopher and psychologist William James spoke in his book “The Varieties of Religious Experience?(1902) from the cave of melancholy. There are people who, even without understanding the reasons, manage to get to the bottom and from there can see this point. where sunlight guides them from the depths to the exit; others, however, are trapped in the cave of melancholy; it’s a place where shame lives (how did I get here?) besides the feeling of chronic depression (I can’t do anything to improve my situation, everything is lost).
To have gotten to the bottom is to be on the floor of discouragement, but you don’t want to go any further. Don’t let yourself go to the basement of despair. Touching the bottom also means reaching a stage of deep solitude, a cavern. where nothing happens and where the mind gets tangled, where thoughts collide and become strange and obsessive, but remember: you have a round-trip ticket and you only have to climb a step to realize that new opportunities are possible.
But getting up requires something very difficult: it’s about overcoming fear, one way to deal with this is to apply the down arrow technique proposed by cognitive therapists like David Burns, under this approach many people live in these psychological wells because they are blocked, because they suffer, they feel lost, and although they are aware that it takes a change to get out of the cul-de-sac , they don’t have the courage or they don’t know how to do it.
The central idea of this technique is to reverse many of these irrational beliefs that so often place us in these scenarios of immobility and despair. To do this, the therapist selects a negative thought from the patient and challenges it with a question: “If this one thought it was true and it really happened, what would you do?”The idea is to describe a number of problems that would act as down arrows to expose misconceptions, make visible and demolish irrational approaches, and promote new strategies. New changes.
Let’s take an example. Think of someone who has lost their job and has been out of work for a year, the questions we could ask you to face all your fears one by one would be: what if you never had a job again?What if your partner also lost his job?What would you do if you suddenly found you without resources?
This exercise can seem very difficult because it always tries to reach the most catastrophic limit, however, it aims to give the person impetus, inviting them to react, confront and argue possible strategies in the face of desperate situations that have not yet occurred (and will not necessarily happen).
Essentially, it is supposed to show that despite getting to the bottom, there are more complex situations and therefore there is still time to react, in fact, once you have faced all these fears, there is only one option left: get up. will be the decision that will change everything.