Life is not how others paint it, it is like you color it, because it will always be our attitude to be our best brush, the one that is able to offer us shades of light when we need them most. Who chooses to paint the days with smiles before bitterness appears in us?
We know clearly that sometimes it is life itself that likes to bring us gray days. Moments of absolute darkness. These are times when, although we believe that everything is under control and we see ourselves as great strategists of adversity, something always happens that reminds us how vulnerable we can be.
- French neurologist and psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik offers us through his books and interviews a really useful and interesting concept about vulnerability and personal happiness.
- We talk mainly about the well-being that a person achieves after experiencing a strip of light-darkness in our existential palettes.
No one is willing to suffer. A happy childhood doesn’t guarantee that tomorrow we’ll be immune to emotional pain. A traumatic childhood should also not determine our maturity and future, as Cyrulnik himself explained in his book “Naughty Ducklings and Resilience. “
Life can be very dark at any time, we already know that. We live, however, far from subjecting ourselves to these facts, to these traumas, we must stop being victims of our circumstances and work day by day in these personal realities, because we are all worthy to be loved, to be happy. We all have to choose the best, colors to paint our horizon.
We do not realize, however, that we all have a very particular way of “painting” our daily lives. We talk, of course, about our attitude as individuals and those particular psychological resources that we use to deal with adversity. We interpret reality and, at the same time, create it.
However, that is where the dilemma always arises. It is often said that it is the genetic component that gives us these roots that pushes us more or less frequently towards depression, depression or that sesained vision, which only sees gray days when what shines is a sincere, immense and bright sun.
Let’s be clear: genetics predisposes, but it doesn’t determine, what matters is the will and our attitude. At this point that Dr. Rafaela Santos, author of “Get Up and Walk”, tells us that resilience is a combination of genetic, social and psychological factors. However, there is nothing more powerful than conscious and constant training with which we can positively manage adverse situations.
All this certainly encourages us to reflect on another personal reality, it is known, for example, that children can inherit from their parents a predisposition to depression and anxiety, which share a physiological characteristic: a hyperactive brain circuit.
What determines us is not a structure in itself, but a series of modifiable metabolic functions, with an appropriate attitude, psychological strategies and conscious training already mentioned, we will paint life in our own way.
Resilience is like the spring that drives life, it is art that gives us a sense of control in the face of difficulties, and far from being eternally powerless by an unjust childhood, traumatic loss or indelible failure, we have the opportunity to choose new colors to shape our horizon.
Experts in self-improvement often say that to achieve this capacity it is necessary to develop the strategy of the field. We know, for example, that the term?Resilience? It comes from physics, and defines those materials capable of recovering their original form, even if they have been deformed, but now, in the field of psychology, it does not work in the same way.
When something “distorts” us, we’ll never go back to our original form. We won’t be the same. However, being a different person does not mean being a more fragile, darker and more wounded person, that is where we have to implement the strategy of the field.
Because resilience is not the ability to emerge unscathed, it is the art of mastering our approaches to thinking to create new emotions, it is the challenge of maintaining self-esteem, independence and courage to choose the colors that we want to paint the future.
Dr. Edith Grotberg, known for creating the Resilience Factor Test, focuses on the resilience based on three verbalizations we can do on a daily basis.
These simple thinking strategies deserve to be put into practice, cost nothing and we can achieve a lot.