Journey Beyond Hardship:

Introduction

Hardship is not for the faint of heart. It impacts our sense of self, affects our relationships, and challenges our understanding of what it means to be alive. If something continues to be hard for you, then it is hardship.

You may be lost in the pain of your spouse’s death. You may be fighting with all your might to leave an abusive relationship or to recover from an addiction. Your body may be altered by illness or injury, and the adjustment may seem more than you can bear. Miscarriage may have you mourning more than you imagined possible. You may be picking up the pieces of your life after a natural disaster. You may be heartbroken. You may be a target of prejudice. You may be in terror at the news of a diagnosis. You may be struggling after months without work.

Your life may feel empty for some clear reason or no reason at all. You may not have suffered trauma, but you still feel afraid, angry, sad, overburdened or confused about being a single parent, about retirement or simply about being unhappy.

No matter the source, the pain of hardship is scary. Mostly, you just want it to be over. But that’s the thing about hardship. It’s not just over. It lingers. Given the force of your pain, the desire to stop the uncomfortableness dominates your attention. You tire of the exhaustion and look for a way out.

The way out of hardship, as much as you’d like it to be over, is in and through. In and through is the most direct path to healing. Relief comes sooner. In essence, Journey Beyond Hardship is a roadmap to feeling vital; a roadmap to full living.

The early chapters of the book describe how hardship survivors react to the crushing emotions typical of the beginning of the healing journey. These reactions include feeling overwhelmed and immobilized or not feeling anything at all.

The central chapters of the book offer concrete tools for responding to and regulating difficult emotions that eventually, and understandably, surface during hardship. Emotions such as depression, anxiety and anger. One tool, called Reading the Edges, helps you recognize the beginning, middle, and end of a feeling, so you can learn to experience the feeling, but not be overcome by it. Without a way to manage your emotions, your emotions manage you. Emotional self-mastery feels good when everything else seems out of control.

In time and with practice using the tools provided, you will gain strength. At that point, you will begin to see beyond your hardship. The final chapters of the book support you there, offering specific guidance for restoring your sense of self and developing hope.

Hardship is part of the human condition. So is the human spirit to overcome.

Chapter One

Packing: Preparing for The Journey

The Healing Journey

Consider, if you will, your hardship as a journey. The beginning of that journey may be very clear to you though the end seems out of sight. The journey might have started years ago—or just yesterday. You may have had time to prepare for the difficulties of that journey or no time at all. You might have been absolutely overwhelmed when the journey began. Or you may have neatly folded up all your feeling, bundled them away, and carried on.

While we can’t take the hardship out of humanity, humanity is equipped with an instinct for healing and wholeness. That instinct just seems broken sometimes. And strange as it may sound, the road to healing goes right through hardship, not around.

As you embark on your journey, please be mindful of this: Compassion is the best fuel. Without the highest possible regard for yourself during this time, your pain will grow. If you get angry, anxious or depressed, and then judge yourself for those reactions, your hardship will be amplified. The truth is, if you tended to be angry, anxious or depressed before the hardship, there’s a good chance the stress of your trauma will exaggerate those emotions. Compassion for yourself, right now, as you are, will help the pain. You are allowed to be human.

Beginning the Journey

At the beginning of the journey beyond tragedy, horror, joblessness, a diagnosis, an intense divorce, debt, isolation, betrayal, pain, sleeplessness, abuse, alcohol or rage, you may not even be sure of your destination. Actually, that can be a good thing. Sometimes, when you’re not sure where you’re going, you increase the chances of arriving somewhere different from where you’ve always been.

For most, hardship begins with a rush of unbearable feelings. Then, one of four things happens. Some people, in spite of the intense emotions, move on. They just take the next step, and then the next. For others, the highly intense emotions take hold and immobilize them. Still others do something with those powerful, difficult feelings called packing. That is, the feelings are so strong and life so demanding they just stop feeling altogether, packing their feelings away. Lastly, many people go forward with their lives, managing some combination of these reactions. All in all, the beginning of the journey is mighty gritty and troublesome. While it’s true that good can be found anywhere, hardship by its nature makes good hard to find.

How did your hardship journey begin? Did you have time to prepare? You may have had a quiet sense of knowing that hardship was nearing. Consequently, there may have been time to get ready. Or maybe your hardship came out of nowhere, and in an instant, the world was a very different place.

Were you one of those with a gut feeling that your life was about to change? Deep inside, you may have been putting together small cues or subtle intuitions. For you, when the crippling news came of your hardship, you were stunned, maybe even broken, but not surprised. Perhaps your tragic news came as soldiers knocking on your door, somberly delivering confirmation of fears about your son or daughter in an overseas war. Or it could be, your hardship began with devastating lab results that validated an instinct about your unborn child.

Perhaps for you, the inner rumblings that kept you up at night were proven right when your spouse walked away from the dinner table saying, “I’m in love with someone else.” Or the hardship may have begun for you as all the pieces fell uncomfortably into place with the announcement at a staff meeting of major job cuts.

On the other hand, your hardship may have come with no time for you to prepare. Many life traumas arrive with no warning: a phone call informs you of the accidental death of your spouse; a normal day at work becomes something very different when a machine malfunction takes your sight; a routine colonoscopy quickly becomes anything but routine when you awake to the news of a cancer diagnosis; a walk to your car at the mall turns into a horrific violation in the parking lot; a scream from next-door calls you to the aid of a neighbor whose spouse had committed suicide; a natural disaster leveled your home in a matter of minutes. In these cases, nothing hints at the start of the hardship journey.