On Letting Go - Resilience Training Part I
Get ready for boot camp. Some of the best concepts for building personal resilience have been developed by the United States military. The concepts presented here have been adapted from training modules for soldiers who are experienced with traumatic events and constant psychological stress. Important military resilience training skills which are applicable to the personal resilience needed when getting over the loss of a partner are individual skills of building positivity and optimism, family skills of building an environment that is focused on emotional ties, communication and intimacy; and community skills which focus on human bonds of connectedness and belongingness to a group.
Assessing the Situation or Event
Your partner and you have permanently split-up. You have taken the time to understand the causes of the break-up and dissolution of your relationship. You know that challenges will be a result of the changes associated with no longer having the person in your life. You know how the event will impact your personal life goals and objectives. Try to assess the event with you at the center, not comparing yourself to anyone else. Try not to think about your former partner, and how the event impacts their life. Try to be realistic about the event and see it as a situation that you can handle. There are countless cinematic productions that deal with the tragic circumstances of life and intimate relationships. Often, the female at the center of the story, is blunted by a bad love affair, unjustly treated, betrayed, lied to and/or abused by the protagonist which is often portrayed by a narcissistic personality male. The victimized woman, pulls herself up by her bootstraps after going through a period of loss, grief and inner turmoil. Then she often finds a way to rebuild her life, mostly by finding a better job, starting that business she always wanted to try, or by being swept off her feet by the love of her life — the new man that comes along and appreciates her and offers unconditional love. It makes a great story and focuses on personal resilience. In some respects you may be able to take some inspiration from these stories, but you should be cautioned on the realism of these screenplays.
It may appear that your partner has moved on and is living a wonderful new life. More than likely, this is not the case. You are not in a competition with your former partner, and it will be better for you to take your time in navigating the confusion and disorientation brought on by these events. If you follow friends and family on social media, you will probably find it hard to resist the temptation to compare other people’s lives to your own. Social media is an illusion. Pictures are snapshots in time, they capture a moment, not span of a substantial time period or era. Everyone else may seem to have to perfect life circumstances, but you can be assured this is not reality of the situation. You are now in competition with yourself and no one else. While the event may have proposed new obstacles in your life, you also may have the new and revisited aspects of more freedom and flexibility.
❏ Make one benchmark your ability to be realistic and grounded in your interpretations of the events and how they will impact your life.
❏ Make a second benchmark, your decision to focus on yourself, and what you can do to improve your own life.
❏ Make your third benchmark, your ability to be proactive and actively engage other challenges in your life, and not to neglect other key issues that are important to your survival.
❏ Make it a benchmark not to attack or belittle yourself, or anyone else.
❏ Make yet another benchmark to be positive and not a totally negative, and to search for the positive side of the new circumstances of your life.
❏ Make it a personal competitive benchmark to see where you will experience more freedom and flexibility in your life and how this can and will benefit you.
Try to remember that how you perceive events, even those which caused the break-up will probably be very different to that of your former partner. You might feel a need to take the role as victim, and you might even be justified in your perceptions, and therefore want to convince your former partner of their shortcomings. More than likely, your former partner will refuse to view him or herself as the aggressor. They will likely take a view of events that totally justifies their behavior, and they will vehemently deny cheating and refuse to take responsibility for their actions. If you get caught up in the cycle of who is more wrong or right, you will lose time and energy. There is a very little chance that your former partner will admit to any wrongdoing. Even if they do, it will not change the circumstances. Do you really need this validation to allow yourself to move on decisively with repairing your life? Will an apology actually change anything at all?
It may be difficult, but try to keep the assessment of the events as neutral as possible. Try to keep your views as logical as possible. The relationship is over, you or they may be more to blame, but this no longer matters. Gaining closure may be a major theme of your assessment, but you may have to move on without answers to your questions or concerns. If it will help, try to write down the questions that you have surrounding the events, and save it to review at a later stage in the personal resilience training process. You might find that your initial questions are no longer important or valid and that in fact you have already moved on.
