This is the time of year when there is significant social and media pressure to look back, look forward and make Resolutions.  If looking back is painful, looking forward is anxiety-provoking and focusing on the Resolutions that you could make to “improve yourself” makes you feel uncomfortable, here’s what to do instead.  These thoughts spring directly from my own experience of feeling all but annihilated by the major trauma that I have been through in 2019.

1. Decline to let anyone tell you what you should be doing or how you should be feeling.

 

Frankly, you should already have done this ruthlessly, a while ago. But your blessing (and your curse) is that you are a very nice person. So, you don’t like to behave in a way that feels inconsistent with being nice.  Actually this has nothing to do with how nice you are.  Instead, it has everything to do with – justifiably – protecting yourself from people whose utterances are damaging to you.

2. Listen to yourself.

Major trauma has any number of unpleasant side-effects, including discovering that you have some very annoying ways of processing trauma. My own annoying ways of processing trauma, I’ve discovered, include,

• staring into space,
• scrolling through social media,
• fixating on online shopping portals and fantasising about how much better my life would be if I only bought the most absurd garments,
• indulging in these and similar pointless activities, including the occasional video game for long stretches of time.

In the end, I came to the conclusions that my mind was actually deeply wounded and zoning out was the beginning of healing – although it certainly didn’t feel like that. I mostly knew what I needed to do but could rarely find the energy to do it for more than about 5-10 minutes.

3. Be kind to yourself when your functioning is below par.

 Over the weeks that my nightmare went on, I had plenty of opportunity to notice how it impaired my mental functioning.  Some things I could do – even do well, some of the time.  Others I could not.  Often, I just didn’t have the mental wherewithal to join the dots enough to achieve any kind of joined up thinking.  That happens.  It is not something to be afraid of.  But it is helpful to be aware of it.

Another aspect of the same problem was that my memory was shot to pieces.  It still  is not great.   That reminded me of the dark days of my abusive marriage when I began to wonder if I had early onset Alzeimers.  I didn’t, thankfully.  What I did have was a lot of gaslighting and ongoing high stress.

If you realize that your functioning is below par, accept it self-compassionately.  Your system is in overload.  Simplify if and where you can.  Accept when you cannot. Be kind to yourself anyway.  Kindness is healing.  Especially if you are not getting too much kindness from other people, you need to give yourself that balm for your wounded soul.

4. Focus on what matters to you.

 This one takes a fair bit of doing.  New Year’s Resolutions are, traditionally, all about losing weight, becoming trimmer, looking better and becoming a higher achieving, higher status individual.

Why?

So that you can feel good about yourself.

Unfortunately, the chances of that working are no less wafer-slim as we are told we should be. Two reasons in particular make this kind of preoccupation toxic.

1. Underlying these New, Improved You Resolutions is the belief that you have to be other than you are in order to be good enough for all the good things that you want to happen to you.
2. Even if you do get to achieve the fantasy – which the vast majority don’t, anyway – what will it actually give you? If you lose weight, you will be thinner.  If you become trimmer, there may be an ongoing health benefit – that, certainly, is not to be sniffed at. If you achieve more, you may well increase your status.  However, the question remains, will these changes really make you happier by transforming your life?

Maybe I move in the wrong circles (certainly it has been ever-decreasing circles over the past three months) but I have not met a single person who is trotting around the planet radiantly happy thanks to a New Year’s Resolution that they made one year.

Mostly, we use New Year’s Resolutions to ward off more bad things rather than to embrace good feelings.

So, how about in 2020, you focus on what really matters to you.

Whenever I listen to survivors of abuse, they list their priorities, mostly along these lines with 1) being the most important and 5) the least:

• Sort out my life. Sort out my children’s lives.
• Sort out my finances.
• Learn how to trust people again.
• Get over the relationship.
• Heal my own wounds so that I can feel good about myself.

You have to start from the other end of the list  by focusing on what makes you feel good about yourself.

That is the conventional – misguided – pattern of starting from the outside in.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.  It’s a bit like saying that you will only have a decent meal after you have sorted out everybody else and all the long-term issues you in your life.  Starving people lack stamina and resilience.  Plus, their decision-making becomes impaired.

You have to start from the other end of the list  by focusing on what makes you feel good about yourself.

So, how about in 2020, you focus on what really matters to you.  That likely means inverting the triangle.

Whenever I listen to survivors of abuse, they list their priorities, mostly along these lines:

• Sort out my life. Sort out my children’s lives.
• Sort out my finances.
• Learn how to trust people again.
• Get over the relationship.
• Heal my own wounds so that I can feel good about myself.

That is the conventional – misguided – pattern of starting from the outside in.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.  It’s a bit like saying that you will only have a decent meal after you have sorted out everybody else and all the long-term issues you in your life.  Starving people lack stamina and resilience.  Plus, their decision-making becomes impaired.

You have to start from the other end of the triangle by focusing on what makes you feel good about yourself.

5. Start a daily happiness practice

Narcissists rarely are great believers in happiness.  Rather, they use it – as they use everything else – as a stick to beat you with.

Neither my family of origin nor the wasband were great believers in happiness.  Not surprisingly they were also miserable people. Their “happiness” was short-lived, shallow and not at all inclusive.  They taught me that thinking about being happy was for weak-minded losers.  They have gone through life constantly discontented, despite enjoying all the blessings that theoretically would lead to happiness.  They and their relatives enjoy good health, financial security, physical safety, a kind of community, and longevity.

What do they do with the blessings that they have?

They bitch and moan and always fixate on one petty grievance or another.  So, I would say that their approach doesn’t really work for them any more than it has worked for me.

I’m guessing that you did not come from truly happy stock either.  Not even if you had the misfortune to be connected to people who flaunt their “positivity” as a badge of honor – and use it to make you feel inferior.

Positivity is not happiness.  Happy people will acknowledge the negative aspects in life and – legitimately, I feel  – see if there is something good, or even funny, that they can pick up on in the situation.  Happy people prefer to default to happiness.  But they won’t try to make you feel bad because your feelings are not their feelings.

A happiness  practice is all about you doing what you can to change your default settings.  Over the past few months, I noticed that my default setting slipped into fairly deep depression.  I was back feeling the hopelessness of living – a throwback to my training in abuse when living really was hopeless and pointless.  I realized that, amid all the stress, I had given up on my happiness practice.  Restarting it has helped.

A happiness practice is composed of things that are easy to do on a regular basis that lift the spirits.  My own include, walking, exercising, doing the facial exercise sequence that lifts my spirits, and counting blessings .

Everyone’s happiness practice may well be difference.  The point if that you fix on various things you can do – daily – that don’t require excessive time, effort or money but lift your spirits.  That small investment will produce big benefits.

Mood change really is about creating the domino effect.  A few relatively small things can produce a much bigger and better effect than reason suggests they should.

Wherever you are along your healing journey, it is always an advantage to understand how to survive and come through trauma.  I hope that you will find something in this list that will make your life a little bit easier.

My very best wish for your peace of mind and happiness in 2020 and beyond.