Psychology Today: Our Changing Normals

“People often come to talk therapy for help dealing with a major change in their lives. In fact, I would say dealing with change is one of the most common situations that create issues for people to address in therapy. It could be a change in a relationship, a change within their family, or a change regarding work. It could be caused by something internal and specific to the client, or it could be something external and universal.”

“The clients I see have much in common regarding the cause of the changes in their lives, as many have to do with situations created by the pandemic in some way. Changes like these can be harder to process than most of the relatively smaller changes we experience. By process, I mean the work of learning to acknowledge and accept these changes. Once we can acknowledge and accept that change has come, and that our “normal” life has permanently changed, we can get on with the work of trying to be happy in the moment.”

“Major changes can happen (or feel like they’ve happened) in an instant, even if they took years to slowly build up to that point. Big changes like divorce, death, breakups, breakdowns — these kinds of changes create a before and an after in our lives. It often seems like we spend more time processing the aftermath of these changes than the events themselves lasted.”

“During this period of time, we are likely to experience the processing of this change as anxiety or depression, and to feel the struggle to wrap our heads around the events of the past affecting us emotionally and physically in the present.We yearn to feel safe, and the idea of things being normal is safe. Normal, by definition, is the opposite of change. And if things are safe now, and they don’t change, then we’re safe. So, we strive for normal.

Normal is, in this context, the past. Normal is the safety of knowing how things turn out. It feels good striving for a return to a sense of normalcy because we sometimes feel better thinking about the past than we do the present, where the future is uncertain. I think what makes it hard for us to enjoy happiness in the moment is our tendency to hold on too tightly to happiness from the past. When we idealize the past and subconsciously crave a return to that safer, more certain time, we take energy and focus away from being in the present, which is ultimately where we spend our lives.

“As with any major life change, the event that occurs to affect the change is just one part of it. It’s the change that occurs within ourselves that affects our lives the most. How we interpret or react to the objective event causes the change. Happier people seem to be able to adapt to changing normals more easily. Let’s work on spending less time waiting for things get back to normal to be happy, and more time finding reasons to be happy right now.

Read the full article here.

As for my own personal reflections on this article, well, a lot of my past honestly lines up with the concepts it's trying to relate–such as living in the present moment. Even before the pandemic (which was/is this article’s poignant example of a life-changing event), I had the opportunity to go through a series of personal trials. These trials, wracking as they were, allowed me to address both past and present traumas, at the same time.

And what played out in my recovery was me recognizing that my fear of the past was rooted in depression and that my fear of the future was rooted in anxiety. Obviously I am not perfect at this, but daily meditation as well as mindfulness has helped to both understand and experience the importance for me of remaining grounded in the present.

I know for myself all too well what this article is trying to get across; change is inherently uncomfortable. And the path of lesser (or least) resistance may be personal stagnation in the context of normalcy in our lives. But, in my experience, that type of personal path does not usually lead to personal growth. And this is something that I am still (and probably always will be) working on in my life everyday.

And as a question for you all: For any major life events in your lives (such as the pandemic), how have you been able to maintain your own personal sense of happiness in the present despite the challenges presented by those changes?

#Change #LifeEvents #Normalcy