Resilience: Remembering Your Past Comebacks So You Can Overcome a Current Setback

One of life's many challenges involves overcoming setbacks. One strategy that is helpful to develop resilience and overcome a setback is to remember your past comebacks during challenging times (see my article: Developing Resilience, Resilience: Bouncing Back From Life's Challenges,  Developing a More Resilient Self in Psychotherapy, Coping With Frustration, Navigating Life's Transitions and Turning Lemons Into Lemonade During Life's Ordinary Disappointments).

Resilience: Remembering Your Past Comebacks So You Can Overcome a Current Setback

During setbacks, it's easy to dwell on everything that went wrong.  It's also easy to remain mired in self blame where you're internal critic gets the best of you and paralyzes you (see my article: Overcoming the Internal Critic).

But the important thing to remember during a setback is that you bounced back during prior setbacks, possibly even worse setbacks than what you're experiencing now.

Resilience: Remembering Your Past Comebacks So You Can Overcome a Current Setback

Think of the current situation as a learning experience:

• What can you learn from the current setback?
• Are you catastrophizing and overreacting to this setback?  See my article: Are You Overreacting to Routine Disappointments?
• Are there any insights you can gain from this setback?
• How can you use what you've learned to sharpen your skills?
• Can you see any new possibilities that you weren't seeing before? See my article: Opening Up to New Possibilities and Moving Out of Your Comfort Zone.
• Are you focusing on the things that you can control as opposed to things you can't control?
• What have you done in the past that helped you with prior setbacks?

Over time, overcoming setbacks allows you to build resilience.

When you can overcome your disappointment to look at the situation clearly, you will often discover that you have dealt successfully with other challenges in the past, and you can use these same skills to overcome the current setback.

Resilience: Remembering Your Past Comebacks So You Can Overcome a Current Setback

Often, this involves changing your attitude about the setback.  If you're overcome with self criticism and telling yourself, "I knew I wouldn't be able to do it" and "I'm not good enough," you're working against yourself and making it that much harder to overcome the current setback.

But if you can develop a more objective perspective about your situation, step back and recognize that you have bounced back before, you're more likely to open up to new ways to overcome your problem.

In the long run, what's most important is not that you're having a setback, but your attitude and what you do about it.

Unresolved Emotional Trauma Can Have an Adverse Effect on Overcoming a Setback
People who have experienced emotional trauma, especially unresolved childhood trauma, often get triggered by setbacks.

If they grew up feeling powerless, unlovable or not good enough, a setback can seem like a confirmation of their negative feelings about themselves (see my article: Overcoming the Emotional Pain of Feeling Unlovable).

This is very difficult to overcome on your own.

Getting Help in Therapy
If you're finding it difficult to overcome a setback on your own and it's triggering feelings of worthlessness related to unresolved emotional trauma, rather than struggling on your own, you could benefit from seeking help from a licensed psychotherapist, who specializes in helping clients to overcome trauma (see my article: Overcoming Emotional Trauma and Developing Resilience).

A skilled trauma therapist can help you to overcome unresolved trauma that's getting triggered by the current setback.  This can help you to overcome the current challenges as well as future challenges.

Rather than suffering on your own, get the help you need so you can free yourself from your traumatic past to live a more fulfilled life.

About Me
I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

I specialize in helping clients to overcome emotional trauma.

To find out more about me, visit my website:  Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.