Hello there and welcome to my e-course
on how to thrive in a crisis.
Let's just dive right into it.
What exactly is a crisis?
A crisis is defined
as a time of extreme difficulty, trouble or danger.
Now, given that that's the case,
it means that it's a time
where people have to make extremely critical and difficult decisions.
A crisis is something that can affect an individual,
it can affect a family,
a group of people,
it can affect a culture,
a society,
a world or even the universe at large.
To give you some ideas of what crisis is,
because it's a full range of things,
I'm going to give you a list:
A crisis can be a mental health crisis,
a crisis can be an identity crisis,
a crisis can happen when you have an extreme accident,
when there's a time of pandemic or war,
a crisis can be a natural disaster.
Some other examples of a crisis:
It could be being in a lawsuit,
it could be a family disruption or a divorce,
it could be the loss of a loved one,
it could be being taken to court and being sued by someone.
What I want you to understand is, is it can be a full range of things.
It can also be positive things.
What I mean by that is that
most people would consider the birth of a new child
to be something that's a blessing, right?
Or a marriage to be something that's a blessing.
But sometimes that can actually initiate a crisis.
What I want you to get before we move forward is that
there can be a full range
both positive and negative things
that cause a person to go into a period of crisis.
The first thing that happens when people experience a crisis,
is that they go into a state of shock.
It's perfectly normal, perfectly "natural",
it happens to almost everybody.
Now the first thing that people report when they go into shock
is that things begin to feel surreal.
They start to experience dissociative states of consciousness.
A lot of people describe the feeling of
watching themselves from above,
or the feeling of life, all of a sudden, turning into a movie,
that they're watching, instead of really living.
They also experience a brain fog.
Where it's very difficult to think clearly
and things become incredibly confused.
Shock is a very difficult somatic experience for people to hold,
because it is the experience of holding extreme dichotomy.
What I mean by that is that shock,
one of the hallmarks of shock,
is this feeling of absolute stasis.
Meaning non-movement.
Like this deep freeze and even apathy of not being able to move,
while at the same time,
inside of that somatic experience,
is this incredible upheaval,
this absolute chaos and confusion
which is an intense movement
which feels a little bit like static.
If any of you have watched any of those old tv sets,
you'll know what static looks like on a screen.
It's this chaotic movement,
but not in any particular direction.
It's all over the place.
But with shock,
that's happening on the inside and on the outside there's this,
deep freeze.
The thing I want you to know,
is that the more you resist shock,
the worse shock gets.
And what do I mean by resisting shock?
Trying to force yourself out of it,
trying to create movement where that freeze happens.
This is not the way to approach shock.
Now, I'm in reality that there are some crises
that don't allow for the luxury of sitting still with shock.
That's usually when you're in the immediate danger type of element,
of certain crises.
You need to allow yourself to get through that
however that you need to get through that.
We'll be having a conversation about that later.
However, It is an absolute 100% necessity
that whenever you get the opportunity when you're in a state of shock,
the way that you have to deal with that shock,
is by getting incredibly, incredibly still.
Stillness,
incredible amounts of presence and motionlessness,
is the way to respond to shock.
The body needs an intense amount of focused presence.
On top of stillness,
in order to be able to come out of the flood of stress chemicals
that are putting you in that primal fight-or-flight mode.
When you experience a crisis,
or when you're in that state of shock,
you're so much in the primal fight-or-flight mode,
that you have to be able to get still,
in order to bring yourself out of the engagement
with those primal behaviors,
and into the engagement
with higher level functioning processes.
What I mean by that is that
when you're in shock,
or when you're in that fight or flight mode,
it's not actually possible to access
the executive functioning element of your brain and body.
What do I mean by executive functioning?
I mean things like memory retention,
or even accessing your memory in order to make good choices,
I mean the capacity for sound judgment,
I mean the capacity to weigh out consequences,
the capacity to emotionally regulate,
the capacity to make an objective decision.
Those types of things are not accessible
when you're in a state of shock.
So when you're in a state of shock,
you don't need to do anything.
In fact, you have to do the opposite.
You need to powerfully do nothing.
I'm going to give you a metaphor
that's going to help you to understand how to deal with shock.
I want you to imagine that when you're in shock,
your whole body has gone into freeze
and therefore becomes like a block of ice.
Now when you become intensely present to yourself,
when you become still
and focus all of your attention on the inside,
to whatever movement or non-movement
may be occurring within your body,
it's the same as taking a high intensity light beam
and focusing it at ice.
Now, it's a very slow process
when you focus light at an ice block,
you may barely get a single drip
in a half an hour.
However, it's doing the process of melting.
So it's almost like by focusing your attention in on the freeze itself,
you're allowing the body to do
what it knows how to naturally do,
which is to melt and come back into that state
of free-flowing activity or movement.
That's where the real good decisions can be made.
The second thing that's going to happen in a crisis,
is that you're going to go into "reactivity mode".
Now, reactivity mode,
it's got a bad rep,
but really what this is,
is it's the parts of your consciousness
that are in charge of protecting you,
that take over your embodiment,
so as to self-preserve as fast as it can.
This is the phase where you're gonna succumb to knee-jerk reactions.
Now those protector parts of your being,
they're going to cope with the experience
or the threat that it's dealing with,
because all crisis implies some kind of threat,
it's going to start dealing with that
in the way that it learned, to keep you safe before.
Those strategies that those reactive parts of you take
aren't necessarily the right way to respond
to a particular crisis when it's presented with you.
It's just that in your past, you've had an experience
you've learned a way of coping with that so that you survived,
and now you're going to just knee-jerk react to
every scenario in that exact same way
that worked before in your childhood.
Maybe it didn't even work then.
For example, let's say that in the past
a person had a part of their being
who understood that the best way to stay safe,
the fastest,
was to go into denial.
When faced with the crisis,
this is a person whose reactivity mode is going to look like denial.
A person who learned that the best way to preserve themselves
was to fight back,
is going to instantly get defensive.
Whenever a crisis occurs,
they're going to get really agitated and probably get in a lot of fights.
A person who learned that the best way to stay safe
was to take full-blown responsibility,
is going to react by immediately blaming themselves.
The thing to understand about reactivity mode,
is that when we're in that state of reactivity
we're not actually accepting the situation at hand.
In fact, we're proactively resisting it.
We're still trying to prevent
what has already happened
or try to come out of the situation unscathed.
And this reactivity
that is a resistance to the situation that it is in and a refusal to accept it,
so we're immediately trying to change it
in whatever way we can and control the situation,
makes this a time of extreme frustration, anger and severely heightened anxiety.
So it's really important that in the reactivity phase,
the minute that you recognize that you're in that phase,
you understand that the things that you're doing
are being done in resistance to accepting the reality that's at hand.
It's also important to understand
that in that moment of reactivity
an intense polarization within you is occurring,
between the part that is trying to protect you,
and the vulnerability that that part is trying to mitigate or minimize.
If you're in that state of intense polarization,
there is no possible way
for you to make a sound decision.
In fact, it's likely that you're going to make a decision that bulldozes
one part of you.
And if you bulldoze a part of you,
it's not actually acting in your own best interests.
It's something that's going to backfire long term.
So there's no way for you to be in that state of polarization,
where a protector element of your consciousness
has taken over your embodiment,
and to make a good decision
that will actually benefit you in the long run,
instead of become something you severely regret.
The next phase that will happen when somebody experiences a crisis,
is what I call the searching for meaning phase.
Not in a good way.
People are obsessed with meaning.
After all, we are creatures that want to ascertain the truth.
We want to understand the implication of everything that happens in our lives.
Now, the searching for meaning
aspect of dealing with a crisis,
is actually still resistance.
It's still a refusal to accept what has happened.
It's to believe that if you understand
the full truth about exactly what happened there,
you could somehow still prevent it.
Something that's already happened.
Or you could for sure mitigate any consequences
that could potentially come of what happened.
When potentially those consequences are coming either way.
When you are searching for meaning in a crisis,
you're going to become obsessed with finding out the truth.
You're going to become obsessed
with why this happened in the first place.
How could it happen?
This is the phase in which it's going to be:
"should have, could have, would have"
What could I have done to make it different?
What could I do still to prevent what's happening?
It's that type of a phase,
You are still not accepting what is occurring.
It's the phase in which you're going to want to tell your story
as many times as you possibly can,
to try to extract some kind of understanding
about the situation that you're in,
or the overall meaning of it.
As if somehow grasping that meaning
is going to assist you
to not be hurt by what's happening at all.
This "meaning phase" of crisis,
is actually also the phase where people begin bargaining.
What I mean by bargaining is,
that's part of the "should have" "what if I'd only"
like, "maybe if I",
the bargaining happens with other people in the circumstance
with the situation itself and with the universe at large.
For example, let's say that you've got somebody
who just got a terminal cancer diagnosis.
This person during this phase,
the meaning phase,
may start to obsess over:
"Oh, well, maybe if I just change
all of these bad habits I had,
or lifestyle choices that weren't particularly good,
then maybe i'll be given more time.
It's an attempt to understand things,
so as to gain control over the experience,
that is innately making you feel so out of control.
The next phase that people deal with
when they're experiencing a crisis, is acceptance and processing.
Now, it's important for me to explain
that accepting, is different than most people think it is.
But in this phase,
you start to accept what happened,
you start to realize that it's already happened,
there's no way of actually preventing it, you can only take proactive steps here,
but you're also accepting that potentially those things
also mean some degree of pain.
Now to accept something,
does not mean to like it.
That's something that most people don't get,
because there's this association
between acceptance and approving.
Acceptance is only to swallow the reality of something.
It is to acknowledge the validity of something.
So, a person is dead.
To accept something,
is to say:
"I accept that person is dead,
I see that it is true that they are gone."
That's what acceptance means.
In this phase of acceptance and processing
it's quite typical for people to start confronting
the reality of their powerlessness
in the situation at hand,
or at the very least,
their feelings of powerlessness relative to the situation at hand.
A person can experience extreme bouts of depression
in conjunction with this particular phase,
if they go into resistance
relative to that powerlessness.
Here's the good news:
Once acceptance actually occurs,
and a person levels with the reality
of what is actually happening,
then what you'll notice is that those primary defense mechanisms
that were up in the whole last part of the process
of dealing with crisis,
they start to diminish.
A person starts to focus less on the story of what happened
and less on how to prevent it,
and even less on understanding the whole situation at hand,
and their attention tends to switch
towards what they can do about it in the now.
So actually, in this phase of acceptance
their power actually swings back
and now their access of power is squarely in reality.
And they're in:
"What I can do from where I am with what I have."
In conjunction with the processing element
of this accepting and processing phase,
what begins to happen
is that a person starts to let go of
what doesn't make sense to hold on to anymore,
and instead their focus adjusts forward.
The next phase of a crisis,
is what I call reorientation.
In a crisis,
to say that it's disorienting,
is a bit of an understatement of the century.
It's almost like somebody came in
and took the cards in your life, and just threw them in the air.
So the reorienting phase,
is the phase where
those cards become collected and put together in a whole new form.
Now that form should be something that adds to your life,
instead of something that diminishes your life.
It's this reorientation phase,
that is perhaps the most critical and important phase
for switching from the old normal,
to the new normal.
So another way of saying this is,
the reorientation phase
is about finding a new sense of direction,
a new focus,
and building a new life,
or a new area of life,
depending on how severe and wide-ranging the crisis may be.
It's about taking those cards
and deciding which ones you're going to play with now.
It's about re-orienting towards what you can do,
the opportunities that might exist,
and the "new" that you might be looking forward to.
This is the phase that is the most fun.
The hope of course here,
is that at the end of the reorientation phase,
even though you're going to look back at it
and still say it was painful as hell,
you will actually be able to see how that experience
made more of you,
instead of took away from you.
It's critical to understand these phases
and also understand how to move through these phases
relative to a crisis.
Because it's possible
that if any one of these phases is resisted,
that you can actually get stuck in them.
For example, it's possible to get stuck in long-term shock
This is something that you see quite often in conjunction
with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
It's possible for people that if they stay stuck
in this resistance to the powerlessness that they feel,
that they become actually stuck in depression for years
as the result of a crisis that has occurred.
It's also possible
that if we don't let somebody really tell their story
and process through that in this phase of trying to find meaning,
that they will never reach a phase
where they accept what has happened.
What this means is that we have to face any resistance
that we may have to any one of these phases in the process
of healing through a crisis.
And we have to confront it head-on.
Because we could do some serious damage,
if we succumb to that resistance
and don't allow ourselves to go through any one of these phases.
I want you to imagine it like this:
imagine that you're in a building
and that building has several floors.
Each one of those floors represents one of these phases of healing.
And you're currently inside of an elevator.
If you've got your hand on those buttons and you're like:
"I'm not going to floor 4, I want to go to floor 6.
I'm skipping floor 4."
You are going to get yourself into some serious trouble
relative to healing through a crisis.
Also, it's important to know what to do,
assuming that you push that button,
you do go to floor 4.
If you have resistance to floor 4,
the chances are you're gonna get off on floor 4
and whatever needs to be done there,
you're not actually gonna do.
Instead you're going to go onto that floor
and compound the damage that was already done there.
Which is my primary reason,
for doing this entire course.
Because I want you to understand
what each of these floors entails,
and when you get off onto that floor,
how to deal with what you find there,
in a way that's going to help you to move through
and thrive through the crisis,
instead of compound the damage already done by one.
I'm going to hit you with a hard truth,
but this time it's one that's going to feel good.
The truth is that nobody has to give you any information
about how to survive a crisis.
In fact, any information they gave you,
wouldn't really help.
You are literally hardwired for survival.
You will survive a crisis.
You're biologically wired to do so.
It's not even going to be a question.
Now thriving through a crisis,
is a completely different concept.
And it's the reason I made this course.
To thrive in a crisis,
is to take that crisis
and to weave it into the tapestry
of who you are,
so that it adds to you, instead of diminishes you.
My intention for this course,
is to help you use whatever crisis you're facing,
for growth,
for the creation of a life that's even better
than the one that you may be leaving behind.
I would love for you to join me.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte