Coping with negative experiences

ANNE-LAURA VAN HARMELEN: Resilience doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to feel bad after a negative event. Rather, that you feel bad for a while, but then you process that and you cope with that, so that you feel less bad after that. So resilient people are mentally strong because they’re flexible. We know that it is important to really think about the experience that you’ve had to process it. And in order to learn from it. We know that it’s important to take enough time to process a bad experience when you are learning to become more resilient. By reflecting on the situation, you can find out what you found worse about the situation, and how you felt about that.

You may be able to recall a situation when you felt the same. What helped at that time. Even if you can’t think of something that helped at the time, you can learn that that wasn’t the way to handle the situation. This way, you can learn and accept and find the solution by reflecting on what you’ve experienced. It can be very difficult when you’ve had a bad experience. You can feel lonely and think that you’re the only one who’s ever experienced this. You can also feel angry and think, “Why does that have to happen to me?” You can also think that others won’t understand how you’re feeling.

So sometimes it can help to hear or see that others have also experienced something bad, or that they had felt really bad.