Losing in order to improve?

“PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTIONS” column by Diego Ingrassia – “LOSING IN ORDER TO IMPROVE?”
for PSICOLOGY CONTEMPORARY – The End – no. 264, November-December 2017 – GIUNTI EDITOR

Today I would like to talk to you about Anna. Anna is curious, has a lust for life and knowledge, loves to study and dream of faraway places.
Anna works in a bar in the mornings and gives Italian lessons in the afternoons.
She is 21 years old, but is already a mother.
Her family of origin has never been there, her son’s father attended history school with her.
He is now preparing his thesis and has decided to follow his own path alone.
Anna’s story is the story of many people who often cross our lives.
They are stories of difficult lives, of denied possibilities, of renunciations.
But for some of us, Anna’s story could be read as the example of a woman who lives her life to the full, a woman who is a protagonist because of the choices she has been able to make, a woman who is courageous because of the resources she has unexpectedly been able to bring into play.

Anna smiles. She does so in the morning when she removes a splash of soap from her baby’s nose.
She smiles when on the way home, sitting in the tram, she reads the last page of a book.
What makes her happy? What makes so many people like her confident and fulfilled, despite the fact that life has scarred them with loss and hardship, exposed them to risks and obstacles, often within the very family in which they grew up?
The ability to overcome adversity, to cope with disadvantage, adapting positively and maintaining one’s balance: this is resilience.
Resilient people demonstrate awareness of goals, motivation in finding the stimuli to complete tasks, consistency in choices and operations, a search for meaning and significance in life, and a sense of humour.
And it is precisely this last personal resource that seems to correlate strongly with emotion regulation mechanisms, especially with the process of interpreting situations (appraisal) and responding to them (coping).
Self-esteem, optimism, self-efficacy and perception of control are those factors that make a person read potentially stressful situations in a positive light in the appraisal process.
A study conducted in 2008 by Peveri and Anolli showed how the ability to regulate one’s emotions and interpret experienced situations with a positive connotation is the factor that, more than any other, favours good adaptation and management of situations perceived as stressful.
The interesting aspect of the research is that this capacity has an even stronger value than dispositional characteristics (self-esteem, optimism, self-efficacy, irony, etc.) in determining a person’s level of resilience.

What competence is therefore required to develop a good degree of resilience?
Research shows that becoming emotionally competent and actively experimenting in building positive relationships is the key to developing resilience.
Being emotionally intelligent means being able to manage one’s own and others’ emotions by recognising their triggers and involuntary indicators expressed on a non-verbal level; not only to create resilience, but also to develop relational competence.
Emotional intelligence enables us to recognise the stimuli that cause destabilising emotions, to interpret them without contaminating ourselves when they are of extreme and destructive intensity, to choose what behaviour to adopt in order to cope with the environment in the most adaptive and functional manner, i.e. respecting one’s own needs and the fundamental motivations of others, in order to preserve one’s own emotional balance.
Flexibility, open-mindedness, and a positive disposition towards events are therefore decisive resources, but it is also true that we often have to reckon with resistance to change: the fear and, at the same time, the fatigue of letting go of something that has so far guaranteed us stability and balance.
However, there are times when we have no choice, such as when we lose something or someone important and we have to adapt, reinvent ourselves.
The experience of loss is inevitably painful, but from the perspective we are investigating it can also be seen as an extraordinary opportunity to get involved and overcome difficulties we never imagined we would be able to face.
When faced with a problem, when we choose whether to act or suffer, we also choose who we want to be and what opinion we want to have of ourselves.
To be able to do this, we have to ferry our sadness into emotions that give us strength, energy and determination.
Restructure the difficult moments we have experienced in a positive way, avoid narrowing the picture and instead work to increase the number of possibilities.
This attitude improves our effectiveness, generates confidence, increases our self-esteem.
Experimenting, leaving one’s comfort zone, reinventing oneself: actions that require courage and the will to substantially improve one’s existence.
And to achieve this with as little effort and difficulty as possible, it is necessary to have an open mindset that looks to the future in a welcoming and positive way.
In short, learning to become resilient through a daily effort to improve our awareness and search within ourselves for the necessary resources.

There is a long tradition of wisdom that identifies the metaphor of the journey as a container from which to draw precious resources for personal growth.
Homer, Dante, Kerouac, in epochs far removed from each other, have accompanied millions of readers through the inevitable challenges that the quest journey entails.
Very different experiences and tales that contain a common message: it is necessary to lose oneself for those who want to find themselves again.
Myths, fairy tales, legends, have been telling us this passage for millennia.
Losing oneself, abandoning superstructures, getting rid of all that is useless, approaching the essence of things, is a teaching that comes from a wisdom as old as humanity.
In a beautiful book with a deliberately provocative title – If you meet the Buddha in the street, kill him – Sheldon B. Kopp, professor and psychotherapist, summed it up by stating: ‘The therapist offers the patient only what he already possesses and takes away what he has never had’.