As I'm trying hard to maintain general sanity and quickly bounce back from yet another personal crisis, I've started to like the word Resilience more than ever. Resilience is defined as the capacity to quickly recover from difficulties. Different people have different ways to cope with difficulty. But Martin Seligman's in his beautiful book "Learned Optimism: How to change your mind and life" describes that there are 3 Ps that comes in the way of recovery:
- Personalization - The victim mindset to attribute whatever is happening to oneself "it happened only because of me" OR "I caused this misfortune".
- Pervasiveness - The misplaced assumption that a setback in one area is going to affect all the areas of life and therefore the life is going to be turned completely upside down.
- Permanence - the belief that the bad effects of the event will last forever
When faced with a crisis the following plays out in an infinite loop "I created this hopeless situation, my whole life has now become hopeless and I'll continue to remain hopeless for rest of my life"
We all know that this is not true. Dr. Seligman argues, therefore, that recognizing the 3Ps helps one to rebound from a tragedy or a crisis lot more quickly as you can put things in perspective.
I wish you don't get into tragedies, but if you do get into, as life has the habit of throwing them once in a while, do remember the 3Ps. I'm also curious to know coping mechanisms you have to come out of a personal crisis.
Remember what Seneca said "We suffer more in imagination than in reality".
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