Embracing Resistance

Life is change. Change is inevitable whether you are in recovery from a mental illness, an appendectomy or getting over indigestion from last evening's artery food binge. Even if it's not a mental illness you're recovering from, then you undoubtedly experience changes, natural ones like the ones that come with aging, geographical ones like moving to a new home or a new city or deciding that you're going to mix colours other than black into your wardrobe. Or, like my partner you may have had a hate-on for eating fish as a kid but developed a taste for it later in life like he did after eating sushi for the first time.

Change is a natural part of life. Period. The fact is most of us don't really like change; it's not something that we easily embrace.

Even positive changes, like the process of getting better after periods of turbulence and due to a mental illness can be difficult to recognize and accept. Often people expect that they will be getting back to the way life was before the issues began. I have never known it to be the case. What you can expect is that life will be different. You will be different because of your combined experience and what you now do in order to manage your life of wellness. For instance, you may have established a whole new routine of exercise, eating nutritous meals, connecting with healthy people and making sure that you get enough sleep and relaxation time for yourself. These may be just a few of the things that are different. Everyone is unique and no two people's recoveries are alike.

Not Every Day is Like Christmas

Everyone wants to be happy. Happiness however is a relative state of being. My late Auntie Etta always used to remind me that not every day is like Christmas. As simple as that sounds, its meaning is full-blown when we compare how we feel from day to day. Everyone has good days and bad days. In recovery there's usually a very awkward time when a lot of good things are happening while there's still some yucky stuff going on. For instance, after a long period of one yucky thing after another in your life, you experience a series of good things like being accepted into the course you applied to, or you've dropped a ton of weight and met the life partner of your dreams. You're excited about all the good stuff but at the same time not really believing or accepting it. You might be feeling confused or that your world could cave in at any moment. It's sort of like having one foot in the healthy world and one in the unbalanced yucky one. It's important to understand and trust that gradually, over time both your feet will be in the healthy balanced world.

So the good news is that resistance to change is natural so we may as well accept it, embrace it and continue to move forward.

If you have any stories or comments related to the resistance of change please share them here so that others can benefit.