How To Help Yourself When You Don’t Have All The Answers

All of us have been at that place where all we ask is “Why?” This word consumes our entire being! Here are some ways you can help yourself when you ask why.

I love my job. It is not the easiest, but I love it.

As a life and relationship coach, women come to me with all kinds of extreme situations that they are in. Someone who just discovered their husband is cheating on them, someone who is unable to step out of a painful break up, someone who is dreading dating again after the pain of multiple rejections, someone who is struggling to see any hope for herself after a recent divorce, someone who is extremely unhappy in her married life and wants more from her partner, someone who is immensely controlled by her husband and desperately struggling to build up her sense of confidence and self-esteem and the list is long.

“Why doesn´t he care about me? Why wouldn´t he listen to me? Why did he do this to me? Why is life throwing this at me? Why is he so bad? Why can´t I be a mother? Why was I the chosen one for this misery?”

Why, Why, Why, Why?

And frankly, to tell you the truth, I often don´t have all the answers. But in those moments, I have come to rely heavily on my own presence, my empathy and my knowledge of things that do work in relationships to help my clients move forward in the future rather than lingering in the past and in the whys.

And frankly, to tell you the truth, I often don´t have all the answers.

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In today´s post, I decided to share with you a few ways in which I look at life. Some learnings that will help you understand how to help yourself. These have helped me immensely in facing my own tough times and in supporting my clients who go through theirs, and I firmly believe they can be of support to you too.

You can´t always know why when a second person is involved

This one´s simple but so powerful, and it relieves my clients instantly. We cannot ever know with surety ‘why’ when a second person is involved.

We can drive ourselves crazy asking why someone did something to us or why someone is a certain way and yet, after spending 72 hours desperately calculating all the different probabilities of different possible answers, we cannot be sure of the answer.

Moreover, any answer we may come up with – will boil down to our own experience of life, and how we see things and perceive them.

We, human beings, are such magnificently complex creatures. We exist in multiple layers of emotions, motivations, drivers, triggers, conscious mind, sub-conscious mind, our past and our present, our cultures and our religion, our family beliefs, our life experiences – to just name a few!

We cannot ever know with surety ‘why’ when a second person is involved.

How can we ever figure out the ‘exact’ permutation and combination of what among these zillion influences inspired a man to do what he did to us?

So, it is important to consider if finding the answer to that ‘why’ is really worth all that anxiety and those sleepless nights!

So, let´s slowly start letting go of the why when another person is involved.

Radical acceptance

This is a term from author Tara Brach and I find it revolutionary. I use this when a client has gone through something that has totally taken away the ground beneath her feet.

It could include emotionally vulnerable situations like the husband saying “I am not feeling it for you anymore” or instances of a partner just walking out on the other or even something as extreme as losing a loved one.

I encourage my clients to ‘radically accept’ what has happened. Radically meaning completely, fully, without any hesitation and doubts, no questions asked – just accept that it happened because it has happened.

Easier said than done, I know, but so much of our pain can be resolved when we can accept things for what they truly are, rather than live in denial.

In fact, very often, it is the resistance to accept things that causes so much more pain than the event itself.

Radically meaning completely, fully, without any hesitation and doubts, no questions asked – just accept it happened because it has happened.

One generally experiences a release of emotion (for instance, through crying) when one can accept what has happened and from there on, one can begin to quit the struggle with denial and start focusing on building again.

Self-awareness – A crazy focus on you and learning

I call it a ‘crazy’ focus on you because I believe in the power of self-awareness so much and I´ve seen it do wonders to the lives of my clients.

While we can never know with surety ‘why’ in the context of another person, we can certainly get to know ourselves with increasing clarity. Asking why when it comes to us is a very evolved thing to do. We can channelize all that anxiety-ridden energy into getting curious, really curious about ourselves and our experiences.

For instance – we can identify what our trained patterns are that have not been serving us in our relationships or if we are attracted to the ‘toxic men‘ or if we have the wrong ideas about how a woman is supposed to be in a relationship.

Spending time, money, energy on self-awareness and consequently self-growth is one the best possible investments one can do for one´s self.

Personally everything changed for me, including my career, when I got in touch with who I truly was, what truly inspired me and where my own beliefs were coming in my way.

I hold these three tenets very close to my heart in my daily living as well as my profession, and the peace and surrender I have begun to feel is priceless.

I hope this will support you no matter what you´re going through right now and that you can remember this, when the going gets tough. 🙂

Image of a happy woman via Shutterstock

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