What do you do when something BIG happens?

By something big, I’m thinking about relationship breakdown, job loss, death of a loved one, chronic illness or significant injury as examples. Powerful life events that visit us all from time to time.

First though, a word about the word crisis which has a tendency to be misused in my opinion. When the Universe deals us a significant blow, we’re tempted to call it a crisis. A lot of the time we’d be right, and the concept of “crisis” is worth visiting for a few moments.

For me, two main features are involved. The first is time: crises do not last; they are temporary experiences although the aftermath (therefore not the crisis per se) may last some time.

The second is that during a real crisis, the experience is overwhelming in some respect; outside of normal experience and therefore a surprise which seems to threaten our very existence at some level. We have to deal with this thing or event in or near the moment.

We follow instinct, let the more ancient part of our brains do the work almost out of awareness. We take the steps we need to keep our head above water, and we do so automatically. We survive as best we can until things settle down and we are out of immediate danger.

Crises therefore are short lived events whereas the aftereffects can be felt or experienced for a long time. Once we’re out of immediate danger the issue for us is how do we handle the consequences of the “big” experience.

The point to really get hold of is this.

Some events are out of our control, and some are not. What led up to this point? Was this just happen-stance? Shit does happen, life does leap up and smack us in the mouth every now and again.

Dealing with the aftermath becomes the real issue and therefore the title of this piece should be “what do we do AFTER something big happens”.

Doing Nothing Has Consequences

The blunt truth is that doing nothing doesn’t keep things the same, it allows things to get steadily worse over time. Everything in life will tend toward chaos unless we apply some energy to all of the systems we are operating: our bodies, family unit, social circle, workplace. This is the basic concept of entropy – if you leave a closed system alone, the energy will dissipate and chaos with unfold.

I describe this lived experience of having done nothing and dealing with the consequences as “getting lost in the maze”.

Why am I lost?

I either did nothing because I was (frankly) not courageous enough or I simply didn’t recognise that something needed to be done. The truth is that leaving the impact of significant events on a physical front or in relationships or at work etc will allow things to get worse. Action is needed however painful it may be, otherwise some kind of monster grows in us and we end up living with some kind of metaphorical hideous creature.

Instead of hindsight science (I hate that stuff ), we can reach for something like the ManMind 6 World Model to decode things.

The framework allows us to sort things through step by step in a way that limits the opportunity to automatically blame ourselves as an immediate response and/or get lost in the detail.

First Steps

To get to grips with the aftermath of a situation and find a way forward, we can quickly find a focal point by asking where is the most obvious place to start? In other words, we start with the bleedin’ obvious:

• If you’ve just experienced a big shock, you will be in shock in some shape or form (no shit Sherlock). Let this settle and give yourself some time and space to recover.
• Significant life incidents will be painful and might be bewildering, especially when it’s not of your own doing.
• This, whatever it is, might have been coming for a while but it is here. Now.
• You might feel layers of pain – maybe in the form of apprehension, anxiety or fear and it all feels a bit muddled.
• Complexity seems to demand immediate understanding but leave it for now. We’ll use a framework to cut the complexity into smaller pieces and this is where the 6-world model helps.

As you start to work things through, notice what you feel with the corresponding emotions and take note – perhaps write them down. This will be useful later.

Then we move to some assumptions, and we hold these to be true for all situations:

• You can get through this with the right resources. The task is to work out what those are and where you might get them.
• There are two parts to the whole experience:
  • what’s in the foreground – what is here and now and to be dealt with,
  • what’s in the background – where some of the contributing factors might be. Hold that thought.
• The “problem” might seem complex but there is often a simple and obvious answer. We need to keep things simple to the point of being blunt.
• There are people around who have your best interests at heart and may well be closest. Reach out for their support.
• Everything is solvable if we frame the problem in the right way. We don’t care about being inaccurate to start with, we’ll clear out the fantasies and find the truths as we move forward.

Now, back to being lost.

Being Found not Lost

My poem Box Hedge Maze hints at this. Feeling lost and understanding how you came to be lost can be difficult to work out on your own. Been there done that, got frustrated and then disillusioned – not good.

The obvious task of trying to retrace your steps is at least logical and often a favoured way to “do something” . Takes a lot of time and energy and ending-up seeing the same damn hedge all the time so-to-speak was pretty damn disheartening. It doesn’t work and is in a sense was self-fulfilling.

I found I needed to stop. Look upwards instead of what’s in front or behind me.

Sometimes we need to do something different to escape the bind, even if it seems counter-intuitive.

The 6 World model is an instrument for doing this.

Being lost implies navigation and two basic questions (again, no-shit Sherlock):

1. Where is here?
2. Where is there – the place of situation I want to be?

This is what to 6 world model allows:

• To sort the foreground from the background
• Allow us to chunk-down, to break up the complexity
• Make clear decisions about what belongs where
• To set individual terms of reference for each world
• Separate out the real “you” from the roles you might inhabit (this beckons an element of choice: where you might invest your energy, take responsibility, build purpose.

So What Next For You?

Always a useful question to ask, so see how this lands:

· If you recognise you’re stuck in some way and you got there because of something “Big” and/or the decisions you made ManMind might be for you.

· Using the same techniques to find a way out that got you there in the first place (something Habitual) won’t work – unless you’re extremely lucky.

· “Putting up and shutting-up”, “getting on with it” or “”Manning-Up” (Attitudes) will just prolong things and use up a lot of energy.

Take a look and at the other things about ManMind.