How to overcome the darkest moments of your life?

My own resilience as a person and my willingness to uplift and influence people comes from my time battling illness, depression and manipulation and one thing I can say is that those experiences either break or make you and you do become someone who was made out of these experiences.  In this article, I am going to talk about some people who went through some dark times, study their Psyche and analyze how they overcame their tragedies.

The first case we are going to study is Victoria Milligan, a mother who lost her husband and eight-year-old daughter on a speedboat accident in May 2013.  In the same accident. she got her left leg amputated and her son who survived had to go through 15 operations to save his left leg.

What saved her?

1.  Support from family, friends and therapists.

Victoria got help from her closed ones and had guidance from professional practitioners too.

To overcome painful events, we need to get maximum support from our close ones and professionals.  In some parts of the world, mental health is still not taken seriously or there might be a stigma attached to it.  However, no one can function properly if the mental state is not fine and it’s absolutely fine to talk about it with your closed ones or get professional help from therapists who are qualified and have the experience helping people overcome traumatic events.

2. Natural disposition to talk about one’s emotions to others

Victoria talked about how she felt without any embarrassment or fear of being judged. I think that it’s very important to find someone who is a good listener and at the same time someone who will not judge whatever you are sharing.  There are actually two sides to this one as only you should get the courage to overcome the tragedy but you should also not refuse the support that you may get from those people who are close to you and actually care about you.  One danger of living through tragedy is closing on oneself.  No one will heal if we don’t take the thing which is eating us out and we shouldn’t be ashamed and feel embarrassed by what we lived.  You will notice that in the intro, I bluntly wrote what I went through because I hardly care about what people might think about it.  It’s the truth and I don’t mind sharing such truths if they inspire people

3. Knowing how much love there was in your life before the tragedy

Victoria said that she has no regrets. She doesn’t regret not being able to say goodbye to her daughter and husband a last time.  She said that they knew how much she loved them and that is all that mattered.  When a person dies, the relationship with the person doesn’t end.  It just changes.  The human brain is wired in a way that it will remember the sad and painful parts of the past.  However, it doesn’t need to be like that.  What is important is the quality of the moments which were spent with your closed ones.  There should be no regret felt if you have lived your life fully. 

4. You can’t get over grief.  You get used to its presence.

As per Victoria, the pain never goes.  You just learn how to live with it.  I believe that the most used phrase that “time will heal everything” is very much overrated.  What happens is that we change ourselves in such a way that we learn how to cope with the loss but the loss is real and we will always feel something is missing.  However, what happens is that we learn to live with the emotion and we don’t let the tragedy consume our lives.

5. Set small achievable goals and be in the moment

Victoria really took life slowly after her loss.  She said that she was not living each day as it comes but living each hour of the day as it comes.  She wasn’t overthinking what the future was going to bring and she focused on small aims like saving his son’s legs, learning to walk with a Prosthetic or going to the girls’ sports day. She looked forward to each event as they came and made the most out of them.  This is a very important lesson as we are currently going through the Covid-19 virus spread and there may be a tendency to just focus on when everything will be normal rather than take each day as it comes and be grateful for still being alive.

I hope that you found the article interesting. If you’d prefer the same content condensed in a podcast, please refer to the following link:

Listen to “How To Overcome The Darkest Moments Of Your Life?” on Spreaker.