Crises Are Opportunities
Jul 15th, 2007 by roberta
What has motivated you to make major changes in your life? Think about it.
If you’re like most people, you’ve made changes when challenges have presented themselves and your usual solutions weren’t helping you to meet them. When I ask most people what led them to make some significant change, I usually get answers such as, “After my divorce…”; “After my wife died…”; “After my after my house flooded…”.
Most of us avoid making major shifts in our lives under usual circumstances. Even when we’re not satisfied with the way things are going, we hesitate to go down a new path. There’s no certainty that untried solutions will make things better and that can be scary.
Traumatic events, such as accidents, robberies, or the death of a child, can present us with some of our greatest life challenges. In the midst of high stress and often overwhelming emotion, people can find that their usual choices and ways of coping are not providing them with enough relief from the anguish they are experiencing. And at the moment that we recognize this, we are presented with unprecedented opportunity.
As horrific as critical incidents can be, we can now discover strenghths we never knew we had, solve problems in ways we never considered before, and come to a new understanding of what is important in our lives.
The fact that people, families and organizations can grow and end up healthier, more productive and more satisfied following crisis, is a very exilerating part of this work for most clinicians. We always hope that the opportunities will be seized.
When a crisis incident occurs it can be an opportunity to strengthen or wreak havoc in many parts of our lives. As a paramedic/LVN in a small community, I see relationships grow stronger or break apart. The largest factor that plays in the way it goes is the support we have from family, friends, and professionals trained to help in these incidents. Not talking about it does not make it go away, it is imperative that we talk about our feelings and our fears about the crisis. Placing blame in the wrong context can also make a crisis worse and blow up out of proportion. In todays world, when a crisis does happen many people are away from family and are limited to who they can turn to. Having a professional to release tension and fears is very important. Many companies don’t understand this, especially if they have a substantial number of young people who work for them. They might have a spouse they can turn to, but the spouse might be to young to understand the disposition of their loved one and not know how to respond. The spouse with the crisis might find a spouse who does not respond and give the impression they don’t care or find a spouse who angrily vents back because they don’t understand the post traumatic effects. Companies need to respond quickly to keep viable and productive employees after a crisis event has occured. Professionals are needed to help, even those who are use to seeing crisis events such as police, fire, and ems have counselors are standby for assistance.