The value of setbacks in life

ZonedOut wrote:I quit therapy (...) a couple months ago. I felt good for a while and thought I was ready to ''move on'', so I went into less intensive treatment elsewhere. Sadly, it failed, and since last week, I'm back at the hospital where I came into treatment back in 2014.

From a while ago, posted here.

Looking back on it, I can only conclude that this experience has brought me an all new and refreshing perspective on my future and enabled me to make plans and start new challenges.

Honestly, I feel like they (the team at the hospital) just let me go, knowing beforehand that I would return pretty soon after I had left. It's not that I was about to jump off a bridge or to go on a killing spree or something once they let me go, so they could do this safely. I think they intentially provided me room to have this experience, instead of (over)protecting me by telling it wouldn't be a good idea to leave at this point. I think in hindsight, this experience was necessary to enter a new stage in my recovery. It has encouraged me to reassess my goals and future plans, as well as the goals and directions of my therapy at the hospital. As a result, I'm about to start a series of courses, paving a new road towards recovery and eventually reintegration in a gradual and safe way, and on my own pace. I even started to carefully think about some new career plans, which I will be move towards with those same courses.

What about your life? Have you ever experienced major lows that eventually turned out positive, for example in this way, resulting in a reinvention of particular aspects of life?

ZonedOut wrote:What about your life? Have you ever experienced major lows that eventually turned out positive, for example in this way, resulting in a reinvention of particular aspects of life?

Oh, absolutely. I'd go even further and venture that as long as you learn from your experiences and persist, almost everything can be turned to your advantage (except maybe trauma; I don't know about that one). And like you said, a big part of it is that setbacks are maybe the one guaranteed way to change your perspective.

Also, as you and other posters have mentioned, it's not just that they change your plans and ideas, but even the reference frame you use to judge everything. I think remembering that helps me make the best of my failures and view them positively, but not overly so. It's not so much that you need to put a positive spin on them, but you gauge them more realistically.

For example, I'm not exactly thriving in life, and sometimes I get frustrated that I haven't been very successful yet like people I know have, or as much as many people say I probably should be for that matter. But the tactical retreats made me realize that those comparisons themselves are relative to false ideals.

People assume I should be thriving socially because I do have social skills, but it was my failure that made me realize social skills are often an illusion and no match for a lack of common experience and stable peer relationships from a young age. By that more realistic yardstick, I'm actually not doing that bad with people. Another example is my long, bumpy road through higher education. My family will particularly complain that I still don't have a degree and that I ever dropped out. But then I remember that if I had graduated when and how I first planned, I would be leaving school right into the Great Recession with a degree in a subject that was absolutely mauled by unemployment and has still never come close to bouncing back. And I wouldn't have had the sang-froid that dropping out gave me to deal with it.

In other words, always try to keep a sound perspective; I've found that many times I failed in life, if I hadn't, I would have been advancing right into a bullet.

Quaker 'Faith and Practice' 21:67:
"I was terrified that I'd break down.
I did.
It didn't matter."

UK SPD wrote:Quaker 'Faith and Practice' 21:67:
"I was terrified that I'd break down.
I did.
It didn't matter."

Nice! I know I've complained about Protestantism several times, especially recently, but I like the Quakers. They're like the whirling dervishes of the Anglosphere.

They probably know what they're talking about too; they've always had a weird tendency to be right about the things that truly do matter.

Yea have I, but not in a sickhouse. It may be that setbacks are not good fully in life, but teach us what is evil, and how best we shun it.

1201236 wrote:Yea have I, but not in a sickhouse.

Me neither. I realize it may have been a bit confusing the way I stated it. With ''hospital'' I was referring to the mental health care facility where I'm getting treatment as a whole, rather than a mental hospital in a way usually being associated with psych wards, or inpatient care in general at best. The facility where I'm getting treatment includes inpatient treatment settings, but I'm getting outpatient treatment. It's a department using an outreaching approach though, meaning they could actually come out and visit me at my house instead of me visiting them in case that would be needed. But it's still outpatient.

Looking at this thread and some recent others of mine, I realize I often tend to start threads and then soon no longer have any impetus to actually follow through. Or well, often I want though, in some sense, but then it feels like too much to wrap my mind around. Or I just can't focus.