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Julie Answers: What is the best way to cope with a situation that feels impossible?
Debby asked: I have been dealing with relationship, financial, and family issues for a long time. Sometimes I get overwhelmed. How is therapy supposed to help?
Dear Debby,
I love your question — the first part especially — “What is the best way to cope with a situation that feels impossible?” The reason I love it is because I think it is an essential question for someone to ask when they are considering therapy and wondering about its purpose, its usefulness, and what it can and cannot do.
It all comes down to perspective, and the capacity to break a problem down into more manageable pieces and sort out and examine each piece. This process will invariably show you that no matter how insurmountable a problem seems, there is always something that a person can do differently to improve the situation at least to some degree.
Imagine a person’s life situation as a tangled ball of yarn. There are strands of all different colors, a bit of red, blue, yellow, and green. Hold it in your hand and try to figure out how much there is of each color. Or determine the quality and texture of the fibers. You wouldn’t have much luck, because all you would see is a big knot.
