When Bad Things Happen – How to Get Through Tough Times in Five Steps
- Brainz Magazine
- Feb 6, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 7, 2025
Colleen & Dana are well-established healers and coaches. They are the creators of The Black Belt Mind, NAP, & YIM, incorporating Colleen’s Traditional Chinese Medicine training and Dana’s extensive coaching & martial arts experience into systems you can use to improve your health, career, and every relationship in your life in unprecedented ways.
You’ve had bad things happen, right? We all have. Some are large, some are small. Some blindside you, and some you see coming, like a tower toppling in slow motion, but you are powerless to do anything about it. The problem is, most of us have been trained to think that the best we can do is duck and cover, weather the storm, and get through to the other side. After all, bad things just happen, right?
Right, but also not right at all. Tough things happen, and how you handle them gives you a chance to come out the other side stronger, calmer, wiser, more capable, and more well-resourced than before. There are just five steps to getting through bad things and becoming a better, more joyous, more powerful person because of them. Some steps are faster, some are more complex, but all are very much within your power to do, and to do well.
1. Choose your response
Reactions happen. Responses are a choice. A reaction is when someone pushes you and you push them back. Shove - shove. It’s a knee-jerk, protect yourself kind of thing. It’s automatic. A response is when someone pushes you and you take a moment to make sure you’re ok, and then to check in and see why they shoved you so you can decide what to say and what to do.
Maybe they pushed you to get you out of the way of an oncoming scooter (appropriate response: say thank you.) Maybe they pushed you because someone pushed them and they were falling (appropriate response: make sure they’re ok too and see what’s up with the 3rd party.) Maybe they pushed you because they’re angry (appropriate response: keep yourself safe and figure out what the anger is about so you can deal with it even if that means walking away.)
When something bad happens, whether that’s someone hitting your car, losing a job, someone breaking up with you, or more, give yourself some time to have your reaction but choose your response. It might feel good to flip out in that moment, but if yelling, insulting, or passive-aggressive comments don't align with who you are in life and who you’re choosing to become, then you’re just going to feel bad later.
2. Don’t try to deny
This is what we teach with NAP and The Black Belt Mind over and over again. Denying things, tucking them in a closet, stuffing them in a suitcase in the back of your mind, and then sitting on it works. For a time. But eventually, it seeps out or blows up, often when you least expect it, often at an inappropriate time, often in an uncontrolled way. You do not need that kind of mess.
The thing is, you deny things because you think that if you recognize they are there, if you accept that what is happening is indeed happening, then you are stuck with the results you are afraid are coming.
NAP borrows from The Black Belt Mind system of “Triple A” and teaches that you have the power to decide the meaning of something, and that changes the outcome. This is a huge, game-changing, and necessary step, yet most of us have been programmed to avoid it.
3. Understand it’s not personal
Yeah, this can be a hard one. Your boyfriend broke up with you and said it was because you’re too needy. Hard not to take that personally. Your work fired you because you’re “underperforming.” Hard not to think you’re the problem. You tanked your self-development work. Again. Hard not to hear your cousin’s voice telling you that you always sabotage yourself.
And yet, the problem is that if you’re focusing on the boyfriend, the supervisor, or the cousin, you’re outsourcing the issue. You’re believing them, or you’re believing your trauma response. You’re assuming that what they say is true, that what they do is all about you.
It almost never is. The boyfriend could have his own stuff going on and feel like he can barely take care of himself, so anyone who asks for anything from him, even if it’s reasonable, feels “too needy.” The supervisor could have been instructed by Human Resources not to tell you anything that could cost the company money, so they picked something from an “acceptable reasons to fire someone” list rather than saying they just don’t have enough cash in the budget. The cousin who repeatedly tells you that you’re sabotaging your own progress is speaking to you from a survival place. Survival mechanisms are great in a survival situation, but they don’t know beans about thriving.
Why is this step useful to not take things personally? Two reasons.
It helps get you out of fight or flight. If something is personal, then you’re in danger. It will keep coming to get you personally. If it’s not personal, then you don’t have to continue to protect yourself from it.
It allows you to not blame yourself.
When you blame yourself based on someone else’s emotions and survival mechanisms, you’re working on their stuff, not yours. And you’ve got better things to do than work on other people’s stuff.
4. But it might not be random either
Yeah, this one can be a little harder to understand. This is all about trauma cycles. Without going into it too much (in other articles, we’ve explored this in more depth), trauma is, simply put, anything that you weren’t well-resourced enough to fully process at the time. That’s it.
If you experience something hard, part of your instinct is to repeat it a bunch of times until you learn what you need to learn from it and can keep yourself safe. We are driven to repeat traumas until we can safely finish the trauma cycle, even if we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing.
Now, “you may be repeating a trauma cycle” can be interpreted as “great, so you’re saying it’s my fault” or “it was fated to happen.”
That’s understandable, but it’s not what’s happening here. If someone has a trauma where they were abandoned, they will feel compelled to repeat that trauma until they learn enough from it. That could mean subconsciously choosing someone who is going to suddenly walk away from the relationship without giving a reason. That could mean abandoning someone else in large or small ways (and blaming yourself later) because then your system can figure out what happened when you yourself were abandoned. That could mean abandoning yourself by walking away from things that are helping you, because that’s how you work through a trauma cycle.
This is not about blame. This is about recognizing that you have power, that you can find the trauma cycle and end it.
And if you’d like to read more about how that trauma cycle might be inherited, how you might be working to complete a trauma that started before you, there’s some cool science behind it.
5. Allow yourself to process it
This is what good self-help does. It gives you a way to safely process what happened. It allows you, without blame or shame, to find out what happened and how to work that into your worldview and your life. It allows you to learn, grow, become more powerful, and gain capacity. It allows you to avoid making the same mistakes again.
There’s a beautiful line from Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Things crack when they expand. That doesn’t mean they are going to break. Stretch marks on a pregnant woman’s stomach are the cracks of expanding to create a life. Cracks on an egg as the chick puts effort into getting out of the safety of its shell are signs that it is making progress to step into the next phase of being. Bad things are the cracks in your life. Processing is how you let the light in.
Start processing the bad things today
We use The Black Belt Mind to put a framework on your life, to help you make sense of the bad things, and to choose how you want to live and how you want to respond. We use NAP (the New Agreement Process) to help you process things, figure out what the trauma cycle is, whether it is yours or inherited, and help you finish the cycle, move out of fight and flight (or freeze, fit in, or fawn), and step into your own power. Come join us and learn some techniques to help you clear old, inherited, stuck-feeling problems gently and easily.
Visit our website for more info!
Read more from Colleen Robinson & Dana Pemberton
Colleen Robinson & Dana Pemberton, Wellness and Leadership Strategists
Dana and Colleen bring partnership to a whole new level in their work together. Vastly different in many ways, they deliver their own brand of magic to the groups, companies, and individuals they work with across North America. Colleen’s experience as a Chinese Medicine Practitioner, fascination with the intersection between science and spirituality, and focus on healing combines with Dana’s “boots on the ground” approach based on a lifetime of martial arts training (he started at age 3) and several decades of coaching. Together, their focus is to help you find and clear the old patterns that are holding you back, and replace them with simple concepts you can apply to move forward with ease.
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