Skills in the Struggle: Finding Strength in Places We Don't Usually Look

When we talk about mental health and substance use struggles, we understandably spend a lot of time talking about what they cost people. VIDEO INTRO LINK

Relationships can be damaged. Opportunities can disappear. Trust can be lost. Physical and emotional health can suffer. People may lose money, jobs, freedom, confidence, stability, and years of their lives.

Those losses are real, and there is no reason to put a positive spin on them.

But they may not be the whole story.

What Did You Have to Get Good At?

People adapt to difficult circumstances.

Someone who lived through years of instability may have become incredibly resourceful.

Someone who never knew what kind of mood a parent or partner would be in may have become exceptionally good at reading people.

Someone who repeatedly lost everything and had to rebuild may have learned persistence and how to start over.

Someone who spent years hiding a substance use problem may have gotten very good at thinking quickly, communicating persuasively, noticing people's reactions, and functioning under pressure.

That creates an interesting question:

Can something useful develop inside something that wasn't good for us?

The new Taking the Escalator worksheet Skills in the Struggle: Finding What We Have Gained While Getting Through What We Lost explores exactly that question. The activity asks people to consider whether difficult experiences may have strengthened abilities such as resourcefulness, adaptability, persistence, problem solving, communication, empathy, self-awareness, courage, and survival.  

From "Get Rid of It" to "Use it for Something Better"

There are parts of ourselves that may need to change. But sometimes we don't need to throw the whole thing away.

Maybe persistence was once used to keep chasing something destructive. Could that persistence now be used to finish school?

Maybe being persuasive was once used to manipulate people. Could that same communication ability help someone succeed in a job?

Maybe extreme independence once meant refusing all help. Could that resourcefulness remain while the person also learns when it is okay to rely on others?

Maybe staying constantly alert once served an important purpose. Could that awareness eventually become better judgment rather than always expecting danger?

This is where a strengths-based approach becomes much more than simply telling someone, "You're strong." It helps people identify how they are strong and decide what they want to do with those abilities now.

The worksheet eventually moves participants in exactly that direction by asking them to identify abilities they currently use productively, ones they want to strengthen, ones that could help with employment, and patterns they want to change.

Looking for What Is Already There

There is another side to this idea for clinicians. We spend a lot of time identifying symptoms, problems, risks, deficits, unhealthy behaviors, poor choices, and areas requiring improvement. Obviously, there are good clinical reasons to assess those things.

But if that becomes the only lens through which we see someone, we're missing a lot.

A useful clinical habit is to ask:

What did this person have to become good at to survive the life they have lived?

Sometimes the answers are obvious.

Other times we have to look harder.

That doesn't mean romanticizing trauma, addiction, incarceration, poverty, mental illness, unhealthy relationships, or anything else someone has endured. The worksheet specifically avoids suggesting that people should be grateful for painful experiences.

It means recognizing that human beings adapt. Occasionally, hidden among adaptations that need to change are abilities worth keeping.

Introducing Skills in the Struggle

The new Skills in the Struggle activity takes participants through that process in several different ways. Participants identify abilities they may have developed, become "Hidden Skill Detectives" by looking for strengths inside several realistic situations, examine a large mixture of strengths and coping behaviors in their own lives, and finally choose an ability they want to take forward and use differently.  

The goal isn't to rewrite the past...It's to look at it from a strengths based perspective.

We can acknowledge what something cost us while also recognizing what we learned getting through it.

What happened may already be written. What we do with what we learned from it is still up to us.

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