Crises occur in a saturated and destabilised environment (From Gordon MacDonald, Rebuilding your Broken World):
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- We are in Overload
- Lost the Initiative
- Lost control
- Cannot please enough people
- Weary – close to burnout
- Said yes to too many people
- Responding to the issues and problems that other people create
- We sense that our effectiveness is quickly diminishing
- Difficult people wear us down
When teenagers have made choices that shattered their personal worlds, it likely that they made their choices:
- When peer pressure was at its highest
- When they felt unloved by significant people in their lives
- When their inner drives and passions were stirred up and they were in situations without others with minimal restraint
The solution to the problem is not just trying to resolve the issue at hand. It is like an invasive weed. Plucking the ‘flowers’ off the weed might make the garden look okay for a short time but the weeds will regrow. So, this book gives you tools and techniques to go deeper and resolve deeper issues, and give you new ways to cope, so you can change the issue at hand AND grow.
The 3 stages are:
Crisis
Minimum 8 weeks
- Look at your habit, and deal with the symptoms
- Habits take 3 -6 weeks to break so work hard on that
- Deal with the immediate family issues
- Gather friendship support
- Look for therapy – for understanding and insight
- Deliver Immediate Apologies
Stabilisation
3+ months
- The consequence of the crisis will pan out and you might not be able to stop that …but you can change yourself
- Rebuild your identity, values, and beliefs
- Look at root-causes, your history, patterns, and triggers – the inner conversations
- Look at communications and relationships – the outer conversation
- Deal with relapses – what have you learnt and what will change
Growth
6- 24 months or more
- Build on the knowledge of the work you’ve have done in the book.
- You cannot address everything at once so look at various habits and coping mechanisms and work through them slowly and consistently