94. Resilience and Hope When There Is No Happy Ending

Getting Hopes Up Part Two

Cheryl Fischer 0:00

A few weeks ago, or like a couple months ago, I did an episode for this podcast about not getting your hopes up. And in fact, the opposite of that, just freaking getting your hopes up. And there has been quite a response to that episode. I am amazed. So it's time to do a little follow-through. We know now that getting our hopes up is the healthy way to go about it. So what happens if the hard thing still happens anyway? Welcome to Mind Your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time. Unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body. Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and, oh my goodness, powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife. This is the Mind Your Midlife podcast. Before we get started, again, make sure you have headed over to Substack and checked out Mind Your Midlife. You can go to the link down in the show notes. It's just mindyourmidlife.substack.com through the end of July. Annual subscriptions are 20% off. I'm so humbled by those of you that are supporting the podcast in this way, are wanting to hang with me as I'm recording this. I'm also putting up my latest walk-in talk on Substack, which is me giving you my sort of unfiltered, unedited thoughts on issues from midlife and coaching that come up. And of course, as you probably are aware, you get the ad-free video if you want it versions of this podcast over there as well. And as we grow, there'll be more. Tell me what you want. Tell me what you would love. In fact, I think I'll open a chat about that and I'll do it. So I'll see you over there, mindyourmidlife.substack.com.

Why Lowering Expectations Hurts Twice

Cheryl Fischer 2:29

Now, back to getting our hopes up. So the episode that I'm referring to is episode 86. And I'm going to put that link in the show notes, of course. So you might, if you didn't listen to that one, you might want to pause here, save this episode, listen to that one, and come back. Or maybe you listen to this one and then you listen to that one. Don't overcomplicate your life, right? Just remember episode 86. That episode was about this saying. And there's various forms of it, but the one that I think most of us recognize is don't get your hopes up. As in, don't get too excited because, oh no, what if it doesn't happen? You might be disappointed. And I spent that episode helping you and reminding me to learn that if we lower our expectations like that, we don't get our hopes up to protect ourselves, it doesn't actually prevent the disappointment. It just means we have to experience the pain twice. We experience the pain or the disappointment as we initially lower our expectations. And then if the bad thing happens, now we got to do it again. So I want you to listen to that because I gave you some tactics and I explained a little bit further that this is not a flaw. This is kind of how our brains are wired. So episode 86, make sure you listen to

When There Is No Happy Ending

Cheryl Fischer 4:00

it. However, what I'm hearing from so many listeners to that episode is well, what happens if there's no good option in a situation? And I know the bad thing is coming, or the bad thing does come, there's no way out. Why would I ever get my hopes up? I'm doing air quotes. So this is what we need to talk about. Because what happens when you are wanting to get your hopes up? You're wanting to live like this and look forward to things, but the bad things are coming and there's no way out. So midlife can bring that, right? I'm going to tell you a story about my recent experience. It's going on now. This happens. There are things that are coming or happening now or have happened that do not have a happy conclusion. And when I say that, I'm sure you're probably thinking about aging parents. And maybe it's not parents, you know, it could be anyone in the older generation, or sadly, in our generation. I definitely know friends from college who've lost their husbands, you know, various things like that. So there are things happening and things that will happen that are heavy situations. There's no happy ending, really. There's not this tie a bow on it, solve it solution that we can look forward to. We recognize that. And that's what I want to talk about today because it feels like a natural sort of part two from the previous version.

Caring For A Sick Parent

Cheryl Fischer 5:45

What's going on with me right now is my mom has a chronic disease. And we've known about this for I'm thinking, I'm thinking for it could be 10 years. It's somewhere between five and 10 years that we've known about this. And it's one of those things where we know that the bad stuff is coming, right? We know that, you know, things are going to be breaking down. She's not going to be able to do this and that as well. It's all going to happen over time. And we, with treatments for something like this, are simply trying to head off all of these negative symptoms and these issues. And so she had action things that she needed to do, and there was medication and all of this. And diseases like this one tend to sort of leap ahead sometimes. This one is Parkinson's, but they tend to sort of leap ahead and everything gets worse. And then we go okay and steady for a while, and then they leap ahead. And so over the past really three years in particular, it has been very hard because my sister and I have talked about this a few times. We're, we're, we're grieving her while she's here because she's not the same person that she was. And that can happen when you're dealing with other things like Alzheimer's and dementia. It can happen when you're dealing with cancer. It can happen when you're dealing with any type of thing. It doesn't have to be just Parkinson's that I'm talking about. There are a lot of things that can come up as we age that are hard for the person, obviously, and hard for those of us in this stage of life where we're the helpers, we're the support, we are doing everything we can. So I'm taking care of all of her finances. We uh together, my sister and I, and to be honest, mostly her, we had to sell her house. She is in a fantastic, fantastic place that we're super happy with and really needs constant care. And so that's hard stuff. And I don't get to just pick up the phone and just call my mom and talk to her. That's just not a thing anymore that is available to me. And that's been an ongoing grieving process to get through that. And I'm sure that you either have gone through something similar or you know someone who has. These are things that happen to us in this stage of life, right? This is real. I'm not making any of that up. That is real. And I'm in fact glossing over many hard things that have happened because I'm not going to share everything, of course, that's personal, but also because you get it. You get it. And there's a temptation in a situation like this to sort of fall back into the complaining and pessimistic trap. And sometimes a little venting is a good thing. I've done it, I'm sure my sister has done it. Sometimes you just need to let off steam, you need to complain, you need to vent. We have had issues with things that we've had to deal with, and it's hard. However, if we fall into that trap and we stay there all the time, it simply makes everything harder. So I know that it's really important that I be careful of my mindset about this.

Redefining Hope In Small Wins

Cheryl Fischer 9:39

Now, here's a tricky piece. I'm a praying person. So what am I praying for? Right? In a situation where there's no solution, what am I praying for? That's another tricky thing. I'm trying to figure it out. So I've redefined what getting my hopes up actually means with a problem that is not solvable. And what I learned is that hope is, I'm gonna call it scalable. So there's not a magic fix in a situation, in this situation I'm describing, and maybe in a situation that you're in right now. There's not a magic fix. There's not a, this is the good way it's gonna turn out, and this is the way I don't want. There's no good way. If that's not possible, you can still sort of scale the things you look forward to and scale the things you hope for. Maybe it's a really good afternoon with that person. Maybe it's a good uh medical report for now for this period of time. Maybe it's uh just laughing like crazy at something ridiculous and doing it together and savoring those moments. And I will say this there were a couple of things I really wanted to say to my mom while she could still hear me and understand, and I got to do that, and that will be with me forever. I'm so thankful for that. So there are little pieces that we can get our hopes up about. Now, am I gonna be dancing around super excited about those little things? Well, you know, it's okay if you're not. And for our mental health, for our heart health, for our nervous system, finding those little pieces, the good afternoon, the day with less pain, the moment of laughter, the good visit, the good report, wow, it makes a difference. It makes a difference for you as the person who is the helper, the family, the observer. And it makes a difference for the person who is going through this, especially if you remind them and you reminisce about remember last time when I visited and we were laughing our heads off about the color of the picture or whatever. Oh my gosh. Laughter is so powerful. This is a little aside, sort of, but the my the strongest memories I have from growing up when I was a child with my parents, are when we were just truly laughing our heads off. There are three I can think of off the top of my head. Two happened to occur in a restaurant, and I'm sure we were making a menace of ourselves. One was when we were on a car trip and stopping for gas. And I just love to think back at those. And if I think about my kids growing up and the four of us as a family, I could think of things like that too. Just laughter is so powerful. But find it when you can. Okay. So you're processing pain in these situations. And the key here is to build

What Resilience Really Means

Cheryl Fischer 14:04

resilience because maybe it's just a slight shift of this idea of getting our hopes up. Maybe we're not cheerleader happy, yet the key is resilience because resilience means we're coming back, we're coming up, we're hanging in there. And I'm in fact going to give you a definition of resilience from the being profile assessment, which is what I use with my coaching clients initially when we start coaching. And if you haven't heard me talk about the being profile before, what it does is goes through various ways of being and moods that impact those ways of being to help us see how we're showing up in the world, how we're interpreting things that are happening to us, and how we're taking action. And one of the secondary ways of being is resilience. So let me tell you how it's defined. Resilience is a quality that enables you to bounce back to your original form or even stronger when circumstances in life knock you down. You consistently leverage setbacks to adjust and learn while finding a way to rise up and continue forward rather than letting difficulties or failure overcome you and drain your resolve. And what we find out in the Being Profile is we find out right now, in this phase of life, do we have a healthy relationship with resilience or is it a bit less healthy? And at the time I did my assessment, because I'm looking at mine at the moment, I had quite a healthy relationship with resilience. And interestingly, I see sort of mid-level 50-50 or healthy with most of the midlife women I've coached. And I find that interesting because I think maybe we do learn resilience as we go through life. If you've lived for 40 or 50 years, you have had things you have had to get through. Nobody's life is just wee surfing on a big wave all the time, right? We've had to resilient ourselves, I know that's not a word, through things. And yet, some of us, of course, have a little bit of a healthier relationship with resilience than others. And what it means to have a healthy relationship with resilience is that you can consistently face difficult circumstances without breaking with elasticity, you might say, like elasticirl. You trust your ability to endure hardship. Others might see that you have patience, strength of character, capacity to manage pain, discomfort, difficulties, challenging emotions, and people may feel encouraged by you and your presence when things are tough. Now, the opposite of that, the less healthy side of a relationship with resilience might look like feeling defeated, distressed, broken by life, changing circumstances or events, maybe avoiding uncertainty, avoiding change, avoiding challenging life experiences. Maybe people would describe you as kind of acting the victim a little bit, or possibly you might go in the other direction and be very rigid, which means you can be fragile. You might take unnecessary punishment and numb yourself to the pain. So there are a lot of ways that we can sort of break down in how we use and feel resilience in our lives. And that healthy version is making it through the hard stuff, finding a way to rise up instead of letting the difficulties or the failure overcome you and drag you down. And wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to have the difficulty and the failure that starts to want to drag us down? But that's not reality. We're going to have hard things. And that's probably, you've probably heard I can do hard things. We can do hard things. That's resilience. We're getting through it and it's we're not backing down. So that's part of getting your hopes up, I say. When there are disappointments that aren't solvable, getting through them, holding on to yourself, staying yourself, not letting it beat you down, not letting it force you to end up cuddled in your snuggie on the couch and afraid to go out in the world and just defeated, that's resilience. And we can do it. So here's where I want to be careful because it's, I'm gonna use the word damaging. That seems

Stop Ignoring The Hard Feelings

Cheryl Fischer 18:48

like a severe word. It's not healthy, even to the extent of damaging. If I were to tell you, or if anyone else is telling you, just get back up, just get back out there, just imagine the good, imagine the good, get back out there. It's not healthy to ignore the emotions that are coming when you're having these hard times. It's not. You're going to pack that emotion down into your body, or it's going to create physical symptoms, and that could be stomach aches, it could be sore neck, sore shoulders, stiffness, it could be headaches, it could be illnesses because your immune system is compromised. It could be that your nervous system is constantly in the sympathetic state, meaning riled up, you're not digesting your food properly. So there could be indigestion. There, there's so many physical things that happen to us that are coming from this emotions that we don't process and we shove down and we ignore because they're not going anywhere if we ignore them. Ignoring them doesn't help. Ignoring things doesn't help, right? They're still there. So the first thing that I want to really make sure that you feel you have permission to do and you have encouragement to do is to feel the feelings. And if I'm being fully transparent, this was the hard part for me because I, if you're familiar with the Enneagram, I'm an Enneagram 7. I don't love to feel the negative feelings. I don't love to feel the feelings that bring me down. However, feeling them is how we get through them. So you may have anger about this situation. You may have anger about how it has been handled in various things. You may have sadness about the situation. You may have frustration about the reality of this and what's going to happen, and the fact that maybe you feel powerless, so many things. These are valid feelings. And I really encourage you to put an emotion word to those feelings. If you grabbed my story cycle resource that I have talked about many times, you have a wheel of emotions. If you haven't, go find that in the show notes. But put a word to it. And then I want you to, when it comes up, when you're particularly feeling frustrated, you're particularly feeling sad, let it happen. And that could look like a lot of things, right? It's okay to cry. It's okay to stomp around the house. It's okay to go outside and stomp around the block. It's okay to scream into a pillow. This is what my mom taught me to do when I was like six, and I had a terrible temper, and I had trouble, I had trouble figuring out how to get it out of me. And so she taught me to go into my room and scream into a pillow. And it helped. Simple things. Maybe it'll help you now. These are valid feelings. Another thing that helps is tapping. And you can find I've done one or two episodes on tapping, but at the at the at the very tiny bit, if you take the karate chop point on your hand, meaning the side, the outside of your palm, and I use like four fingers on my other hand, and I just tap. And if you're seeing the video, you can see what I'm doing, but I just tap on that point. Even if that's all you do while you're feeling these feelings, it will help. This is an acupressure thing, it will help. You could do a full tapping practice and Will help more. We we gotta let the emotion flow through. So that really is the first step. And then we want to start thinking about resilience. So resilience is only the focus once we've allowed ourselves every now and then to have the emotion, to feel the feelings. And sometimes we already feel better. If you've ever had sort of a crying jag, a lot of times we feel better after that. That's not an accident. It's because we got those emotions out and now we're able to process. So resilience isn't about skipping through tulips all the time being happy. And that's not what getting your hopes up is about either. It's about processing the pain when it happens and then moving forward and looking forward and finding something that you can look forward to, look up to, I might almost say, because we want something a little better, even if it's a day, even if it's a result, even if it's some small thing that you can look forward to and get your little baby hopes up about. That's resilience. Or maybe you've thought of some action you can take that'll make it just a little bit better for right now. That's resilience. You processed everything when you had the pain and the emotion, and now you can maybe look for a small thing and look for another small thing and look for another small thing instead of just continuing to torture yourself with these repressed emotions. So as I'm saying that, I am fully aware that I don't always do this in the best and most healthy way. I mean, this story I'm telling you, there like there's no good ending here, right? Some days are really hard, and I have something else going on in my life that is also really hard at the same time. And that's one of the reasons that I have a therapist. Therapists have therapists, coaches have therapists, coaches have coaches. We sometimes need the help of other professionals. And it has helped me to go through this while talking to someone. So if you don't get a handle on, okay, now I'm gonna sit and feel my feelings, and then I'm gonna look forward and find it's not maybe there's a really bad day and you don't want to hear me saying any of that. That's okay. That is okay. Give yourself time, give yourself grace. One of the things you can do if you are kind of remembering these words in your head, but thinking, oh my gosh, she's so ridiculous. That is just so overly simplified, I can't do it right now. This is when keeping a little log or journal of how you're feeling is actually helpful, believe it or not. Because putting things down on paper, and if you must typing them into your phone or into a Google Doc or something, the paper I think is even better. Putting things down on paper, sometimes that allows you to start that process of letting it flow out as well. So just write down all the. And then you can keep that paper if you want to, or you can just rip it up as in like visual, okay. I let it go. That's it. I've been to workshops before where we actually burned that paper. I'm not going to tell you to burn the paper because fire, you know? Rip it up, get rid of it. There's a lot of ways. Find a way that works for you to let this flow. It's tapping, it's walking, it's screaming into a pillow, it's writing it down and ripping it up, it's crying. Maybe it's talking to someone and being vulnerable with them. Find a way because it is still really important to

Glimmers Self Care And Next Steps

Cheryl Fischer 26:52

bounce back, to find the resilience, to get your hopes up again and come out of that lowest point. Take tiny steps. Maybe it's a little bit of gratitude. Maybe it's focusing on glimmers. What is it that you, when you've you've felt the emotion, you've gotten through it. After a phase of that, you're going to come into a phase where you do feel better. What is it that you can look forward to and get your hopes up about? Maybe it's something about this situation. You want the good, the good or at least not bad, medical report, or you want to, you know, hear some tiny good news or spend a good visit or whatever. Maybe it's about something else going on in your life that is also okay. You can be grateful, and I might need to say this twice. You can be grateful or happy or excited about something else in your life, even when the hard things are happening. And it's healthy for you to be able to do that. So that's why I talk about glimmers, because glimmers are tiny moments of joy, tiny pieces of gratitude. And we can all find them anytime. I'm actually having, let's call it a glimmer right now because as I'm taping, taping, listen to me, as I'm recording this podcast, a thunderstorm is coming. And I thought I heard a little bit of thundering in the background, but then it hasn't been doing it. And so that's much better for the sound. How nice. I'm gonna feel some appreciation for that. So the key to a glimmer is to notice it and to feel the good emotion about it. I always use the example of you're having your morning coffee and you just get your your whatever you put in it, you get it just right and the flavor is just right, and you just take a sip and ugh, it's amazing. Feel it. Just pause a second, a moment, and feel it. Because doing those things, looking for gratitude, looking for glimmers, realizing that good things can happen even while this hard thing is happening, is training your brain to look for more. That might even be the most important piece of gratitude and glimmers. It doesn't even matter what you're happy about. It's training your brain to look for things that you can be happy about. And as I said before, that I was gonna say it twice, you are allowed, and I say encouraged, to find things to be grateful for and happy about, even in the middle of hard times, even in the middle of disappointment and sadness and anger and frustration. It's okay to sometimes feel happy. It's okay to take a break from that and look outside and see the trees blowing in the wind and feel grateful for that. It's okay to go and see your friends and have so much fun because it's healthy for you and you need to be taking care of yourself so that you can be helping, supporting, going through the hard stuff with other people. So I have a freebie for you, a menu of self-care options. You can do the one-minute version, the five-minute version, the 30-minute version, whatever time you have, do it. Just go to CherylPFischer.com/slash self-care menu, grab it, pick something, send me a note on social media, tell me what you picked. It's really powerful. You need to be taking care of yourself. So please do get your hopes up. Please know that there are going to be things that don't have a good ending, no matter how hopey we get, and you can still throw in some resilience, you can still find the small things, and it's good to feel the feelings. It's good to feel the emotions. Find the small things, throw in that resilience. You can do it. Because even though there are hard things, I know this has been sort of a hard thing episode. Midlife can still be an absolutely amazing time of life, right? Maybe you have more time to travel. Maybe you have gotten into a new hobby. I've done that. Maybe you have now these adult kids who are just amazing people that you love to spend time with. Maybe you, who knows what, right? This can be an absolutely amazing phase of life. Maybe you just simply don't care what other people think of you anymore. And that is quite freeing. So let's figure out the healthiest ways we can get through the hard parts so that we can have those good parts too. If you've been listening to this and you've been thinking that you would want to consider coaching, explore what that would look like. Go to CherylpFischer.com/slash recharge, find out more. Let's set up a one-on-one and just chat about it. And if you are looking for a cozy space to connect with me and with other midlife women, come join the inner circle on Substack at mindyourmidlife.substack.com. It is the best way to support the show. Get ad-free episodes of the podcast and get all those unfiltered tips from me. And until next time, keep remembering midlife is your time to take just a little bit better care of yourself on the outside and on the inside. Just a little bit more care makes a big difference.