My laptop stopped working all of a sudden a few weeks ago. I could not figure out what it was; it just would not turn on. I went on to the all-knowing internet, followed all the golden 'how to fix a Mac' steps, basically became a Mac expert overnight. My faith in Apple was growing dimmer and my frustration of not being able to fix it was rising.
Of course, I still had a pen and a paper, and of course, although this slowed me down, I could still get my job done, but I just couldn't do it! Why? Because my Mac was not working, because I could not fix it, I could not fix a problem.
Knowing that my problem was rectifiable, knowing that there was an Apple store not that far away from home, my inability to fix my laptop still left me all vexed. Most of us are privileged enough to have solutions lying around us to some very tiny pickles and sometimes to some big ones. All our lives we have had issues to which we have had remedies, whether it was a plumbing issue or an issue with the cable connection, we have gotten around to it.
But it is not always a dead laptop, or a poor cable connection, sometimes it is much bigger, something to which a solution might be hard to find and sometimes even if the solution might be present, it is out of reach for some. Most of the physical dilemmas have their physical solutions, but there are problems to which finding solutions is hard, and at times in this quest of trying to solve the issue, the problem at hand may even get even worse.
Over this summer, I had the opportunity of working with the mental health team at an NGO here in Mumbai. Our team encouraged 'Narrative Therapy', something to which I had never been introduced to before. It was not until the last days of my internship did I truly almost understand it. In the past when I have had my moments where I felt like the need to find a solution to something that troubled the equilibrium of my life, I partnered up with a counselor and we would then have our endless brainstorming sessions. However, peace of mind was never restored.
In narrative therapy, instead of finding the answer to something, the tools to completely recognize the problem at hand is established. There are certain skills and qualities inbuilt in all of us that aid us not only to resolve a problem but also to confront the problem and underrate its effect on us.
Think about it, if we were incompetent, we would all have already faced existential crisis! Yes, positivity is indeed a powerful facet to one's character, but so is recognizing the already existing tools and using them to deal with our obstacles, hence causing them to shrink in magnitude. To avoid crashing when cycling down a steep downhill, we can adjust our speed, but not the slope.
In simple words, as explained to me by my one month experience with narrative therapy, some problems in our lives cannot be avoided, some problems just cannot be solved, but we sure can rise above them by mobilizing our army of equipment, to make our lives much easier.
