Do you ever feel shame, guilt or anger when you think about a negative past experience? Do you want to move on from old hurts and feelings?
Finding the Benefit Therapy Technique has been defined as “the process of deriving positive growth from adversity.”
It allows you to revisit a negative or painful past experience in a safe capacity and to reframe your thinking to find the benefit of that experience. Every experience positive or negative is a lesson and a means for us to grow. Everything happens for a reason and sometimes the reason doesn’t become clear until we have gone through the trauma, pain or negative experience.
Learning to find the positive (or rainbow) from a traumatic or painful experience has been proven to build emotional resilience, strengthen mental cognition and give you a new sense of meaning and purpose in life.
Step 1
Find somewhere quiet and relaxing to sit. Take three deep breaths, inhaling deeply from your belly and focus as you continue to breath in and out.
Think about a past traumatic or painful experience, allowing your mind to freely think about all the emotions and thoughts you associate with this experience.
Step 2
Keep your focus on the traumatic or painful experience and think about:
What the experience taught you?
How has the experience allowed you to be better equipped or deal more resiliently with similar challenges or difficulties in the future?
Be honest with yourself about what happened and why it happened and what you needed to learn from it. If you hadn’t have gone through the trauma or painful experience you probably wouldn’t be the same strong, amazing individual you are today.
Please bear in mind that initially you may feel negative and painful feelings when thinking about the past experience.
Please don’t get bogged down in the negative feelings.
Feel it, process your feelings and move on to thinking positively about how far you’ve come since it happened.
Try to focus on the positive feelings that come up when you think about finding the benefit and what you have learnt from the experience.
By practicing finding the benefit you can learn to reframe upsetting or traumatic experiences and move on from them by thinking of positive things that have happened because of them and the important things you learnt from them and how they made you stronger and your mental health more resilient.