Don’t expect any magic bullets, because there aren’t any.
I very often hear from people how they want to remove crippling anxiety from their lives, or their grief from losing a loved one, their fear when battling cancer, or the pain of a recent divorce. There is very frequently a request for a list of techniques that may help someone hack their own mind so to speak, in order to presumably not feel any discomfort anymore, but such things don't exist.
There is no magic bullet that will solve all our worries and concerns. We can search far and wide for a way to change everything without changing anything, but we won't find it. The foundation of every single crisis intervention, no matter how sophisticated, ultimately boils down to how we conduct ourselves on a daily basis as we try to put the crisis behind us.
Life is unfair, and as Chuck Pahlaniuk points out in his glorious book 'Fight Club', "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero". If there was ever such a thing as a rule of life, that's probably it.
The only thing that will liberate each of us is to dig deep inside and to change our approach to life itself, so that what we engage in on a daily basis is at best meaningful and at the very least tolerable. And that's exactly what we want to explore and nurture through psychotherapy.
You can't change the rules, but you can at least change your life.
