Foreclosure, just that word spells stress in a new way. If it isn’t enough that you have to think about what you might do if you and your family were put out on the street, you also find yourself thinking about that humiliation that goes along with it, the pressure to pay the bills, and the possible loss of a structure that once provided security, safety, and the homey smell of warm bread in the winter time.
Without a house, and without the ability to create security for you and your family, then what is life for? And how are you supposed to find happiness when the stress is so excruciating that it could sink the mother of all hopes and put an end to life as you know it?
How? Let me start by first saying that believe it or not, foreclosure presents one of life biggest and best opportunites for self growth on this planet. It is not an accident or a mistake that you are in foreclosure; it is an opportunity to grow. Self Growth is THE path to happiness. For many of you, you may not know what I mean by self growth, nor understand how that could possibly have anything to do with happiness, and that is OK. You can still benefit from this article.
The first step is to see that you are experiencing a range of emotions that “feel” stressful to you right now. They aren’t hard to see, they scream at you every day, every time the bank calls, every time you get a letter from the bank, and every time you answer the phone. Your response to these icky feelings is to want to get rid of them, naturally. If you are like most people in foreclosure, you feel like if you could stop the foreclosure, stop the harassing phone calls, and make your payments with ease, then you would be happy – happy meaning you got rid of the problem that caused those icky feelings. Right?
Do you see that you are blaming the problems in your life for the stress you feel now? Do you also see that you have given away your power to be happy by blaming your problems? Here is another way of putting it; do you feel like you can’t be happy until your foreclosure situation is gone? Chances are – you do – and therefore you are powerless to be happy now until you decide to stop blaming your foreclosure situation.
What if I told you that you could be happy, regardless of the foreclosure? Well – you can IF you choose to learn something new and growth within yourself. You see, you can’t expect to keep doing the same old things and get different results. If you want to find happiness regardless of your foreclosure, then you need to learn to understand yourself and react differently.
The second step is to choose to stop blaming all those problems you have for making you miserable. When you do this, you take responsibility for your happiness and therefore gain your power back to become happy. You have an ability to be happy now regardless of the problems around you. The reason this is hard to grasp is because nobody every showed you how or even told us it was possible.
The third step is to process your emotions and this can be done in many ways. The reason you need to process them is because until they are gone, you will struggle to be happy. It is sort of like not finishing an argument with your spouse, going to bed, and then trying to pretend everything is okay in the morning. Ignoring how you feel doesn’t work. So here is how I process my emotions. I think of something that stresses me out, pick something small at first. Close your eyes and think of that situation and feel that icky emotion that comes up. When it arrives, allow yourself to feel it. Sit with it and be with it. Don’t try to convince it to go away, don’t try to distract yourself from it, just allow it to be part of your life for now. Allow it to fully be part of your experience – remember it is just an emotion – you aren’t going to die. I find that the more I sit with it and allow it to be welcome in my experience, the more its intensity reduces. And if I do this long enough, then the emotion leaves permanently ( you will know when this happens because you will think of that same thing again, only there will be no more bad emotions that come up anymore, the memory will have no emotional charge to it) Once this happens, you will naturally find happiness in that moment.
Don’t you think that if you got rid of all those fearful, humiliating, icky feeling, then you might be able to think more clearly. And if you could think more clearly, then do you think that the solution to getting out of foreclosure would become more evident. Here is an example of what I am talking about – have you ever got in a fight with your spouse and said some hurtful things you later regret? Your emotions took over at the time and you made irrational decisions which you later saw to be silly once you calmed down. The feelings your are experiencing during foreclosure are no different. If you are scarred, fearful, humiliated, you won’t make a very good decision on how to get out of foreclosure. You might perhaps make a decision you regret later on.
Dedicate a small portion of your day to processing your emotions, because they are just emotions. People make the mistake of thinking emotions are the only reality there is because let’s face it – emotions are something we face day in and day out. But once you learn to control them, to process them, and to let them go, then you become happiness. You see them for the temporary little nothings they are and choose to be happy. Then, every moment of the day gets easier and easier until that becomes reality to you.
To sum it all up – your foreclosure is a blessing in disguise. It has the ability to teach you to be happy, to be a better person, in ways you never thought possible. You are not your foreclosure and you are not the emotions that come with that foreclosure. You are powerful, you are beautiful, and you can be happy right now. Seek and ye shall find.
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