What was your experience with hardship and what coping mechanism did it leave you to develop?
And for that matter, was said coping mechanism so effective for you it felt like “the bad days weren’t even there”?
Edit: I suspect the effective coping mechanisms are most thoroughly born when the survival impulse is driven.
To offer an explanatory perspective by quoting a popular medium:
“There is an official Time-Lord strategy you are taught even as a small child: in circumstances of near-defeat, you take stock of the forces that are working on your behalf, your assets and then separately assess the forces working against you, your liabilities. This leads to the next stage: devising a plan that will increase the former and diminish the latter. The dictum had always struck the Doctor as typically Gallifreyan—that is to say arid, abstract and artificial. The only really stimulating thing about defeat, death and disaster is that all the rule-books go out of the window, and you are permitted to improvise under the purest inspiration of all—blind panic. But for the present his numbed brain allowed neither panic nor inspiration, and he was grateful to have the tired old Gallifreyan formula to fall back on.”
“Doctor Who: Castrovalva”, novelisation by Christopher Bidmead
What was your experience with hardship and what coping mechanism did it leave you to develop?
And for that matter, was said coping mechanism so effective for you it felt like “the bad days weren’t even there”?
Edit: I suspect the effective coping mechanisms are most thoroughly born when the survival impulse is driven.
To offer an explanatory perspective by quoting a popular medium:
“There is an official Time-Lord strategy you are taught even as a small child: in circumstances of near-defeat, you take stock of the forces that are working on your behalf, your assets and then separately assess the forces working against you, your liabilities. This leads to the next stage: devising a plan that will increase the former and diminish the latter. The dictum had always struck the Doctor as typically Gallifreyan—that is to say arid, abstract and artificial. The only really stimulating thing about defeat, death and disaster is that all the rule-books go out of the window, and you are permitted to improvise under the purest inspiration of all—blind panic. But for the present his numbed brain allowed neither panic nor inspiration, and he was grateful to have the tired old Gallifreyan formula to fall back on.”
“Doctor Who: Castrovalva”, novelisation by Christopher Bidmead