"Given the patience and the will, one will usually find a way out of problematic situations. Life is too short a time to spend with a head full of troubled thoughts and a heart lacking the courage to leave the past behind. One must relieve oneself from previous bad experiences, past regrets and emotional baggage!
Mark Twain wrote in 'The American Claimant',' Drag your thoughts away from your troubles, by the ears, by the heels or by any other way that you can manage it; it's the healthiest thing a body can do.'
During my many years of running numerous groups in Probation Offices, Prisons, Hostels, Hospitals, Psychiatric Units, Schools, Educational Establishments and Community Halls, I always included some programming content which dealt with effective ways of problem-solving. Without going into the many techniques and methods one can gainfully employ to problem solve, I would place the distancing of oneself from the original thoughts and emotions that surrounded 'the problem' to be essential in creating the best conditions for resolving it. Note that this doesn't imply running away from the problem, but simply taking a breather. You need to put sufficient time and space between your old thoughts that got you into trouble in the first place and the kind of thoughts that will get you out of trouble!
Another way that one can create this essential mental space is to learn to get rid of the 'distraction' within the problem situation which is preventing you from focussing on a possible solution to it. Every problem has a distractive element to it and once we discover the source of that distraction, we can remove it and create the space for resolving the problematic situation. Please note that the distraction can be a person, an activity, a thing or almost anything imaginable; even a wrong or unhelpful attitude of mind or an irrational belief can blind you to finding your way out of your mental maze. Find out whatever it is that is taking your mind away from the thoughts required to correct the situation. If you are in an unhappy or abusive situation, you may need to leave the person (the distraction) in order to make the space to make the right decision about your future. If you are attempting to relax and there are workman crashing and banging about outside your house, you are better leaving the place you are in and distancing yourself from your noisy distraction and finding more quieter surroundings before you attempt to relax again.
So, whatever the distraction to your problem solving happens to be, first, get rid of it. If you are a slow-moving tortoise dying from thirst and who needs to get to a water source quickly and find that a high fence, one mile in circumference, is separating you from the cool water just yards away, what do you do? The surviving tortoise recognised the distraction of resolving its situation to be an irrational belief that tortoises do not and cannot climb high fences. So, instead of dying of thirst before it could travel the one-mile circumference of the fence, the tortoise abandoned its irrational belief and decided it would be faster to climb over the fence!
I'm with you, Mark; upwards and onwards!" William Forde: August 14th, 2018.