Internationally renowned film director Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, which was shot partially in Taiwan, set box-office records and started discussions the world over.

Though few people in the real world have been adrift on the ocean with a tiger, everyone has dealt with a “beast” of some sort in their life, be it an existential crisis or a life-threatening situation. Difficult though they are, such experiences force us to grow and transcend our circumstances.

We admire people who cope well with adversity. In fact, it could be argued that one of the driving factors behind the recent “Linsanity” surrounding NBA star Jeremy Lin was his tremendous determination and ultimate triumph.

Falco, a victim of domestic violence, says that the writing of his book A Diamond in the Dust brought him back into the light.

The Bible says that everything has its season, laughter and weeping, mourning and dancing.

Breakups, divorces, bankruptcies, disabling accidents, job losses… such things happen, and they cause us pain.

According to an October 2012 issue of the weekly science journal Nature, research from the US shows that 50–60% of people suffer physical or psychological injury at some point in their lives, whether in a violent attack, a severe traffic accident, a natural disaster, or even war. Roughly 8% of these will go on to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition from which only two-thirds ultimately recover.

The sources of stress and the ability to cope vary from person to person. According to Dr. Joshua Xu, a psychiatrist with the Songde Branch of Taipei City Hospital, research shows that traumatic events such as divorce, the loss of a spouse, or an accident that causes loss of physical function are highly stressful for most people.

How severe must a blow be to cause injury? It varies.

Psychoanalyst Yang Ming-min says that “adversity” is caused by conflict between people’s expectations and objective external reality. “No-one’s life is completely conflict free. The differences are in how we view, interpret, and resolve our conflicts.”

Yang says that our frustrations can be overwhelming without looking like much of anything to other people. He offers as an example a patient of his who is a student of exceptional ability, one who had always come out on top in every situation until getting only the second highest score on an exam. The experience left the student distraught and initiated a downward spiral.

On Chinese New Year’s Eve, monks at Dharma Drum Mountain strike the monastery’s prayer bell, hoping to ring out the anxieties caused by the unenlightenment of the profane world and ring in wisdom to guide our lives.

When people suffer a severe injury, they generally go through a process involving stages of shock, preoccupation with their loss, and resolution.

The initial shock includes a protective physiological mechanism aimed at preventing collapse: numbness. It’s a bit like an insect playing dead in response to a threat, but instead of playing dead, people numb themselves. After a time, they enter the preoccupation phase, during which they become dejected or depressed. They then slowly work through their grief and enter the resolution stage.

“The body and mind are marvelous things,” says Yang. He relates a real-world example of what he means: a father who lost his son unexpectedly during the latter’s military service handled the funeral arrangements calmly, but began showing signs of depression, including uncommunicativeness, a few months later. He sought treatment, and, after two weeks on antidepressants, began talking again. He reached an even bigger turning point on his third visit to his psychoanalyst, when he broke down and wept over his son’s death.

The film The Intouchables depicts the relationship between a wealthy man paralyzed in a parachuting accident and his ex-convict caregiver. A touching, at times humorous film, it offers a profound moral lesson.

How long does it take to recover from a blow?

Hwu Hai-gwo, a professor of psychiatry with the National Taiwan University medical school, says that negative emotions are one of the brain’s defense mechanisms. Fear, for example, encourages us to avoid dangerous situations, while anger gives us the strength to contend with threats. But if we remain in the grip of negative emotions for too long, they can sap our brain’s vitality and impair our mental capacity. The longer they go on, the greater the sense of frustration they will engender. Once sucked in, it can be nearly impossible to extract ourselves from such maelstroms of negative feelings.

“We need time to seek meanings,” says Joshua Xu. He explains that grief generally involves five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But we can find ourselves whirling through them again and again.

For some people, the return to health is rapid, but others find themselves stuck. What can they do to extricate themselves? Learn from other people’s approaches to the struggle to recover.

“We’re all in the same boat.” Xu, who was paralyzed as the result of a spinal injury, argues that we “have two eyes.” If one eye has experienced frustration and become fixated, such that it sees mostly the dark and the negative, we must strive to use the other to see the light and the positive. In other words, we need to take stock of our blessings, to see and recognize the support and the resources we have.

“If we constantly immerse ourselves in pain and grief,” says Xu, “failing to see the efforts our friends and families are making on our behalves, failing to express our thanks, and instead complaining and taking them for granted, we’re pushing away resources.”

Opening our eyes to the situations of others can also help us to appreciate what we have. Singer Lai Pei-hsia did precisely that.

In her book The Courage of Coming Home, Lai writes of learning in a body, mind, and spirit class how to be honest with herself and face life’s pains, sorrows, and distresses with courage. She later went on a meditation retreat to the Osho Ashram in Pune, India, where she took a variety of classes fostering spiritual growth. These ultimately enabled her to cope with painful misfortunes such as the absence of her father and the failure of her marriage, and to find a spiritual home.

Paying attention to others helps us forget our own troubles. A visit to Malawi enabled author Huang Tong to let go of her own painful past.

Some people find strength and peace of mind in reading and writing.

Three years after investment expert Hsia Yun-fen lost her younger son in a jetskiing accident in Sanzhi, New Taipei City, she told the media that when her grief was at its height, she took some solace from reading Streams in the Desert and the Diamond Sutra. She also copied out passages that reminded her of lessons she had found helpful.

Bestselling writer Huang Tong has published a dozen-odd uplifting books over the last five or six years, including works such as Turbulence Is the Spice of Life.

The books train others to cope, while also providing Huang with a measure of consolation in her own life.

She says that she suffered a difficult childhood. The only thing she really loved was writing, which wasn’t approved of. As a result, she spent years in a state of doubt and self-denial. It was only after traveling to Africa and Cambodia and seeing the different lifestyles there that she began to pay attention to the world outside herself.

“Malawi has many child victims of AIDS and the children at the orphanage I visited were as thin as matchsticks.... There was so much more to the world than I had imagined.

“Always observing myself and thinking about myself, my problems multiplied and became harder to resolve,” says Huang.

In recent years, she’s begun fostering stray animals and currently has four dogs and four cats staying with her. By turning her attention outward and volunteering, Huang has been able to overcome her depression and stop using the sleeping pills she’d been taking for six years.

Falco is a 38-year-old man with Tourette’s syndrome who was a victim of long-term domestic abuse at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend. A recipient of extensive support from the Garden of Hope Foundation, he recently made a motorcycle tour of Taiwan to support the foundation’s call for an end to domestic violence.

Determined to be a writer, Falco has now also published his first book, A Diamond in the Dust. Part autobiography and part therapy, the book describes his young life and experience with abuse.

Giving voice to your experiences can be part of the healing process. Joshua Xu recommends that people lost in depression find a safe way to share what they are feeling with somebody, whether a friend, parent, or medical professional. “The process will involve grief and tears, but the person you speak to need only listen without criticizing.”

“It is very difficult to analyze and treat yourself,” says Yang. “People usually need someone to guide them.” He says that when you can’t find a way out of the darkness, you need to seek professional help.

Creative work is both expressive and therapeutic. The photo shows 74-year-old painter Lin Hsing-yueh, who on learning that he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease challenged himself to produce a painting of Taiwan’s giant cypresses.

Bestselling author Rhonda Byrne published The Magic in 2012, on the heels of the hugely popular The Secret and The Power. Throughout the new book, Byrne argues that ordinary gratitude is a “magic” that grants us health and happiness.

Drawing on clinical psychiatric data, Joshua Xu makes the similar point that grateful people find it easier to recover from misfortune.

“In my own life, I lack the loving attention of my parents and the support of siblings, yet my heart remains full of gratitude,” says Zhong Manzhen. Born in 1967, the young Zhong was a gang member and brawler who was detained and sent to jail on the day he graduated from middle school. His teacher changed his life by signing him up for the Chung Cheng Armed Forces Preparatory School’s entrance exam.

The marching and drilling at the school transformed and honed his character. The never-surrender attitude he learned there saw him through a graduate degree in educational policy and leadership from Tamkang University.

Having taken the wrong path early in his own life and being familiar with the loneliness of kids who make mistakes of that sort, he resolved to go into education. Becoming an award-winning teacher, he was honored by Commonwealth magazine in 2010 for his efforts to develop the character of his students.

Zhong says that you have to treat life’s setbacks like driving the lane in basketball. You can try to drive through the defender in front of you, possibly injuring you both, or take a step back, giving yourself more space and more options, and increasing your chance of scoring.

Middle-school teacher Zhong Manzhen, a former gang member, says his understanding of the loneliness of kids who get into trouble enables him find ways to help them open up.

While gratitude is central to Western religion, Chinese philosophy offers its own approaches to recovering from adversity and getting on with your life.

“The religious path involves relying on God,” says Wang Pang-hsiung, a professor of philosophy at National Central University. “The self-cultivation approach relies on you.” Wang explains that in Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam, adherents take God to be their ultimate safeguard, whereas Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism focus more on personal development and striving to make yourself the “way.”

“Life’s miseries can tie us into knots. When we don’t get something we want, it can drive us to despair.”

Wang, who has been teaching Laozi and Zhuangzi for more than 40 years, offers a philosophical take on dealing with life’s travails in his book The Way of Laozi: “The Way is Nature, but we make our own path. The natural road consists of sunlight, water, and air. Walk in the sun’s footsteps, root yourself in a corner of the workaday world. The Way lies in the unbounded vastness of the world. The Way lies in everyone being innocent and at peace with themselves.”

A century ago, French sociologist Émile Durkheim hypothesized that a person’s individuality was closely connected to society. Durkheim, who was known for his research into suicide, also viewed suicide from a “social” perspective. His data showed that suicide levels tended to spike in times of upheaval such as social unrest, war and famine, which led him to conclude that suicide was an indicator of social disorder.

If we take a cue from Durkheim and look beyond individual adversity to society at large, we see that Taiwan’s mental health indicators have remained in the normal range in spite of the recent economic downturn.

According to Tsai Lu-chun, CEO of the Mental Health Foundation, a 2010 foundation survey of mental health indicators among Taiwanese 20 years of age and older came up with an overall mental health index of 4.15 (equivalent to a score of 83 on a 100-point scale where 80 is “normal”), which was actually better than that of previous surveys.

Family health posted the highest score among the four sub-indices (87.4), followed by personal control over one’s life (83.8), psychosomatic health (82.3) and personal values (78.5).

“Families are extremely important,” says Tsai. He notes that the survey found that one in four Taiwanese feel they don’t belong to a group and that people who lack a sense of belonging tend to have lower mental health scores. Similarly, a pessimistic outlook was 10% more prevalent among young people who didn’t live with their families than among those that did, highlighting that the sense of belonging that comes of interacting with family has a positive impact on mental health.

As the renowned poet Su Dongpo once wrote: “Heed not the falling rain pattering on the forest leaves, / but stroll whistling and humming a tune. / A bamboo staff and woven sandals tread more lightly than horses’ hooves. / Why fear? A straw hat and coat are all one needs.”

The social environment is a bit like the weather in that we have no direct personal control over it. But we can choose how we see it.

Adversities and setbacks are like storms. Rather than complaining and attempting to flee the thunder, we’re better served by breathing deep and singing a tune.

When the night seems unending, light a candle and go for a stroll!

Whether you put your faith in God or follow the path of self-cultivation, setbacks large and small provide a varied backdrop to life, like the rising and setting of the sun or the phases of the moon.