What Kutan posted just above represents for me, the simplest and most important attitude change toward the rough times and falls. Reb bards calls it "Keep On Trucking!," and he is so right, of course.
I heard it from Reb Tzvi-Meyer a bunch of times, read it in one or two seforim over the years before recovery, and yet all I actually paid attention to before recovery was the was the useless message of: "Keep trying harder! Hashem is on your side!...and if you are having difficulties and falling, it means you are failing." Yes - of course, in some respect that is all true, but so are all kinds of things that can be destructive to focus on in my daily avodas Hashem.
For example, in a class aimed at potential new ba'alei teshuvah, you would not elaborate much on killing the infants of Amalek, on arba misos beis din and the particulars of how they are administered, on the concept that a person is not really a full Jew/person unless they are married, the nature of slavery for non-Jews, and that a woman's eidus is not almost never acceptable in court.
We have no shame about these things, and they are surely the best path for us, being Hashem's Will, but you just do not showcase them for newbies, cuz they are lacking the hakdomos. They already have Western culture's hakdomos, so they will not understand it all yet. It's a matter of timing.
In the same way, the m'kubalim expend a lot of time making clear that Hashem is totally muvdal fro us in this world, that His Essence does not even have a real name we can use for it at all, and that We cannot even really praise His Essence. "...v'lo, (and for Him) dumiah tehillah (silence is the closest we can get to praising Him). Yet, every single sefer written for the purpose of spirituality, teshuvah, recovery, and for better avodas Hashem will always focus on the relationship we can have with Him! Now how do you have a relationship if all you are aware of is how transcendent and perfect He is?! It seems that even though both are true, the issue in actually being better Jews is what we are looking at. Somehow, we do have a relationship with Him and somehow, it is real.
The people who argue against this and say, "What are you talking about? His being muvdal is no stirah at all!" have a valid point - in theory. For someone who really feels the gulf between us and Hashem and focuses on it, good avodah may not easily follow. We are people, not books.
Also, there is the 'tall order' of perfect balance. True, we should remember that we are going to die. It is one of the most real facts there is about my life, right? But if I choose to focus on it and frame my actions in that context, I will need to balance it with a tremendous measure of faith/trust in Hashem, true appreciation of the present, and other stuff like that, just to escape the depression of the acceptance of my mortality. I believe this is obvious to a person who really delves into things like death, for example, in the true mussar way of Reb Yisroel and his talmidim - when painful realities start to become real on an emotional, gut level, the balance required becomes sudden emergency. And for the guy who thinks he has really accepted his mortality, but then discovers that he becomes surprisingly frantic when he is alone at night and sees a stranger following him...well, he obviously has not really accepted death yet.
Oh my gosh, I have prattled on like crazy. Nu. lunchtime at work gets boring...
