“The best team won.” This is the overriding view of sports commentators, professional and amateur, throughout Australia after the British team retained The Ashes. Magnanimity in defeat is a quality that comes naturally to some and it is striking that it comes so easily in Australia (where coverage of their defeat has included fulsome praise for the British team) and to Australians (who seem to have a sunnier outlook than many Brits) even in the face of adversity.  Sometimes it seems as if we, as a nation, find it hard to hide disappointment or acknowledge another country’s success against our own.

Finding a positive side, at home, at work and at leisure, can also seem impossible - yet doing so can help us get through difficulties with ease.

At work, decisions are made that contradict the wishes of many leaving some feel short-changed and, perhaps, a few feeling they can’t put up with their jobs any more. At home, disagreements over small things can turn minor issues into events that have enormous implications – perhaps splitting up relationships, severing contacts, changing lives. In down time in between, staying in control enough to cope with change can lead to an over-zealous approach to exercise, a compulsion to shop or clean, or a withdrawal from society.

Managing emotional reactions, improving performance and building resilience, can however be learned – with guidance from a professional.

Meanwhile, as a new year begins, many of us make new year’s resolutions that are founded more in hope than in experience - and that are bound to be unattainable.

Setting realistic goals – moving at an achievable pace, one step at a time – is more likely to lead to success, whatever the overall aim. Yet many of us reach first for the final outcome – the equivalent of winning The Ashes – forgetting that there are several steps – each Test – to go through before the outcome is known.

Professional therapeutic support can help you work out which steps to take, and how to pace them, to achieve your new year’s resolution so you can face 2011 with as much of a positive outlook as Australians have towards the future of their cricket achievements.

Two inquests are currently dominating the news – reminding us that traumas leave an unpredictable legacy. It is impossible to know exactly how people will be affected by a trauma – and it is impossible to know exactly when its effects might emerge.

In the case of the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, the inquest highlighted resentments and misunderstandings between specialists – ambulance, police and firefighting staff all had expectations of each other that went unfulfilled, leaving them all feeling blamed for others’ shortcomings. And it made those specialists relive their experiences – bringing some to tears in the witness stand.

As for the death of barrister Mark Saunders, killed in a siege in May 2008, a specialist firearms police officer is accused of playing a game with the evidence he gave at the inquest in September 2009.

What both these situations show is that it is important not just to support people’s mental and emotional health years after they have experienced a trauma; it is also important to help them develop resilience before they experience a trauma including by recognising when they might be vulnerable to pressures and stress, how those vulnerabilities might emerge, and when and how to seek help.

While it might not have been possible to predict a random bombing, it is possible to predict that community leaders such as the police, firefighters, paramedics and ambulance staff will face traumas of some sort – and that they will react differently to them. With specialists such as firearms officers, it is possible to predict that some will behave oddly before, during or after a trauma, perhaps as a way of managing their anxieties, the overwhelming nature of their responsibilities, or the difficult decisions they had to make while under pressure.

It is not for us to pass judgement on the way the people involved in these two high-profile cases behaved during their traumas or afterwards – or to imply whether they are innocent or guilty. What we can say is that the way they behaved is entirely predictable, in an unpredictable kind of way, and that organisations can help their staff face, manage and recover from a trauma – if they take professional advice, including from mental health specialists, to develop policies that help their people build resilience and learn how to manage stress or anxiety caused by anticipating or experiencing trauma.

The world is in awe of the way in which the Chilean government, the mining company, the miners and their families (and, for that matter, the world’s media) have handled this staggeringly unusual crisis. It would be wrong to be complacent while the rescue operation continues but it would be wrong, also, to focus only on the miners' release and the immediate aftermath. The miners who are already above ground are now in medical care; checking their physical health is a priority of course.

So is managing their mental health and the Chilean government has already said it will do all it can to support the miners for the long term which must include understanding and treating their psychological reactions.

What about others? Everyone closely involved in the operation could be affected by this internationally-followed crisis – the rescuers who travel down the mine to assess the health and welfare of the miners before they are transported above ground; the people deciding who should be rescued first, last and in between; the people who built and tested the rescue pod or who created and lined the shaft; the families waiting, uncertain whether the crisis would end in tragedy or joy; wives, partners, mistresses (as reported by the media), children, parents who find their husband, lover, father, child has changed having lived for so long with uncertainty, underground; the head of the mining company; the media observing it all; even the president of Chile. All could be affected by this incident, and in unpredictable ways – or not affected at all and be accused of callousness or indifference. That’s the effect of trauma.

Even the word trauma conjures up dramatic incidents, but a trauma cannot be measured on any scale other than the one by which the person affected measures it. Something others perceive as trivial or inconsequential could have a massive impact for the person experiencing it. No one else should be your judge and jury; if you feel you have experienced a trauma, you’ve experienced a trauma. And that means you could be struggling with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The effect of trauma can come and go, be ever-present, last for life, or disappear soon after it emerged. The good news is that much more is known, now, about PTSD and the way it can be treated. One particularly effective treatment, recommended by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), is EMDR (to continue with the acronyms – this one stands for eye movement desensitisation reprocessing). The effect of EMDR is thought to be similar to REM sleep, during which the brain makes sense of the day’s events, reprocessing the memory and releasing problem emotions and associations.

EMDR could help the Chilean miners and others associated with them, just as it could help anyone who has experienced a trauma, whether the cause of the trauma was obviously dramatic to a wide-eyed world or invisible to everyone but you. The point is to seek help and rebuild your resilience, not suffer in silence believing you ought not to be affected.

So, Tony Blair has published his memoirs and confessed that he fell into the habit of using alcohol to support him through the stresses of being prime minister. The revelation immediately generated a debate, among journalists and the public, about whether this was anything worth writing about – many of us think nothing of drinking a whisky or G&T followed by a couple of glasses (or half a bottle) of wine each evening.

As Mr Blair said, he was drinking at the upper limit of what is considered appropriate but an interesting question is whether he underestimated his alcohol intake – just as many of us do when asked by our GP or in surveys.

The difficulty, in a nation where drinking is so much a part of our culture, is that it is very easy to kid ourselves that we can handle what we drink and that what we drink is not too much. I am not implying that Tony Blair was pulling the wool over our eyes or his own; he defined his alcohol intake as “not excessively excessive” and we have to take that at face value.

But what made his confession so interesting was that he recognised his drinking had become a prop. For many, this objectivity is not possible. We drink (or turn to drugs, eating, self-harm, bullying) to cover up, disguise or distract us from difficult emotions (or workplace struggles such as stress or an overbearing corporate culture) – without being aware that that is what we are doing.

The first stage on the road to recovery is to discover and unravel those feelings so we can learn how to manage and respond to them. And many of us need not a quick-fix prop but professional support to plan the best route for the journey through our complicated, 21st century lives - building resilience so we can manage without turning to career-limiting coping strategies.