Real Resilience

Resilience is our capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. Many of us feel we are resilient when actually we are suppressing the stuff we don’t want to feel. You can feel resilient in one area (physical challenges, for example), and lack resilience in another (emotional).

This week I’ll talk about how to break harmful patterns that limit our ability to feel emotionally resilient.

Say you grew up with all of the privileges in the world. Your basic needs were met, you went to summer camps and learned how to connect with nature and be a leader, and you went to a great school. But you were missing something important, something foundational to resilience. You were missing emotional awareness and nurturing, and therefore you lack the ability to meet and process emotional stuff because the big and difficult emotions weren’t always safe to express.

For many of us, our environment and behaviors were very controlled. There wasn’t room to speak up if you didn’t agree with something your caregiver or parent said. You couldn’t express yourself when you felt angry or misunderstood, without punishment. For safety, you learned to suppress. You might have had every opportunity to build resilience, but your environment created barriers.

Now, as an adult, you might feel anxious, maybe an urge to control, you seek perfection and achievement, you might experience overwhelm often, or maybe you never quite feel good enough, or happy enough. Something inside of you is missing, while outwardly it’s all there.

Real Resilience

Building emotional resilience is something we need to work on as adults. The good news is, we can! I am a living example of this.

Let’s talk about children right now. We know that environment and circumstances impact our ability to be resilient. COVID has certainly shown us that we all need to be practicing things that promote resilience right now.

Social-emotional learning plays a critical role in resilience. We know that understanding our difficult emotions is step one to bouncing back. Sounds simple, but learning how to tune into our emotions, especially the ones we have stuffed for so long, takes work.

If you have experienced emotional meltdowns, depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive stuff, or even felt like you have had a breakthrough during the pandemic, this is your cue to DIG DEEPER. There is work to do. Even though it’s scary, what comes out on the other side is having a better understanding of yourself, and your emotions, and knowing that YOU ARE STRONG ENOUGH to face the hardest things that come your way.