HURDLES TO BUILDING EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE
It helps To Know The Difficulties with Building emotional resilience to avoid becoming frustrated
When you’re struggling, it’s frustrating when people offer platitudes about trying harder, managing your thoughts, or avoiding unhealthy coping mechanisms when your unresolved emotional and mental stressors are still troubling you deep down. Especially when you’re triggered feeling depressed, anxious, or angry.
Here are a few reasons you may be struggling. The good news is that each one is something that can be overcome.
1.
EMOTIONS ARE NOT LOGICAL
Language comes from the part of the brain that deals with logic, analysis, calculations, and making sense out of our experiences. This is the part of emotional trauma that gets the most attention. Trauma definitely has a story, but it also has a powerful non-verbal component that is often overlooked. We think in words, but feelings and emotions are complicated, sometimes hard to describe. As infants and toddlers, before we had any way of describing how we felt, we definitely experienced fear, sadness, anger, and emotional numbness. Emotions and feelings, typically correlate with a symphony of body sensations that help us interpret our experiences. For example, fear typically is associated with holding our breath, a rapid heart rate, dilated pupils, and muscle tension. Because we tend to focus on words, we often overlook or ignore the feelings at the heart of our emotional wounds that also need to be processed.
When emotions are intense, we shut them down, to “cope” or control them, without allowing them to naturally cycle from intense back to balanced. This can culminate in overwhelm, and also a blunting of our ability to be happy because all emotions are in the same nervous system container. When you shut down painful emotions, it diminishes your capacity to feel positive emotions as well.
2.
Old habits die hard
We learn to cope as kids as we find ways to adapt to uncomfortable feelings and emotions. Because our coping strategies are so well rehearsed, they can block our ability to think of new ways to handle stress as adults. Because habits are linked to beliefs, it can be impossible to respond in any other way once we have found a way to minimize our emotional pain. Especially when the emotions are overwhelming.
3.
OVERWHELM LEADS TO BRAIN FOG
When emotional challenges don’t have an immediate solution, they build and become so intense that the brain, in it’s infinite desire to minimize your pain, will release a shot of opioids and endorphins which naturally takes your thinking and body sensations offline. People describe feeling floaty, having no thoughts, missing body parts, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, and a struggle to find answers or solutions. Your brain effectively overrides intense physical and emotional pain by administering its own numbing chemicals. You’ve seen this when you see a gazelle get caught by a lion. It gets a shot of these brain chemicals as it prepares for the worst, and goes down with its eyes wide open, without a struggle, after a brain self-administered dose of opiods and endorphins. In some people with emotional trauma, this mental and emotional numbing gets confused with lack of focus due to attention deficit disorder. When people resolve their emotional wounds, their emotional brain fog also clears.
4.
WHEN YOU'RE STRESSED, IT IS DIFFICULT TO FOCUS YOUR MIND ON ANYTHING OTHER THAN YOUR TROUBLES
Unresolved fear, sadness, and anger gets very “loud,” sequestering all of your attention, making it difficult to think or focus on anything else. That’s why platitudes don’t help. Intense fear, sadness and anger get linked to survival reflexes, which once triggered, can be difficult to quell, because they are tied to strong impulses associated with the basic human need for safety. This is especially true after years of controlling our emotions without allowing them to naturally restore balance, because emotions compound and intensify if not allowed to heal.
5.
feeling better is the antidote
It’s difficult to feel better when you feel bad, yet people who feel fine typically suggest you should “just get over it” or “move on.” They are likely well meaning, and just don’t understand that when you are emotionally exhausted from stress, it’s difficult to even recall what it feels like to be supported, loved and accepted. The good news is, the mind is powerful. Just a few minutes of practiced positive refocusing can lead to a major breakthrough in emotional overwhelm. Remembering the feelings that go along with positive or happy memories is often the first major step to building emotional resilience.
While significant, these difficulties with becoming emotionally resilient can easily be overcome by working with a practitioner trained in SLIP™ Emotional Resilience Building Techniques. Emotional blocks are dense, and usually cause a dead end when working on improving your emotional health. Having a trained emotional resilience practitioner who understands how to navigate these challenges make the difference between struggling on your own over the years, to resolving your emotional and core belief wounds within a few months.
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