Emotional resilience is a measure of how well you adapt to stress, recover from emotional wounds, and feel about yourself.
Emotional resilience is impacted by traumas experienced in relation to other individuals, and groups, and how you feel about yourself.
From the moment we are born, we are automatically in learning mode, making sense out of our experiences as we interact with people and our environment. Our experiences impact how resilient we become. Nurturing, supportive, reaffirming experiences contribute to a strong emotional framework and core beliefs, and emotional resilience is protective when mental and emotional challenges are encountered. Emotional resilience is increases or decreases throughout our lifetimes as a result of our experiences.
Emotional resilience is the filter THROUGH which you interpret your experiences
As we mature, some assumptions we make are healthy, and others can be damaging. For example, you get in trouble when you are a child, and your caregiver says you are “bad.” Over time, judgements like these become internalized, and can become attached to your core beliefs about yourself.
People who believe they are “bad” are more likely to engage in risky or dangerous behaviors compared to people who believe they are “good.” Substitute “bad” with beliefs like “unworthy”, “not good enough,” “ugly,” etc, and connect them to a series of experiences where you feel neglected, abandoned, or unwanted, and you can see that as you experience life with through the negative lens your filter selects experiences that confirm its correctness, just as when you believe you are “lovable,” “intelligent,” and “beautiful” and your beliefs are similarly confirmed through your experiences.
A person with high emotional resilience who doesn’t get the job or relationship they desire will rebound from that experience having learned something that will make them stronger in the future. A person with low emotional resilience may feel defeated, withdrawn, or overwhelmed.
How emotionally resilient are you?
This emotional resilience quiz will provide you with some insight to how resilient you are, and what you can do to improve your resilience based on your answers.
Note on resilience building: coping is not resilience building. Coping includes techniques people use to quickly feel better, but leave the underlying emotional trigger unchanged. Over time triggers build until you feel exhausted and become overwhelmed.
Coping can help in the short run, but will leave you at your wits end over time as you become more and more emotionally blocked.
emotional resilience changes over time
Emotional resilience is characteristic that changes over time. Someone lacking resilience can improve, and someone high in emotional resilience can lose it over time. Simple exercises may be enough to improve your emotional resilience, however, low emotional resilience caused by deep emotional wounds and extremely low self-value will need support through the healing process as the deepest wounds are accompanied by equally deep blind spots.
When looking for help, consider how emotionally resilient the person is who is counseling you. Choose a person who has already overcome the healing blind spots, and is well on their path of emotional healing and resilience building. A person can only help you to the degree they have worked through their own blind spots. You want to make sure the person you are working with is not relying on platitudes and google searches for advice.