Developing Emotional Resilience

Have you ever noticed people who never seem to be troubled by life’s challenges? Or wondered about people who can bounce back quickly after life deals them a severe blow? How do they do it? Why do some people seem to make it through—seemingly unscathed—while others may take days, weeks, or even months to recover?

I think part of the key is emotional resilience. These folks have a flexibility in their souls that allows them to roll with life’s punches. When knocked down, they get back up. They might need help getting up, but indeed they do rebound and are still able to maintain a belief in the principle ideals of goodness, hope, and love. They go on with life and do it with joy and serenity because those are just better options than misery and strife.

I believe that emotional resilience is cultivated over a lifetime. Its development is contingent upon how we respond to stressful situations. Do we fall apart or do we implement healthy coping skills to pull through? Are we so shattered that we can’t function, or are we able to step back and more objectively re-assess the series of events that brought us to the distressing juncture?

Coping skills are learned. Perhaps we observe them in action in someone else thereby enabling us to implement them through a not-so-perfect process of trial and error. Or maybe we consult a helping professional who teaches them to us. Either way, we learn which coping skills work well for us and which ones do not.

For example, having a drink or taking a Xanax every time we are stressed is probably not a healthy coping strategy over the long haul. However, taking a few moments to focus our breath can help us find our center and not be shaken by the upheaval that surrounds. So can closing our eyes and viewing our predicament from the vantage point of a compassionate observer. We can ask ourselves, What would I tell a dear friend or loved one to do in this very situation? What kind of emotional support would I offer them?  We then take that same empathy and return it to ourselves.

Developing health coping skills takes time but enables us to develop greater distress tolerance. Distress tolerance is our ability to ride out difficult emotions and crisis situations while still remaining present for life, work, and the significant players in our lives. Distress tolerance is a sign of emotional growth and health.

As we grow in distress tolerance, we become far more emotionally resilient. I like to think of emotional resilience as those stretchy, gummy superheroes I used to have as a kid. My brother and I would stretch them as far as we could, and they would rebound to the same shape.

I think that’s the intended goal of psycho-emotional-spiritual growth. When stretched to the nth degree, we rebound to the same form we were before—only  stronger—with more hope, joy, and serenity to carry us forward on the journey of life.

Comments

[LouAnn Smith]

This was a great reminder! I am 45 and I have spent the past couple of years taking a long hard look at where I am and who I am. I have spent most of my life not coping well with crisis. I tend to question most of the decisions I've made in life and when something does not go the way I had hoped, feelings of failure tend to keep me down a long time. I have observed people who have taken risks to become what they feel they were born for and even when the "stuff of life" happens, they seem to have that inner strength to get up, just as you described. Time to dig deeper...