What is Emotional Resilience and How can I develop mine?

As a psychologist in private practice, I meet many distressed people. Some seem to be derailed by relatively small issues and others can withstand seemingly insurmountable adversity and only need the slightest bit of guidance before they can cope independently. What may be available to get on top of your emotions when they threaten to overwhelm you? What can help to force yourself into objectivity and to move away from getting entangled in emotional interactions. How can you learn to bend without breaking? And how can you develop the inner strength that may prevent you from breaking when under emotional onslaught?

Many have tried to distil the essence of emotional resilience. Often people to whom resilience comes naturally often seem to have a combination of curiosity and determination in their mental make-up and they tend to see hardship as a challenge. They also tend to be fully in the moment and present when struck by adversity. Consequently, they have a sense of control over their life events. As Victor Frankel (1946) mentioned in his seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how”.

Over the years I have come to realise that emotionally resilient clients tend to have an absence of self-derogatory self-talk. Beating themselves up and the resultant despair, hopelessness and helplessness this brings is absent in these people. Rather, their self-conversations tend to approach adversity with a can-do attitude and they are curious with a high-performance and problem-solving mindset that breaks problems into bite-sizes. This makes them able to systematically manage these smaller challenges more easily. They are curios to learn as much about their difficulties as they can not to dissimilar to interested scientists researching an area of interest.

Somehow this curiosity and mindset prevents them from often engaging with their emotions. It is as if they prefer to examine their thinking styles rather than how they are feeling creating a sense of objectively. This in turn helps them to quickly brainstorm solutions to how they are feeling. Instead of getting bogged down in a “poor me” and “this is so hard” cycle, resulting in being trapped in and wanting to escape the emotion, they tend to think “what can I do about this problem” and “what are the ways out of this problem.”  And when they do occasionally get bogged down in emotions they often view their emotionality as temporary, until they have worked out how to solve the problem cognitively.

Consequently, emotionally resilient people tend to experience adversity in a different way. Rather than being at the mercy of their emotions, emotionally resilient people tend to acknowledge adversity rather than dwell on, flee from or deny it.  By doing this they can move from being reactive and overwhelmed to thinking consciously and deliberately about the problem and its solutions.

How can I develop mine?

But how can you develop your emotional objectivity?

I often like to use the metaphor of balconies and dance floors when I help my clients learn how to gain the emotional objectivity that resilience requires. This metaphor helps people gain more perspective by taking a few steps back from an intensely emotional experience. It will help you to step onto a higher vantage point, where you can observe a situation from a more emotionally detached position:

The Balconies and Dance floor Metaphor

Imagine a lively dance floor filled with people dancing passionately to the music. When you are in the middle of the dance floor, you are immersed in the energy and emotions of the moment. However, if you climbed up to a balcony overlooking the dance floor, you see the entire scene from a different angle. From this vantage point, you could see the bigger picture, the patterns of movement in the dance and the interactions among the dancers without being directly involved in the emotional excitement on the dance floor.

This can also help when your emotions are running high, such as during a conflict, personal challenges or an emotionally charged conversation. By taking a moment to metaphorically step onto the balcony, you give yourself the opportunity to assess the situation from a place of emotional neutrality. This will help you have better problem-solving and have a more balanced approach to handling the situation. It will also help you to step into someone else’s shoes and understand their emotions, leading to improved empathy and communication.

When you use the above visual reminder, you will change the neurology of your brain: you will activate your prefrontal cortex, the area of your brain where rational thinking and problem solving occurs, instead of using the Amygdala, the area of the brain where emotions are triggered and that keep you dwelling on problems with anger, fear and sadness. Solving problems is very satisfying because it keeps our hope alive and motivates us to continue to achieve our goals.

In conclusion, by stopping to see your circumstances emotionally (lingering on the dancefloor) to thinking about your situation (stepping onto the balcony), you will become more resilient because you will become less bogged down in your emotions. You will be able to see more objective solutions to your problems and this in turn will create hope and goals for your future.

Exercise:

1.        For the above concepts to come to life I would encourage you to see the 1997 Italian film “Life is Beautiful”. It tells the story of a Jewish waiter and his young son who became victims of the Holocaust when they are transported to Auschwitz. It shows how the man continued to move out of his despairing emotional state whilst being in a dreadful situation and this way protecting and keeping his son safe from the dangers around the camp. While watching it, try to identify the father’s thinking that sets him apart from others in the camp  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CTjcVr9Iao.

2.        When thinking about your own thoughts and emotions, try to identify when you are in thinking-mode and when you are in feeling-mode. To help with this use the following two pictures to help you identifying what you are feeling and what you are thinking: 

Source: Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for anxiety and depression - Adapted for Brain Injury(CBT-ABI): A Treatment Manual. (Dana Wong, Ming-Yun Hsieh, Adam McKay, Kerrie Haines, Meaghan O'Donnell & Jennie Ponsford.