Your Emotional Super Tool is Resilience

August 15, 2024

Let’s glance back over the past ten years for a brief moment. I could fill hundreds of journals with issues, circumstances, ‘problems’ and life shifts I’ve gone through. Blech! Readers don’t want to hear about my life, its challenges and how I navigated them. What you want is something to inspire you, motivate you, uplift you. That’s so much dang healthier. It’s like cleaning up your diet after realizing you’re not going to trim extra pounds by eating chocolate chip cookies every day. Bravo for this realization. Nobody wants the junk trauma UNLESS-they’re going through a similar challenge and are desperately searching for hope in what seems like an impossibly deep dark hole. Listen, I’ve been there. MANY times. I hear you and see you, to coin a trendy little phrase. What you want and need is to hear that your current state of mind is not here to stay, and that this too shall pass.

Good News! It will and it does.

But why should you believe me?

It takes time for writers like me to earn the trust of readers like you. Again, that’s a good thing. If you just blindly trusted what someone wrote and published out here in the blogosphere, you’d probably not be my audience. I, and my ‘tribe’ (trend alert!) are skeptical, cautious and critical thinkers when it comes to talking about emotional healing. It’s no joke and it’s rather private, until it isn’t. More on that later. So, what’s the point of all this?

What’s bugging me lately is seeing online gurus, or personalities doing and saying things in order to grab the attention of readers, which seems to be more and more difficult to do.  Getting the attention of readers has hit a frenetically fevered pitch. When I hear or read, ‘and all that they’ve been through’, I wonder, just how bad is bad. I mean, seriously, this is such a subjective statement. An Olympic athlete who missed a competition due to a sprained ankle is unfortunate, and super disappointing, but it might not be considered a tragedy, according to most people who’ve experienced serious tragedies. However, if it adds to the story and snags attention, the narrator can definitely whip it up as a tragedy. And who are we to determine what another person’s tragedy threshold is?

Maybe it’s because the older I get, I understand first hand, that we ALL ‘go through’ alot in our lives. And you know what else I know? You better be unbelievably resilient in order to get through it and bounce back into living your life. Again, (trend alert) the word ‘resilient’ is bandied about often, like ‘authentic’, ‘showing up’, ‘triggered’. The buzz words are so deep in social media and the online community, does anyone really know what they mean and if they’re being used correctly?

For my purpose here, let’s look at the word resilience. The simplest explanation is that if you possess resilience, you can bounce back from the s&%t life throws at you. But wait! It’s not that simple. That doesn’t mean that you’re superhuman and the s&%t that hits you has no impact on you. It means that you have the inner confidence and other nifty emotionally healthy tools that allow you to move through the situation instead of getting stuck in the muck. Notice that I didn’t say to get back to your previous life. That can happen, but it’s not usually what does happen.

As many of you know, once you take a massive punch to the gut by life and you do some deep reflection while you’re healing, you’re not really the same person on the other side of blow to the belly. Those hits, from losing a job to big tragedies can be life-changing experiences, even for resilient people. I used to think that resilient people were the strong, smart, stable people who are able to stay up above it all without even getting rattled by the hits, and then they can get right back to business as usual. This isn’t necessarily so. The more I read about it, it’s much deeper than that. Resilient people know that life’s injustices might very well hit them someday. They’re not paralyzed in the aftermath thinking ‘Why me?’. They accept that anybody can get clobbered by unexpected circumstances. What they do have is an emotional toolbox filled with handy, useful, and effective tools to navigate the hits without coming apart at the seams, becoming emotionally wrecked, or paralyzed by what just happened to them. I don’t know about you, but I never learned this when I was growing up. Most of us aren’t prepared for these times.

Resilience isn’t necessarily a character trait that you’re born with, although genetics might play a very tiny role in it. It’s a learned skill. Resilient folks believe in, and are confident that they have what it takes to move through this circumstance, are confident they can handle the situation,  and they get on with living. Their ‘living’ may be different afterwards but the important part of this is that they know that they will get back to living their life to the best of their ability. This isn’t about time, it’s about a mindset of confidence and hope. Another one of their superpowers is that they never give up on the fact that good is always going on all around them; they might just be temporarily unable to see it, but they know it’s present. They don’t become cynical or bitter.

So, while grieving or healing, or tending to heartbreak or natural disaster, or community tragedy of any kind, the resilient mind knows how to actively detect good where others might not see anything good. That nifty little emotional skill is a versatile one that we need with us at all times.

Resilience doesn’t mean bouncing back up as if nothing ever happened. It means that one’s well equipped emotional toolbox has effective tools (healthy coping skills) that facilitate all the normal stages of processing, and then letting go of continual rumination of the past. Resilient people understand they have a say in how they can learn and move forward. That’s a powerful mindset and is the first step in staying out of the mental muck of stuckness while taking intentional actions to move forward.

As pictured above, strong springs, tied by skilled craftswomen insure that a piece of furniture can take thousands of compressions, yet get back to the task at hand-continuing to serve its’ purpose as part of a strong suspension system. Same with our emotionalc health. I used to tell my kids that they needed strong shock absorbers (same thing) to be able to endure and rebound from circumstances out of their control.