6 Lessons on How to Boost Your Emotional Resilience

We all know the adage “Time heals everything”
However, a new study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science confirms this idea that time doesn’t heal. Researchers from Arizona State University discovered that in general, people don’t possess a lot of natural resilience.
I would agree with the ideas presented in the research.
In my opinion, if we are taught to build resilience when we are young, it will not only reduce stress but also help roll with life punches and emerge stronger.
Thus empowering ourselves to boost our emotional resilience as we become adults.
Resilience and Resistance: Survivor Stories
Every human has to find the best coping mechanism to deal with their life-altering events.
Take the example of the terror stories from the Holocaust, 9/11 in the United States, 26/11 in Mumbai, 13/11 Paris attack and the recent London attack.
It is easy to assume that once a survivor has experienced life-altering events, they can begin rebuilding their lives, and their pain would disappear. However, as echoed in the interviews below, survivors had — and still experience — difficulties on a day-to-day basis.
Some survivors live with guilt for their own survival and for others who died trying to save them.
But, the complexity of the survivors’ lives should not and can never be understated. It is a constant battle to survive with private and painful memories while attempting and mostly succeeding to rebuild their lives in a new and lonely environment.
Professor Zwi Bacharach, a survivor of the Holocaust testifies in the interview the extremely difficult existential gap between Holocaust survivors and the local population.
“They could not understand the nature of someone being released from [Nazi] concentration camps. It’s coming from abnormality to normality, so the normal person can’t understand you.”
Maureen Roussela survivor of the Paris attack, and who launched a platform “Life for Paris” to bring together the hundreds of survivors still reeling from their traumatic experience.
“Just because our skin is not marked, does not mean nothing happened and we’re not hurt. There are more than a thousand of us. Over a thousand who left that room, more than a thousand people for whom things will never be quite the same. This is huge. In this misfortune, I think it’s important to get together,”
But what is the one thing that we notice with the pattern of survival stories?
Emotional healing of wounds.
Do you agree?
All the survivor stories will always reflect the pain as if it has just happened. They all have suffered life’s worst adversities, and they have evolved stronger with time.
But the scars still remain.
There is every possibility that the survivors are living with old painful memories which can trigger their wounds again.
But if we are taught how to become more resilient from our childhood, deal with our emotions and more self-aware, we can connect better with the people around us and also heal our wounds. We may perhaps even bounce back in less time and deal with our adversities. This is the way we start building more authentic relationships.
How does one become resilient?
So, how do we face our adversities and then train to become more resilient?
Hara Estroff Marano, Editor-at-Large for Psychology Today, wrote in her article “The Art of Resilience”:
“At the heart of resilience is a belief in oneself — yet also a belief in something larger than oneself.
Resilient people do not let adversity define them. They find resilience by moving towards a goal beyond themselves, transcending pain and grief by perceiving bad times as a temporary state of affairs… It’s possible to strengthen your inner self and your belief in yourself, to define yourself as capable and competent. It’s possible to fortify your psyche. It’s possible to develop a sense of mastery.”
How do we build resilience?
Sheryl Sandberg in her book Option B talks about learning to be resilient to beat the lows. Being resilient means the strength and speed of our response to adversity — and we can build it. It isn’t about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone.
From her book, I learned these six abilities one must have to build resilience.
- The ability to acknowledge what we are feeling
Humans are evolutionarily wired for both connection and grief: we naturally have the tools to recover from loss and trauma. Sheryl talks about interesting learning from a friend something Buddhists have known since the fifth century BC that all life involves suffering. When we accept this noble truth, we end up “making friends with our own demons”. Acknowledge is the first ability we all need when we are faced with adversity. Lean into the suck. This is awful but it is our reality, and there is no escape from it. We have to move away from the misery shadow — where we keep thinking about the fact that we have to suffer this adversity. When we acknowledge what we are feeling the intensity of the pain starts to go.
2. The ability to be vulnerable, connect and ask for help
Most people who have not experienced loss are uncomfortable having intimate conversations about your adversity. It makes you feel that people don’t care. But the truth is most people avoid painful conversations. But to bring about this change and make people understand how you are feeling, we have to bring that change in ourselves. We must learn how to respond to pleasantries even when we are suffering. A simple question of “how are you” need not always be a response as “fine” “good” or “awesome”. We must be honest about how we are feeling. It is okay to feel vulnerable. When we are trying to isolate ourselves from the world, we end up carrying a big elephant in the room. That stops us from connecting with people, listening to their stories of similar adversity they have faced and how to cope with our own feelings. Connecting with people and asking for help who have faced similar adversity gives us a sense of comfort on how we are feeling.
3. The ability to show up as a friend in times of grief
When you are struck with grief, you don’t want to ask for help. Find your circle of comfort and allow people to help you. Most of us don’t know how to help people struck with grief. We must reach out to them, see if we can help them, listen to how they are feeling, or just give them a hug. When we start sharing at a deeper level, we form meaningful relationships with friends. I understood that friendship isn’t only what you can give, it’s what you are able to receive. We all will find an opportunity to restore the balance with friends, where sometimes we are the givers, and they are receivers or vice versa. The important lesson here is to show up as a friend in times of grief.
4. A supportive relationship with oneself
Everyone makes mistakes. Some are small but can have serious consequence. But sometimes these can also be big mistakes too — error of judgment, failures to follow through on commitment, lapses of integrity. None of us can change what we have already done. Instead, we must practice self-compassion, where we accept that imperfections are a part of being human. Those who can tap into it recover from hardship faster. When we start beating yourself down over our actions, we damage our future. Blaming our actions rather than our character allows us to feel guilt instead of shame. The way to feel compassion for oneself is to own our mistakes.
5. The ability to feel joy again
When we experience the first happy moment after our adversity, guilt takes over us. We stop living for our own self. We stop doing a single thing that brings us joy. We always want others to be happy. Allowing ourselves to be happy — accepting that it is okay to push through the guilt and seek joy — is a triumph over permanence. Having fun is a form of self-compassion; just as we need to be kind to ourselves when we make mistakes, we also need to be kind to ourselves by enjoying life when we can. Tragedy breaks down your door and takes you, prisoner. To escape takes effort and energy. Seeking joy after facing adversity is taking back what was stolen from you. We learn to become our own happiness.
6. The ability to find strength together
Martin Luther King’s words describe perfectly the feeling of finding strength together by the power of sharing
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
When we share our stories with people about our adversity, we are not only sharing our grief or sorrow that has deeply impacted us but also building resilience along the way. Resilience is not just built in individuals. It is built among individuals — in our neighborhood, schools, towns, and governments. When we build resilience together, we become stronger ourselves and form communities that can overcome obstacles and form communities that can overcome obstacles and prevent adversity. Collective resilience requires more than just shared hope — it is also fueled by shared experiences, shared narratives and shared power. In the face of atrocity, moral elevation leads us to look at our similarities instead of our differences. We see the potential for good in others and gain hope that we can survive and rebuild. We become inspired to express compassion and battle injustice.
