What Is Emotional Resilience?

 




What Is Meant By The Term Psychological Resilience?


There are many definitions of reliance, but we could settle for the ability to be able to cope, adapt, recover and learn from life’s challenges.

Coping usually refers to being able to ‘sit with’ unpleasantness/distress with the knowledge that you can weather that storm and things will improve. This particular interpretation and response to difficult circumstances makes us less likely to become overwhelmed.

Adapting to stresses is a helpful aspect of resilience. It refers to altering your behaviour (and interpretation of events) about the demands of the circumstances. A lack of resilience leads us to respond in the same way: “Because that’s what I always do”.

Linked to this is the ability to learn from events which of course informs how you adapt to future stressful experiences. That knowledge will also strengthen your ability to cope with further unpleasantness.

Once all these elements are in play, your ability to recover from significant life changes is improved. Also, I’m sure you can see, that the chances of burnout from life stresses are greatly reduced.


How Is Our Resilience Established?

Our understanding of what it means to be resilient, and whether we see ourselves as able to cope, is established in our earliest years.

Through our development, we gain experience of coping, or otherwise, through observing our caregiver's resilience and direct experience being managing unpleasantness. When we observe others coping (or not) we learn to mimic and test out ways of managing the distress we experience; what is termed vicarious reinforcement.

This also is where we learn the ability to adapt to circumstances. Ideally, we learn that our response to events is not fixed and we can change how we behave, to manage best the emotions they create.

Of course, this is relying on having observed helpful ways of coping; unfortunately, this is not always the case. Helpful and unhelpful modelling can influence resilience.

Ideally, we were encouraged to problem-solve with support rather than our caregivers doing everything for us. We were able to experience distress and be supported to find ways to cope. Each is a learning experience that builds our skills and beliefs to be resilient in our adult years.

If we don’t have that experience, either we find it difficult to cope with unpleasantness and become easily overwhelmed, or we develop a form of toxic resilience.


What Is Meant By The Term Toxic Resilience?

Toxic resilience is easiest to recognise in the person who sees pushing past all boundaries, fighting on and repeatedly saying that they are fine, even when things are far from easy, often with a fixed smile.

Quite often there is a sense of shame or embarrassment to ask for help/advice; it is seen as a weakness: “I’m fine”.
In my experience with clients, this tends to be characteristic of being told to “get on with it” and “man up” alongside a lack of helpful models of ways to be resilient, as a child. Alternatively, they may have protected themselves from unpleasantness with the caregivers sorting out all distressing circumstances rather than involving them in the problem-solving. Without a clear model of resilience, the individual falls back on fake positives.

The toxic resilience will be affected only in the short term and often leads to burnout, and/or an exacerbation of longstanding anxiety and emotional problems.


How Does Hypnoanalysis Help?

Hypnoanalysis combines both psychotherapy and hypnotherapy and helps to improve resilience by working through the unhelpful childhood experiences you may have faced and as a result coping with life changes and day-to-day challenges easier.

The therapy works under the principle of cause and effect. For every effect, there has to be a cause a reason why someone suffers in the way they do.

Rather than managing symptoms, the aim is to remove the psychological root cause of symptoms.

By enabling past events to be re-examined and the associated emotion released, patterns of behaviour which are no longer appropriate, the symptoms cease.




Find out more and book a free initial consultation at www.ketteringhypnotherapy.com or call David directly at 01536 350328

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting a Better Nights Sleep - The 3 Week Challenge: Principle One

Image
It all began a month or so before lockdown when I noticed how many sleep aids there were in the chemist.  That same week I had four people contact me for help with sleep problems.  This made me ask myself: “What does psychological research and Hypnotherapy tell us about getting a good nights sleep?” A positive psychological approach focuses on what makes people healthy rather than unhealthy. Instead of looking at the behaviour of someone who is struggling to get a good nights sleep, we should focus on the person who frequently sleeps well. How is the behaviour different? Can we copy it? I began teaching people to use these psychological techniques alongside Hypnosis to nudge their sleep pattern. I was pleased to see the differences that could be made…but more people are needed to really see how effective it could be. Fancy a challenge? You need to apply the principles for the next three weeks and review the changes to your to sleep.  Each princip...
Read more

Hypnosis Explained

Image
    If you are hoping to read that Hypnosis is a magical, mystical, controlling power that can make people behave in ways they choose not to, then you are certainly going to be disappointed. Any assumption that a person is asleep or unconscious is also not the case.  So have you ever experienced Hypnosis? Think back over the last 24 hours…. When you woke up this morning, do you remember that half-awake half-asleep feeling? On that commute to work, perhaps you drifted into auto-pilot and as you were driving along? Perhaps your mind drifted to the things you had to do.  You could be forgiven for thinking that you were daydreaming. Tonight, just as you drift off to sleep you are very likely to experience that same half-awake half-asleep feeling. Every one of those experiences could be given the name Hypnosis. Hypnosis is a natural state we all experience many times throughout the day. It is as much part of our lives as breathing. The idea of being under the control of ...
Read more

Imposter Syndrome: Do you sometimes feeling like a fraud?

Image
  One behaviour people experience from one time or another is being an imposter; the feeling that they might get ‘caught’ out for not being as good at what they do as people assume they are. Imposter syndrome is where an individual doubts their accomplishments and abilities and these are converted into a fear of being exposed as a fraud. Interestingly, this still happens when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.  What do you attribute your successes to? Unjustified feelings of being an imposter are an attribution bias. It is a tendency to attribute successes to luck or poor judgment on the part of others’. In a self-deprecating way, the assumption is that they are ‘just getting by’ and if others saw the real them then they would less than impressed. When we feel this kind of imposter syndrome, we failing to have any internal acknowledgment of our own achievements, something which is characteristic of those suffering from anxiety, and unsurprisingly, low self-estee...
Read more