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