If You Want to Become Resilient, You Need to Be Emotional
Contrary to popular belief, being emotional is what makes you stronger.
I am speaking on the basis of more than ten years of therapy, several courses of mental health coaching from licensed therapists, and years of university studies. My definition of resilience is heavily inspired by Tonje Fossum Svendsen’s books.
What Resilience Is
To understand the misunderstanding, we first need to define resilience.
Resilience is the ability to adapt to a stressful (or overall negative) situation in a healthy, constructive way. Resilient individuals use their psychological, social, and physical resources to buffer themselves against various negative outcomes of adverse life events. Thus, they are less likely than their peers to develop health problems, and better equipped to handle crises well.
The key takeaway here is that resilience is linked to adaptability.
What Resilience Is Not
On the other hand, resilience is not about being un-emotional.
How you react to a situation emotionally is not within your control. People differ in terms of how intense and how positive or negative their emotions tend to be. Being emotional (which often means that you have intense and negative feelings as your emotional baseline) is natural: crying or stressing more than others does not automatically make you a less resilient person.
What makes you less resilient, however, is handling your emotions poorly. After all, it is within your control how you choose to approach the feelings that naturally arise in any given situation. What improves or worsens your resilience is your chosen approach to the sadness, anger, or stress within.
Therefore, resilience is not built on emotionality, but rather on how a specific emotion is processed and handled.
How Not to Build Resilience
As we now know, resilience depends on adaptability.
Sadly, the ways in which most people handle their emotions are built on the assumption that emotions are weak and that resilience is synonymous with toughness or hardiness. There is some merit to this idea in the sense that no, overwhelm (that is, being overpowered by your emotions) is not a particularly helpful approach. But while yes, resilience does require you to push through hard times and not be controlled by your emotional states, it does not mean that you should exert control or power over your feelings to counterbalance this.
Doing so would be another extreme of poor processing. Suppression can be equally bad, because it leads you to bottle up your emotions instead of truly processing them (for instance, by forcing your jealousy down or not crying when you need to), which is immature and fairly irresponsible. Your emotions are what allow you to react and respond to various aspects of life and take your needs and desires into consideration — and, therefore, the act of neglecting your feelings is entirely counterintuitive to living a life where stress has less of a negative impact on you.
In other words, resilience is only worsened by the toughness it so often is associated with.
How to Build Resilience
Resilience is built on healthy emotion regulation.
It means confronting your emotions: acknowledging their presence and allowing them to be. It does not mean overwhelm: they should float in the background as you proceed with the tasks before you. It also does not mean suppression: your emotions need to be felt, even as they should be more like companions than distractions.
Even though this might be difficult at first, your emotions will become easier to handle with time. Again, you cannot — and never will — control how intense or negative your emotions are. What matters is that you continue to choose healthy regulation strategies.
Because at its core, resilience is about adapting to your situation.
