Building Emotional Resilience
- Sarah F. O'Brien, LCSW, LCSW-C, CCATP, CTMH
- Apr 17
- 8 min read
Why recognizing, naming, and understanding emotions helps build resilience
Emotions are universal and biological
All humans experience an array of emotions, we can’t get away from it, it’s physiological, which is to say it’s biological, a biological certainty. Considering this is a certainty of the human experience, it’s amazing how little people know and understand about emotions, especially their own. However, like most things, we have to be taught about something to know and understand something. Social-emotional learning was not much of a concept in the Boomer, Generation X and Generation Y eras. These folks likely learned little to nothing about emotions and healthy emotional expression in terms of relationships. We’re slowly seeing shifting sands with Gen Z, and Gen Alpha might the first generation to start learning this stuff early in life—as we now understand the importance.
Without emotional awareness, it’s likely folks are not managing emotions in healthy ways. Building emotional strength has been a key element of psychological well-being for centuries. In the past, cultures worldwide recognized the importance of mental resilience through practices like meditation, physical activity, and social bonding.
Emotional strength is the ability to manage and navigate the ups and downs of life while maintaining a sense of balance and well-being. By building emotional strength, we can handle difficult situations with resilience and grow from them. Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors.
You can build Emotional Strength by:
Acknowledging, naming and accepting emotions
Maintaining a positive, or neutral, attitude, even in tough situations
Practicing self-compassion during setbacks and mistakes
Developing coping strategies for stress and overwhelm
Setting healthy boundaries in relationships
Cultivating patience and persistence
Building a strong sense of self-worth
Emotional bandwidth means the mental and emotional energy you have available for daily tasks, relationships, and stressors.
When it’s high, you can handle challenges with resilience, be present in conversations, and make decisions without overthinking, or being impulsive. Preserving your bandwidth comes from permission to rest, and not just when you’ve pushed yourself past your limits. Setting boundaries without explanation and limiting news/social media intake can help you conserve energy.
Spending time with people who refill your cup, having deep, meaningful and safe conversations can restore your energy. Doing something just for you, intentional time alone to reset will restore your bandwidth. Do one thing at a time instead of multitasking as this isn’t productivity, rather it’s bandwidth overload.
When it’s low, even small things can feel overwhelming. Do you know how to check in with yourself?
Suppressing emotions instead of processing them will drain bandwidth. Pushing through stress, frustration, sadness doesn’t make them disappear, it just adds to the background noise. Also, overcommitting to others at your own cost, saying yes when you want to say no will drain you. Checking in when no one checks in on you. Carrying emotional weight that is not yours. Neglecting basic needs like healthy food, healthy movement, healthy rest and instead running on caffeine, doom scrolling, and lack of movement will certainly drain your bandwidth.
If you feel so low and drained, just stop and sit, just be. Not necessarily in meditation or anything, but just quiet, focus on breathing, and being still.
To manage emotions effectively requires learning skills
Emotional regulation isn’t about avoiding feelings, or only coping with feelings, but rather understanding feelings. Exploring your emotional patterns requires self-awareness. When we become more aware of our emotions, what turns them on or up, then we can respond to challenges with more compassion and clarity. Learn your early warning signs for activation of different emotions. Understanding your automatic response to feeling misunderstood or hurt and naming this will help move you from reaction to response. Also, are you judging your feelings? This just adds a second layer of pain and stress. We wave in and out of emotions all day every day, that is the human condition. Good news about this means emotions are not permanent states of being, bur rather temporary experiences. Learning to ride the waves of emotions can help you cope with them more effectively.
Emotional regulation toolkits can be helpful. Find things that appeal to the five senses and keep them gathered in one place, or even a box or container for easy access. When emotions hit and you feel dysregulated, go to your regulation toolkit and start using the items that help you self-soothe and ride those difficult emotional waves. Examples include: music, sounds of nature or ocean waves for listening; favorite blanket or clothing or fidget item for touch; pictures or scenes that evoke peace or happiness for sight; aromatherapy, essential oils, candles, or lotion for smell; tea, coffee, favorite snack for taste.
Without awareness we usually react to felt emotions. Intentional response to our felt emotions goes like this: awareness, pause, urge recognition, evaluation of acting on urge or not, make a choice, repeat the next time a wave of emotion hits.
Early childhood impacts emotional experience
It’s important to discuss how our early life experiences have shaped how we behave as adults. If you grew up in an invalidating, harmful, unstable, or traumatic environment then it’s likely many of your emotional needs were not met, and at least not met by the main people caring for you (like parents, grandparents, guardians). We often don’t know, or don’t realize, that we have unmet needs leftover from childhood. We do often, however, feel the impact of unmet emotional needs. And it’s likely we are still struggling as adults to get these needs met in healthy ways, especially if we are unaware of ourselves, our emotions, our reactions, and the impact of our early experiences.
Unmet emotional needs can show up as…
Unmet need to feel: May show up as:
Safe, secure, protected Anxiety & mistrust
Heard, seen, prioritized Resentment & jealousy
Loved & supported Numbness & sadness
Valued & appreciated People pleasing
Able to honor your needs Stress & overwhelm
Understood & cared for Loneliness & disconnection
Understanding how unmet needs can show up as unhealthy behaviors or reactions can give insight into how you see yourself, see the world, and how you interact with it and other people. If you’ve never really felt understood, you could often feel depressed and lonely—impacting outlook and communication. If you’ve never really felt seen, heard and prioritized, you could often feel anger, resentment and jealousy when others receive these things—impacting thoughts, behaviors and communication. There’s nothing wrong with you if you never got these needs met by early caretakers and the result is unpleasant and uncomfortable emotions, that perhaps happen more often than desired. It is, however, your responsibility to recognize what you didn’t receive, and find ways to care for yourself now and access support and care in safe and healthy ways. This takes work, like most good things in life.
Also, when our early caretakers fail to set us up for success later in life, we can react intensely and quickly when certain things get activated in us. Feedback can feel like criticism—and how do we respond to feeling criticized? Armor up, shut down, or something else? Not feeling good enough can kick up guilt—and how do we respond when feeling guilty? Do we people-please, beat ourselves up, or something else? To build emotional resilience requires self-awareness, first and foremost, as do most things. You can’t learn something new if you don’t know where you’re starting from. Increasing self-awareness in and of itself leads to better emotional well-being because it’s more likely you can attend to your emotional needs when you are aware of them. Obviously, it can be pretty hard to attend to your needs when you are not aware. Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong or bad about these emotions. There is nothing wrong or bad about you if you feel these emotions, and/or feel these emotions that stem from something deeper—that’s pretty much true for all humans. There’s nothing to feel bad about here, only stuff to learn, learn about yourself, and others to create more harmony in yourself, your life, and your relationships.
Take a look at this list of feelings that stem from something else, likely rooted in early childhood experiences, and/or repeated people experiences in your life.Feelings that stem from being criticized--> Stems from believing you are not doing enough, or are inadequate: SHAME; Triggered when criticism aligns with something you regret or believe you should fix: GUILT
Comes from feeling exposed or judged in front of others: EMBARRASSMENT
Arises when criticism feels unfair or like a personal attack: ANGER
Rooted in feeling misunderstood, rejected, or unappreciated: SADNESS
A reaction to protect yourself when feeling unfairly blamed or attacked: DEFENSIVENESS
Caused by worrying about future rejection, failure, or disappointing others: FEAR
Emerges when criticism makes you question your abilities or decisions: SELF-DOUBT
Develops when criticism feels repetitive or unhelpful: FRUSTRATION
Emotional well-being is obtained with intentional effort
Understanding emotions, in general and yours specifically, is a great benefit, and a skill to be honed. Especially if you are in the Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y generations. This takes intentional effort, but isn’t rocket science hard. You do have to be committed to learning to name emotions accurately and learning to recognize how they present for you. Once you can do this, then learning ways to more effectively manage and cope with your emotions becomes a bit easier, because now we’re paying attention, can catch or spot the emotions when they arise, and then give ourselves options for dealing with them—hopefully in ways that don’t cause harm to ourselves or to others. Emotional well-being and resilience aren’t born, but made. Anyone can build emotional resilience and increase emotional well-being by intentionally setting out to do so. Step number one is always self-awareness. It’s often hard to gain this self-awareness without someone to bounce things off of, like a professional, and without intentionally self-reflecting. Learning to recognize emotions and name the correctly opens the door to being able to experience and cope with them in healthy ways. These together are what builds up resilience. Resilience helps us maintain emotional well-being when the hard stuff happens.
Hard stuff happens all of the time. Wouldn’t it be good to build resilience and skills to deal with it best? I think so too. Reach out to me if you want dedicated support in building better emotional resilience and taking better care of your emotional self.
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