How to Armor Up for Emotional Resilience
What is emotional resilience?
Emotional resilience is response ability.
It means enduring through all that life throws your way — no matter how adversarial or painful it may be.
It means realizing that happiness comes from within.
And that you forge your life’s meaning, by creating your life as a mindful construct.
What makes emotional resilience a challenge?
Life is hard.
It’s painful.
It’s suffering.
On top of all that — society blames those pesky emotions for human suffering.
Society’s really in the dark on emotions, and how you can work with them.
Society would have you believe that your emotions are not to be trusted, that they seek to destroy all logic, and that they’re dangerous to your health.
But working with your emotions is really your only shot at emotional resilience.
That means, you need to armor up — so that you’re ready when society tries to convince you to stay far away from your emotions, by: invalidating them, minimizing them, ignoring them, suppressing them, judging them, or rationalizing them away.
Society encourages polarization, but integration is the way to emotional resilience
Not only does society try to polarize emotion and reason — pitting them against one another as opposites.
Society also tries to polarize your emotions — so that they’re mostly positive.
There’s great stigma attached to the dark, or negative emotions. And an even greater stigma that comes when you accept those emotions as having a right to exist.
On the surface, it may appear that love and light make for greater happiness, but your brightest optimism comes from your darkest pain. And your dark emotions can ultimately fuel personal growth in ways that the light emotions won’t be able to.
The positive emotions make you feel safe and comfortable where you are at.
The dark emotions compel you to grow. They move you forward to make important changes in life — so that long-term, you can experience more of the positive emotions.
Polarization won’t work, because just like emotion and reason are intertwined in the brain, the dark and light emotions have a symbiotic relationship.
And if you’re polarized from within, you’re bound to let society tell you how to live, even when it goes against your values.
What does emotional resilience armor look like?
Emotional resilience armor comes from having a clear understanding, mostly gained from experience, of how valuable working with emotions can be.
Once this understanding is strengthened, then you can create and maintain strong personal boundaries — only expending time and energy on activities that align with your mindful constructs and enhance your response ability.
Boundaries aren’t tangible, so you can’t easily see them.
But they do provide the framework for your actions and behaviors.
You can think of boundary-work as acting in integrity — in alignment with your values.
Why armor up for emotional resilience?
You’re a lone soldier who just stumbled on an ancient treasure map.
That maps leads into yourself — your emotions and all the gifts they have to offer.
Society doesn’t want you to take the journey.
But since you live in society, you can’t just ignore its cries. And fighting against it won’t be very effective either.
So fight for your emotional resilience.
And armor up by thinking critically about any one or thing that claims polarization is good for you.
How to start armoring up today
These articles demonstrate practical ways to armor up for emotional resilience:
Having the courage to face the dark…
- Cognitive Distortions and You
- Dysfunctional Beliefs and You
- Dysfunctional Beliefs of a Jehovah’s Witness Apostate
Finding value in the dark…
Accepting the dark emotions…
- Why Anger Has Such a Sharp Tongue
- Why You’ve Never Been Jealous
- Why Feeling Too Much Isn’t Bad
- The Acupuncture Perspective on Pain
What’s emotionally healthy even if not socially acceptable…
- Emotional Outspokenness: Crass Comes before Class
- Don’t Be Afraid to Be Alone
- Don’t Agree with Everyone
- Don’t Play the Forgiveness Game
- Searching for Your Soul Mate is Codependent
- Bless Them Curse Words
- 5 Roundabout Ways to Emotional Intelligence
- Response Ability is Cooler than Responsibility
- Why Neither Monogamy Nor Polyamory Are More Natural
Avoiding the Self-Help/ New Age pitfalls…
- 3 Things Not to Overlook When Using the Law of Attraction
- 4 Reasons to Kill Your Ego That Aren’t Very Good
Maintaining boundaries…
Subscribe to Mindful Construct to learn more about emotional resilience and how to armor up.
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