Pillar 1. Honoring Your Feelings and Emotional Self-Regulation

The Central Role of Emotions in Adversity

The first pillar to building resilience is learning to honor your feelings, since stress and adversity generate negative emotions.

We must understand that the greater the stressor we face, the more intense and greater the emotions we will experience within.

We would not call a situation stressful, traumatic, or difficult if it did not have a direct impact on the way we feel internally.

Emotions are the language through which our being communicates to us that we are going through a situation that requires all our attention and energy.

Therefore, the starting point to being more resilient is not to deny what we feel, but quite the opposite: to recognize their presence and importance.

The Value of All Emotions, Including Negative Ones

All of our emotions, even those we consider negative and we hate, are part of the precious and complex tapestry that makes up the rest of our lives.

We couldn't know joy without sadness, or confidence without experiencing doubt, since emotions are defined by their opposites.

Furthermore, our emotions alert us to what is happening around us and offer very important clues about how we should respond to situations.

This is why we can and should learn from all of our emotions, seeing them as messengers rather than enemies to be suppressed at all costs.

The Problem with Emotional Dysregulation

The real problem is not the existence of negative emotions, but what happens inside us when we are unaware of them and their impact.

When we are unaware, we allow our emotions to completely overwhelm us, leading us to a state of emotional dysregulation that is very damaging.

In this state, it is our emotions that begin to control us us, instead of us being the ones in control of how we feel.

This loss of control prevents us from being able to respond to challenges in a constructive way, leaving us at the mercy of impulsive and often destructive reactions.