Building Emotional Resilience Through Understanding Trauma, Stress and Self-Worth
Emotional resilience is our ability to withstand stressful situations.
Understanding how to build emotional resilience has been a huge part of my healing journey, and what I’ve learnt along the way is what I want to share with you today.
I love to write about the different aspects of the ego and the soul, which really play into our emotional resilience. Often, it’s our ego, which is designed to limit our consciousness, that can’t handle stressful situations. It is our soul that carries more of the resilience, due to its eternal nature and unlimited lives that it’s most likely experienced.
So, when we talk about emotional resilience, we really want to be looking into the ego programming that blocks our ability to respond, rather than react, to stressful situations.
If we have an experience where we feel panicked, overwhelmed and stressed, it’s usually a sign that we need to build our resilience so that we can feel more in command of the situation, rather than out of control.
Our soul always knows the truth of the matter: that we are safe, that we are eternal, and that we are loved. Yet there are other parts of us that do not embody these truths, leading to fear, stress and an inability to navigate through the situations that we find so testing.
The role of trauma in our ability to handle stressful situations
A huge part of our ability to withstand stressful situations comes from the trauma that we’ve experienced in our lifetime.
When we think of the word ‘trauma’ we often don’t think it applies to our lives. It feels too heavy, too serious. Yet, if we’ve experienced a distressing, frightening or stressful event in our lives, then we too have experienced trauma.
Trauma is not a label that we need to use to describe who we are. Instead, trauma is a part of the human experience, and we all have varying degrees of trauma in our lives. It is not comparable, for one person’s experience is vastly different from another's.
One of the key reasons why we may struggle to handle stress in our lives is that we’ve experienced trauma that hasn’t yet been cleared. Or perhaps it was a long time ago, but the memory of the event still echoes within us, even though perhaps we’ve done healing work on it.
Like everything, trauma has layers, and they need to be cleared and released, which is exactly what I do in Divine Healing sessions. If not, we often find that we can overreact to situations due to the threat and fear that still resonates within us.
A good example of this is when I worked for someone for almost four years as a personal assistant. At that time, I had two phones, and she used to call me up and email me throughout the day asking for updates and asking questions. That doesn’t sound too stressful in itself, but at the time I had a real lack of boundaries in that role. I lived in fear and was pushed to the point of burnout.
This trauma has lingered in me so much that I feel a tingle of fear in my solar plexus every time I get an email or a phone call. I have this deeply rooted belief that I’ll be in trouble or that I’ve done something wrong.
If there’s an area of your life where you struggle to calmly respond, and instead go into a state of stress, panic and overwhelm, then there may be some deeply rooted trauma that needs your love and attention so that you can clear it and move forwards in that area of your life.
How our nervous system contributes to stress
Another core reason why we can struggle to respond calmly to stressful situations is that our nervous system is stuck in the fight-or-flight response, meaning that it is wired for attack, rather than settled in its natural parasympathetic state of calm.
We live in a world that causes chaos to our nervous system, especially if you’re highly sensitive, empathetic and feel things deeply. I have very strong 8-8 energy in my Soul Contract, which means that I can feel things very deeply and can soak in everything around me like a sponge - even when I really don’t want to do that!
It is an overstimulating and overwhelming reality at times, especially when we live in built-up areas and spend the majority of our time online. There is so much information, constantly accessible at our fingertips, that it can be a real struggle to learn how to switch off, slow down and calm ourselves.
Landing in the stress state of fight or flight is very easy to do - it could come from reading the news and seeing all the terrible events and goings-on that feel threatening to you and your family. It could come from running to catch your bus, missing it, and knowing you’ll be late for an important meeting.
It could also come from an argument with a family member, or even witnessing an argument on the street that has nothing to do with you. It could even come from not drinking enough water or eating certain foods that don’t agree with your digestive system.
Anything that your body deems a threat will stimulate your nervous system to go into a sympathetic state. When this happens, we aren’t so capable of rational thinking. Instead of responding to situations. Instead, we react from a state of threat and fear, no matter how small.
The self-worth wound that creates fear and stress
The last, but still very important, reason as to why we struggle with emotional resilience is due to how we feel about ourselves.
We all have a major emotional wound - something that feels very painful for us. It may be around abandonment, worthiness or safety; it’s different for all of us. Whatever it is, it can flare up and feel very painful when it’s tested.
When we experience a stressful situation in our life, it can trigger this deeper-rooted emotional wound within us. For me, I am always working on my self-worth and how to feel deserving of good in my life, and so when there’s a situation that tests my self-worth, I can react with extreme panic and fear.
A good example of this is when a client, many years ago now, questioned me right when I had first opened my Kinesiology practice. I was a new practitioner, bambi-legged and still finding my feet with this very new work. I hadn’t yet gained experience or confidence but was doing my best.
A woman came to see me based on a recommendation. I could tell she was stressed, angry and fearful, which came off as brashness and a hard edge. After the first session, she emailed me asking questions about the treatment that felt accusatory, demanding and attacking, and this continued for several more sessions.
This felt so deeply wounding to me that I just didn’t know how to handle it. On top of this, with my fear of emails and the belief of doing something wrong that I mentioned earlier, I went into meltdown. It felt like an attack on my worth, and I couldn’t rationally respond to the situation.
Luckily, I had support to handle the client, and I managed to communicate with her and stop working with her.
This is just one example of how a situation that doesn’t need to be stressful can feel so deeply overwhelming for us. I have another client who has a similar issue with technology - if something goes wrong, she goes into a panic instead of calmly working through it or seeing help.
How to build emotional resilience
The most important thing here is to have compassion for ourselves and all of these wounds that we carry within us. We are not superhuman, and it’s okay to not always manage to handle stressful situations. What we can do, however, is to gently and consistently build our emotional resilience so we can pull ourselves out of a state of stress and into a one of calm.
Some of the ways in which I am building mine is through understanding where my challenges are so I can confront them head on. Through knowing my Soul Contract I have a deep awareness of where my wounds are around confidence, boundaries and self-worth. This enables me to have more compassion for myself when I’m in a challenging situation that I find stressful, because I understand myself on this much deeper level.
I also recognise that there are certain things that I personally need to do to in order to build my own emotional resilience. These include spending time in nature, eating well, regular healing practices to uncover hidden trauma, daily walks, spending time with people who soothe my nervous system and doing the things that bring me joy.
If you’d like further support to build emotional resilience in your life, explore my monthly healing membership Your Divine Alchemy, or stay in touch for similar posts through my newsletter by signing up here and also receive a set of daily reminders to support you as you build your emotional resiliency.