Emotional resilience is a good quality to have, most people would agree. Bouncing back means we can risk new behaviours accepting that if anything goes wrong, somehow we will know what to do.
After having written about the four resources that can help increase resilience, I started thinking about the things we do to decrease our resilience. Not that we do it on purpose, I doubt many people walk around thinking about how they are going to damage themselves, yet we can mislead ourselves in believing that certain behaviour would make us stronger or more resilient.
These are the three that I have identified so far:
Self-esteem (vs self-acceptance): most people would want to have a high self-esteem, it seems a panacea for all the things we have not accomplished in life. It is very easy to justify the reluctance to change by labelling someone (or ourselves) as having low self-esteem. I believe that high self-esteem is only an effective resource when it is the result of our actions rather than the precondition for them. Tenacity, persistence and hard work are often more robust methods to feel worthy than any ongoing positive affirmations. While positive affirmations are crucial to developing resilience, but sometimes, we just need to work a bit harder and master a few skills before we can earn esteem.
We can fare much better in life with self-acceptance instead. Accepting that we are vulnerable, make mistakes, fail, regret and get angry with compassion is tuning in to reality and to being human.
Self-reliance (vs self-responsibility): highly celebrated in the West and a result of individualistic values which encourages us to rely on ourselves for almost any need. In some cultures if you ask for help you admit failure and defeat. In reality, we depend on one another in order to survive physically and emotionally, none of us would last very long outside society. Our actions get their meaning from how other people respond to us and vice versa – just think of life without physical touch, a caress, an acknowledgement and without empathy. There are two problems with self-reliance, one is that we often confuse it with self-responsibility. The second problem is that self-reliance is a depleting experience, we feed, as it were, on ourselves, without renewing our resources. It is also a very lonely experience. Of course, we sometimes want to withdraw in order to ‘regroup’ and there is a fine line between this being one of a few strategies and the only strategy. Self-responsibility on the other hand are the actions we take in order to support our needs.
Self-deprecation (vs humility): often disguised as humility. I find this behaviour as the flip side of self-acceptance and self-responsibility. The problem is that when we self-deprecate we get lazy because we let other people decide for us what we are good at and what our limitations are and impose our views on others, we tell them how to perceive us. We also impose our need for acknowledgement without asking for honest connection. We think we are being humble, but often, what we actually do is raise our ‘praise deflectors’ and not allow real and honest feedback. Being humble is not about brushing off our qualities, but about accepting our vulnerability.
Although playing down our qualities may seem endearing, it actually creates a false sense of security. In reality, we miss honest exchange with other people and develop relationships that are not conducive to growth but to dependency and ongoing disappointment.
