What it is:
Emotional resiliency is a skillset that allows us to navigate both new and ongoing stressful situations in ways that both match our values and do not result in significant emotional exhaustion, numbing, or burn-out. It involves understanding our emotional experience, learning to soothe and heal our emotional pain, and developing healthy protective mechanisms to reduce the impact of ongoing stressors on our mental health. We like to say emotional resiliency is our ability to run emotional marathons in healthy ways.
While some folks find these skillsets quite intuitive and natural, most of us do not. For this reason, many of us need help learning how to navigate ongoing stressors without either avoiding or collapsing under stressors.
What It Can Help With:
- Burn-Out, including
- Professional Burn-Out
- Relational Burn-Out
- Caregiver Burn-Out
- Shame
- Low to Moderate Mood Concerns
- Low to Moderate Emotional Over-control
- Navigating life as a Highly Sensitive Person
Skills You Would Learn:
- All about your emotions! You will learn how to recognize, understand, and communicate your emotions effectively.
- How to restore your emotional bandwidth. When navigating ongoing stressors in life, it is important to learn those individualized habits or activities that help restore you. We encourage a decrease of short-term strategies (technology, alcohol, avoidance) and an increase in long-term restoration (soothing your nervous system, building connection, finding joy, and taking time to be still).
- How to change unhelpful habits and patterns. We come by our patterns and habits honestly. They probably worked for us at some point in our lives! However, decreased resiliency is often a sign that what worked before is no longer working for us. We can help identify unhelpful or old patterns and begin to build new, more effective, and sustainable habits.
- How to set and hold boundaries with others. So much of resiliency involves knowing our own brains, bodies, and personal limits and then communicating this to others. This is easier said than done for those of us who hate to disappoint others, were trained to take on more than our share, or who get reinforced for having no boundaries. The resiliency program helps find a balance between honoring your own values and limits (by setting limits or boundaries) while keeping close connections with others.
Therapeutic Components:
- Structure: Emotional Resiliency (ER) treatment is a semi-structured and skills-oriented type of talk therapy. Your resiliency is an individualized skillset, so this means that we need to spend time understanding who you are, what matters to you, and what led you to this point. We also believe that it is important not only to talk about what got you here, but give you concrete skills to do something different. For that reason, the treatment has a skills focus and asks you to practice new ways to approach your emotions, communicate with others, or create new habits.
- Theory: Emotional Resiliency treatment is anchored in a blend of the so-called “third wave” cognitive-behavioral therapies, which include CBT, DBT, ACT, and mindfulness interventions. The theory is anchored in the idea that we do not engage with our emotions effectively when we do not recognize them or have skills to address them.
- Intervention: Emotional Resiliency interventions involve teaching skills to help you better identify and communicate your emotions, as well as learn to both accept and change them, depending on your goals or values. It involves significant skills practice, both during and between sessions.
- Modalities: The TAP clinic currently offers multiple resiliency programs depending on your particular concern. If you are experiencing burn-out in specific areas, you may be most appropriate for our Professional Resiliency, Relational Resiliency, or Caregiver Resiliency programs. These programs involve individual therapy with a burn-out specialist.
- If you are someone experiencing difficulties across multiple resilience areas, you may be referred to our Emotional Resiliency (ER) group, which is a skills group aimed at getting you particular resiliency skills more quickly and with the support of other folks that are also working on their resiliency.
Specialty Services at TAP:
Our ER program is also offered in group format. Learn more about our ER Group below!