Emotional resiliance, the causes, and the effect upon your behavior.

[colditz]

Some people are more emotionally fragile than others ... are devastated for weeks by a gang of teenagers shouting something at them. Others would just think 'Twats' and move on. Others would shout obscenities back, and fume for days ... and still others wouldn't even notice.

Why is this? What causes these huge gulfs between people's personalities? How can we raise our children to be resiliant? How can we become more resiliant ourselves?

Ooh, I will be back to post copiously on this when ds1 is not stealing my books and destroying the flat. (so at some point after 9pm tonight )

Excellent question - will look at replies with interest.

Sounds like an essay question - this is a huge thing and a big debate within psychology.

Part of it boils down to the nature/nuture debate. Are we born happy/resilient or are we made that way by the way we are brought up? I would say it was a mixture but would tend to say that nurture has a much bigger effect that nature.

If you are emotionally fragile yourself, is it possible to raise emotionally resilient children or are they doomed to walk in your timorous footsteps?

I think it is possible. I am reminded of A Child of Our Time where there was a woman who set out from the beginning to make sure her son was much more confident and outgoing that she was and he is. However, is that the way he would have been regardless or is that because she made an effort to make sure he got involved in things and wasn't frightened of anything?

Niecie, I always think of that woman too.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that we learn a lot of these 'coping techniques' from our parents or other adults who played a part in our upbringing.

I think it's often why we think depression runs in families - it's not necessarily genetic but because you don't learn how to deal with what life throws at you if you're learning from a parent who is permanently depressed.

This is just my opinion by the way.

Good question!

I think it is most probably wrapped up with how much self esteem a particular person has. If someone has a high degree of self worth, then it is more likely they will see the name caller as outrageously wrong, rather than there being any truth in what they have said. For those low in self esteem, they will worry endlessly about whether what they said was true or whether they deserved to be shouted at etc.

I wonder whether much of this comes down to subtle differences in parenting. If we take an example of someone shouting out to a child 'hey fatty, how many pies have you eaten today' the parent with the child could respond in a variety of different ways. Perhaps the extremes are a) parent pretends not to hear, even although the child knows they did - child thinks 'oh god' it is true even my parent thinks so' b) parent might laugh and say 'isn't that the most ridiculous thing to say, you are a picture of health and beauty'. How the parent responds will probably shape the child's view of themselves.

If this continues throughout childhood, it is not at all surprising that the child grows to an adult with differing emotional responses to different things. Of course you do get children who have lived with put downs all their lives who grow up to be wonderfully assertive, carefree people - but these are probably the exception rather than the rule.

It is also worth considering whether the emotionally fragile person is getting something out of being emotionally fragile - it can actually be a form of incredibly controlling behaviour. Looking at another example - if a partner has to go away on business for a week, the emotionally fragile person might be totally crushed by this. However, that person is controlling the life of their partner, keeping their environment as they want it to be. Manipulating those around them to make the choices that the emotionally fragile person 'needs' to keep functioning.

So, in answer to your excellent question - it is very complex

I think in a way that is a postive thing because it means that you can get over anything if you get therapy or you learn coping strategies. It isn't written in your genes that you will have to be a certain way and there is nothing you can do about. You can learn new ways of behaving.

My baby is too young to judge but i have friends who insist that their child's character was evident by a couple of weeks. Maybe they imposed the character they assumed? I don't know, just wondering aloud. A sense of humour goes a long way. I think humour can be taught by demonstration along the lines of foxinsocks. Again, just pondering. Resiliance often looks like confidence...Sometimes confident people are secretly insecure and frazzled.. i'll stop now.

can't stop, nicely said soap box. I'll lie awake and ponder my level of self esteem/worth...

I wonder about this too, I think that every person has their dispostion chosen genetically but how they cope with it is a skill found through life, if you see the cup as half empty it'll always be half empty but it's how you deal with it that makes the difference.

Its how your brought up. My parents were/are negative, nervous, people with not an ounce of confidence. Their parents were the same and me and my sister are.

When we were growing up my parents always made me and my sister feel that we were not good enough to achieve anything. They never encouraged us to do well in academics or sports - we weren't good enough, only other peoples kids were .

I resent my parents for the way we were brought up, my mother especially. They did nothing with us either.

I am trying to break this cycle of negativity & encourage my DC's to be positive, independent, sociable people plus DH and I do loads of stuff with them.

Hmmm. Food for thought here.

What about when one parent is confident and jolly, and the other parent is a withdrawn depressive?

And anyone with more than one child has experienced the horror when you realise that your second child is not a chance to get it right 'now you know what you are doing', merely a chance to learn, first time round, about a different child!

Do children exposed to a lot of 'events' become more resilient, and learn how to cope, or does it depend how their own parents cope .. and which parents they are watching? Similarly, do sheltered children not learn to cope at all, in either a 'good' or a 'bad' way?

Is bursting into tears actually a fairly effective coping mechanism in an environment where it would cause the stressor to cease and sympathy to poured on, but in an environment where is would receive scorn, is it a sign of not coping (that one has been driven to cry despite scorn)?

Is emotional resilience always a good thing though. If your reaction to witnessing an assault is to shrug your shoulders and think 'oh well', is that better than being upset enough to do something about it. Or even than simply being upset. Is there not a risk that emotional resilience is another word for callousness?

no, I don't mean that you would shrug your shoulders and walk off, that is a lack of empathy, not emotional resilience. But, having done whatever you felt able to do at the time, emotional resilience is being able to leave the day's events in that day, and not be tortured by it for the next 10 years.

IMHO

Great thread colditz

I agree you can be emotionally resilient but still be sensitive and empathetic.

colditz - people are born more or less resilient/robust, of that I am sure. I think nurture plays a role but is much less important than nature.

Colditz - I think nature is more important than nurture. Otherwise, how could you possibly explain such huge differences between siblings. I think nurture is say 30% influence, nature 60% and position in the family 10%.

A lot of people who have idyllic, happy, loving childhoods are poor at dealing with anything going wrong in their adult lives. And they can sometimes lack empathy.

Swedes - I agree, it is the difference between siblings that makes me think that nature is more important than nurture.

My elder stepson is just like his mother who is just like her mother - totally impervious to the feelings of others - which is a different character trait to resilience, but in that family very obviously hereditary.

I read a really interesting book a while back by Oliver James called 'They f@*k you up: How to Survive Family Life'

I was of the opinion that how your are is probably 50:50 nature/nuture but he put forward a very convincing argument that nature has very little to do with it. You are affected by the environment from the moment of your conception. Nobody can experience things in exactly the same way you do even if you are, for example, identical twins. I think that may be why birth order can have such a predictable effect on people. If it were down to genes families would take after each other but so often, 1st borns are the responsible, sensible high achievers, last borns are the rebels (over-simplifed I know but you get the idea). This has nothing to do with genes and more to do with how people react to us.

Whilst I would not be so sure that everything could be governed by I would put it 75:25 to nuture.

Dh has a photograph of his four children when they were younger. You can tell their characters from their expressions.

DD1 - unsmiling, determined, driven.
DS1 - Scowling and looking throughly pissed off.
DD2 - Playing the fool.
DS2 - Nonchalantly bored.

Without exception, this exactly describes their main character traits as adolescents/young adults.

So, I think nature pips nurture - and emotional resilience, up to a point, could perhaps be inborn.

That said, when I was younger I was more 'fragile' than I am now. That's now to say I was very fragile ... but it's all relative.

Nowadays I'm as resilient as a concrete bunker, so life's experience obviously has something to do with it.

Niecie - I know this argument goes round and round.

Having stepsons, and more particularly stepsons of another culture and religion, has been a real eye-opener for me, because living in such close proximity with children with whom I share neither genes nor culture (and am not therefore inoculated against/blind to) it is relatively easy to dissect where their behaviours emanate from.

And, gosh, does nature play a part . The elder one is totally impervious to the feelings of others and has, as a consequence, zero sense of humour and the younger one is a much more sensitive soul - who suffers greatly at the hands of his brother and mother (same character) but is actually much kinder and funnier. They were born like it - nature made them.

Anna - Isn't having zero sense of humour an unavoidable consequence of being French?