Resilience Begins on the Inside

Emotional illiteracy is a resilience gap.

2 min read

Let’s get one thing straight. No one taught me adulting. Not even by example. My parents were too busy trying to reflect their generational ideal of perfection. They disciplined and cajoled me into behaving, into being invisible, into not being a burden. To perform as theatrically perfect as they were. To put my needs below theirs. To say “I’m fine” when I was falling apart inside.

 

In school, I was taught math, grammar, languages, and civic duty. Nothing about my interior life. I had feelings, but I could not name them, nor understand them, nor communicate them, much less deal with someone else’s feelings. I was invisible. Love was something I needed to chase. 

At home, I was taught that attraction, attachment, dependency and codependency was love. The skill part of love — showing up consistently, tolerating difference, repairing rupture, choosing love every day — nobody taught me that. I wasn’t taught how to love. I was taught how to need.  It took me decades to learn that love isn't what you feel. It's what you practice. 

Outside my home, love was defined by movies and books. The bliss, the tragedy, the beauty, the wreckage. But hardly ever the inner work - the sloshing through your pain and secrets to come out on the other side with eyes wide open and clearly able to identify what  was going on and what your most loving response could be.

I learned to be a fair witness to myself. Not a harsh critic, which had been my default growing up. Not a deluded defender - but an actual fair witness. That was the first step to loving myself. Because what we attract reflects how ready we are to meet ourselves. You can't receive what you haven't given yourself permission to have. The relationship that shapes every other relationship is the one you have with yourself.

I also learned that this process applies to all ages. The young, the middle-aged, the older, the elders. I'm still growing, I'm still learning, I'm still opening my heart and mind to what I don't yet know about myself. I just wish someone had warned me earlier: growing up and growing into yourself are two entirely different things. One is automatic. The other is the work of a lifetime — the most important project you'll ever take on, and one which will define who you are and what you do.

Because here's what nobody tells you: emotional illiteracy is a resilience gap.