Five things I learned on the journey to emotional stability.
Mug available in the Good Vibes Wellness Box
Emotionally stability is something most of us strive to obtain. It is the ability to maintain a relatively level emotional state despite changes to our surrounding environment. Emotional stability allows us to effectively move through adversity and the uncertainties of life with a level head and clear vision. It will enable us to experience joy, even in the darkness of times.
“Stressed but blessed” is a phrase you will hear me say often. I developed it on my road to emotional stability because it felt like the most honest answer to “how are you?” My life up to this point has been extremely high maintenance & I am stressed most of the time. Between juggling career, motherhood, family drama, anxiety disorders, and my healing, shit can get hectic. As an adolescent & young adult, I was an emotional mess. I often felt unhinged, experienced many long bouts of depression, health issues caused solely by stress, and many challenges on my road to wholeness. There has been a great deal of personal work on my end to heal from trauma & re-wire my brain to get to the grounded, happy, & healthy individual I am today.
Over the years, I’ve learned to use gratitude as my primary defense. It has helped me gain emotional stability and maintain it as well, hence where the blessed part comes in.
Along my journey, there are a few truths I’ve learned that I think are worth sharing:
1. Emotionally stable people don’t entertain emotionally unstable shit. Birds of a feather flock together. A stable person may attract an emotionally unstable person seeking healing, but emotionally stable people don’t stick around and bask in instability. If you repeatedly find yourself getting sucked into emotional instability or dating emotionally unavailable people, you may want to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself why is this being revealed to me?
2. Stability doesn’t mean there won’t be hard times; it means they won’t unhinge you. Emotionally stability is the product of proper maintenance. It comes not from having the perfect surroundings but from being grounded within. Having emotional stability means being active in one’s self-care and utilizing a variety of tools to employ healthy coping mechanisms during tough times.
3. Emotionally stability is a combination of emotional endurance and healthy coping mechanisms. When I was highly emotionally unstable and trapped in my toxic cycles, I often felt like emotional stability was this elusive thing only people with some detachment superpower possessed. The truth is emotional stability is like anything else; it is the outcome of many good habits. Emotional stability is what happens with consistent holistic self-love & care.
4. Emotional stability is most natural when you are rooted in purpose. “Your vision dictates your discipline.” – Monte Sanders. When you are rooted in purpose, it is harder to be distracted by the constant dramas of life. Having a vision for yourself will make it easier to keep your eye on the prize, especially in trying times. When rooted in purpose, you will be less likely to relinquish control of your emotions to outside forces, making you less of an emotional mirror to the things around you. Your energy will remain steady through the high-stake moments of life, allowing you to stay high functioning.
5. Emotional stability requires effective and timely emotional processing. Effective emotional processing is imperative to emotional stability. To achieve and maintain emotional stability, we must acknowledge our emotions promptly through a lens of compassion. We cannot run from our feelings, nor can we hide from them forever. Feelings we push to the wayside will always find a way to come up. The more we ignore them, the stronger and more invasive they will grow, threatening our emotional stability. The best thing to do when it comes to painful or uncomfortably emotions is to allow ourselves a moment to sit in them. Feeling our feelings and permitting ourselves to experience them for what they are, is the first step to effective processing. By facing our feelings head-on, we can make sense of them. When we recognize these feelings from a compassionate place, we allow ourselves to experience the emotions without holding on to them. In turn, this will enable us to think beyond our immediate feelings and make a tough decision from a rational state of mind.
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