Navigating Major Life Transitions: Tips for Emotional Resilience

Written By: Brooke Pollard, RSW, RP-Q (OCSWSSW, CRPO)

Tugade and Fredrickson (2011) describe emotional and psychological resilience as a concept using a metaphor illustrating wrought iron compared to cast iron due to its “soft,” “malleable,” and non-breakable structure, indicating its resilient compounding nature. Tugade and Fredrickson’s (2011) depiction of resilience can be applied to our discussion of navigating significant life transitions by visualizing how wrought iron adapts to heat and pressure, such as adversity, stress, or hardship, by bending but never truly breaking. Life events or transitions are a spectrum of fundamentally changing circumstances indicating an individual’s new or evolving status that cab provide long-lasting or short-term changes to the “fabric of daily life” (Bühler et al., 2024; Shi & Brown, 2018, p.1). For example, this can include but is not limited to experiencing divorce, entering into a new relationship, marriage, changing careers, removing or limiting substance use, separation from friends, family, or intimate partnerships, graduation, expanding your family, blending families, retirement, moving homes, moving back into your parent’s house as an adult, or becoming houseless (Bühler et al., 2024). Similarly to resilience, many ways a person can experience a life transition, including depth and frequency, are not biased. 

Shi and Brown (2021) offer insight and a more unconventional perspective on understanding how experiencing change, including life transitions, impacts one’s capacity to maintain resilience. This consists of conducting a self-exploration of one’s life script, or in other words, one’s lifeline (Shi & Brown, 2021). Consider the following: What are some major life events or transitions? Can you identify all of them, including the ones that are outside the realms of Eurocentric social norms? What is your cultural life script or lifeline? Try listing these events in order from drawing a lifeline on a piece of paper, while focusing on events that influenced the most impactful internal and external change. As you think, reflect, write, and draw, imagine how these life transitions, including cultural transitions, have shaped who, how you present, and where you are today (people, places, etc.). Take this time to reflect on your resilience, which has led you to today, including moments when you bent out of fear, compliance, bravery, or from feeling stuck without entirely breaking. This is to visualize the times of change where you adapted and persevered regardless of experiencing relatively negative or unsettling emotions or life transitions. 

Reflection on the times of one’s personal resilience aims to solidify what you already know about yourself. While resilience is a recognizable strength, experiencing life transitions, those in or outside one’s control, is also an element of life where a person relinquishes control, making some elements and circumstances of change seem too overwhelming. Where do I go from here? How do I know I am making the best decision for me (or others)? The unfortunate and beautiful reality is that individuals need to experience change and adversity to develop exposure and life experience to guide their next steps toward self-prosperity, regardless of how challenging it might seem. For instance, living with people criticizing you may help enhance the perspective that you no longer wish to live in a critical home environment. To use a metaphor, perhaps you have outgrown or realize that you can no longer flourish in the pot that you have settled in, and now it is time to transition into a bigger pot (change in the face of change) or a different spot in the living environment with more sunlight (adapt). 

Claney (2024) emphasizes the importance of cultivating emotional resilience internally to better cope with or “bounce back” from adverse and challenging encounters and or experiences. Unfortunately, when advice similar to this is provided, it often does not include actionable steps to answer the question, “Okay, but how exactly can I achieve this at its fullest capacity?” Claney (2024) recommends creating space for emotions (taking the time to acknowledge what emotion is coming up for you without dismissing or minimizing them to practice emotional regulation, such as allowing yourself to cry when in an appropriate and safe space), promoting a growth mindset (praising or acknowledging your effort, including your failures and successes, by telling yourself, for instance, “I am proud of what you did today” and or “I may not know the answer now, but with careful thought, I can find a way out of this problem”), establishing consistency and routine to help navigate through or prepare for difficult transitions (planning for bodily movement or physical exercise three to four days a week for 30 minutes or establishing a morning ritual), and, lastly, promoting personal, interpersonal, and social connection in relationships that fill your cup (sharing with trusted and trusting friends or family members or writing in a journal as forms of self-care) (Claney, 2024). From reading this, ask yourself empathetically and without judgment, “Am I emotionally resilient or generally resilient?” 

It is critical to note the life transitions that are more difficult to make sense of, such as losing a friend, becoming widowed, or experiencing the loss of a parent (Bühler et al., 2024; Shi & Brown, 2021). The above coping and actionable strategies can be implemented to help foster increased emotional resilience in the face of grief and other difficult life transitions to help prevent and recover from moments of experiencing failure to cope or complex internal restlessness. This also helps prevent, mediate, and address common adverse symptoms from experiencing major life events or from lack of use of appropriate coping strategies regarding past life transitions today, such as hopelessness, from exacerbating, leading to a more balanced life and working toward self-sovereignty and healing (Lee et al., 2018; Shi & Brown, 2018).  

References  

Bühler, J. L., Orth, U., Bleidorn, W., Weber, E., Kretzschmar, A., Scheling, L., & Hopwood, C. J. (2024). Life events and personality change: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Journal of Personality, 38(3), 544-568. https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070231190219

Claney, C. (September 13, 2024). Building emotional resilience in kids as they head back to school. Relational Psychology. https://www.relationalpsych.group/articles/building-emotional-resilience-in-kids-as-they-head-back-to-school#:~:text=A%20growth%20mindset%E2%80%94the%20belief%20that%20abilities%20and,them%20approach%20difficulties%20with%20optimism%20and%20perseverance.

Lee, S. W., Bae, G. Y., Rim, H., Lee, S. J., Chang, S. M., Kim, B., & Seunghee, W. (2018). Mediating effect of resilience on the association of emotional neglect and depressive symptoms. Psychiatry Investigation, 15(1), 62-69. https://doi.org/10.4306/pi.2018.15.1.62

Shi, L., & Brown, N. R. (2021). Beliefs about transitional events: The effect of experience and life-script consistency. Frontier Psychology,12,1-13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.727524

Tugade, M. M., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2011). Resilient individuals use positive emotions to bounce back from negative emotional experiences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(2), 320-333. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.86.2.320