Immaculate's Reflection: Caring for Our Emotions to Build Resilience

In most cases, as we grew up, we were taught how to take care of our physical bodies. Every

day, almost automatically, we brush our teeth…tidy our hair…take a shower. Or if we scrape our

knee, we wash off and reach for a band-aid. But rarely do we have such easy and automatic

responses to our emotions. We often don’t think of our minds and emotions as needing such

regular care and attention.

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What we might not know is that our minds are just as – or even more – important to maintain.

This is because everything flows out of our minds: how we behave, feel, think, and act all flow

out of how we are doing mentally and emotionally. Even our physical and social health are

greatly affected by our mental and emotional health. That means it is imperative that we create

time to look into how we are doing mentally and emotionally, especially when we go through

difficult experiences. This is extremely important if we are to remain resilient, healthy, and

strong individuals who can overcome setbacks.

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One of the main goals of the Youth First curriculum is to develop emotionally resilient students.

Youth First curriculum topics address students’ emotions, thoughts, and behaviors through

emotional resilience topics such as identifying and regulating emotions, somatic awareness,

benefit finding, character strengths, and more. These give us a formula for emotional check-ins,

processing emotions, and maintaining emotional wellbeing.

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For example, through “Session 7: Identifying Feelings,” students learn to name and define a

wide range of emotions, both positive and difficult. This helps them identify different emotions

they experience during the day and grow self-awareness. The session introduces a visualization

exercise that helps them tune into how they are doing and calm themselves. At the end of the

session, they are given a homework exercise to tune in and reflect on their feelings from the

last week. They learn that these feelings affect how they behave, act, or react. They realize that

when they know what they are feeling, they are more likely to be in charge of their words and

actions.

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In further sessions, students learn how to manage difficult emotions. They talk about difficult

emotions we experience as human beings, like anger, disappointment, worry, stress, fear, and

overwhelm. They share how they react and how they have seen others react when

experiencing these emotions, and reflect on healthy and unhealthy ways of dealing with them.

The session also brings a gender lens to emotional awareness, helping students dissect how

boys and girls are socialized to deal with difficult emotions differently. Coupled with other

sessions related to managing difficult situations and interpersonal conflict, these conversations

are very healthy because they tell the students it’s okay to have these emotions and talk about

them.

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This is important because when we experience difficult situations such as failure, loneliness, or

rejection, we go through difficult emotions. If we don’t take time to tune in and become aware

of our feelings, it could lead to a downward spiral, or have a ripple effect on many aspects of

our lives. For instance, when we experience failure, we can feel dejected, which carries into our

self-talk. We might feel like a failure or like we never do anything well. This creates self-doubt,

which affects how you show up in the world. When we experience rejection, and we don’t tune

into our emotions, we carry the belief that we are unlikeable or not good enough. We ruminate

and replay that scenario again and again, which is detrimental to our health.

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When we are not taking care of our emotions as automatically as we take care of our bodies,

these emotional states can erode our resilience. We need to recognize and address them. We

need to learn how to persevere through adversity, focus on positive things like our strengths

(character strengths), and see difficult experiences as learning points (benefit finding). These

are the coping mechanisms that the Youth First curriculum introduces us to. The program

heavily emphasizes peer support, partner sharing, and creating a safe space so that students

feel comfortable sharing (support systems). It breaks the previous barriers, especially for boys,

where people felt unsafe having these conversations openly. Developing this emotional

resilience impacts all other parts of life: our physical bodies, education, work, and how we

relate to our family, community and society.

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Youth First helps students grow self-esteem and self-efficacy, such that even after difficult

experiences, they can still pick themselves up and keep moving. Challenges will always be there.

The biggest question we should ask ourselves is: how well do we deal with failure and

challenges? Do we take time to emotionally tune in and process? How might our lives change if

we practiced this care for our emotions as regularly and deliberately as we do for our bodies?

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