Pathways to Emotional Resilience

By: Eva Jahn, LPC

Today I want to talk to you about emotional resilience, both through the lens of personal grounding and collective support. I think we can all agree that we are living in a time where crises not just happen here and there but are instead overlapping and compounding. We see climate emergencies, political polarization, economic instability, ecological loss, technological acceleration, and so much more and for many of us, it feels like everything is happening everywhere, all at once, with no time to metabolize one wave before the next arrives.

So our nervous system doesn’t get the same pause, the same break to reset. 

And, if we want to respond coherently. If we want to show up for our families, our communities, and our work, we need emotional resilience that is both internal and relational.

In our Thicket course we offer two pathways to emotional resilience. One we may call “internal capacity" and the other “relational/collective capacity.”

Internal Capacity is the resilience we build in our own bodies and nervous systems. It develops through practices that help us regulate, ground, and widen our window of tolerance. Those can include 1) Grounding and orienting 2) Vagal nurturing (gentle tone of voice, touch, rhythmic movement:practices that awaken the ventral vagal system), 3) Breathwork 4) Finding our feet (somatic anchoring through contact with the earth) 5) Movement that restores flow rather than performance
These practices can help us down-shift from survival mode into a more flexible, relational state. They create the inner spaciousness necessary to hold grief, uncertainty, and complexity without collapsing into overwhelm.

Relational/Collective capacity is just as important and it speaks to the resilience that emerges between us. Our nervous systems are designed for co-regulation which is the process through which one person’s regulated, grounded presence helps another person’s nervous system settle and orient. According to Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011), humans rely on the ventral vagal system (part of the parasympathetic nervous system) to signal safety, connection, curiosity, and openness. When we are with a regulated other, their tone of voice, facial expression, cadence of breath, and micro-movements communicate safety cues to us and our own neural circuits literally shift in response. We borrow their regulation until our system can remember how to regulate itself.

This is why isolation amplifies distress and why healing happens in relationship.

As Western individualistic cultures often prioritize solitary self-soothing practices, collectivist cultures tend to regulate distress through community involvement, shared rituals, storytelling, and relational presence. And the emotional burden is not held alone but is distributed across kin, clan, or tribe.

This matters because it widens what “resilience” means.
Resilience is not only how I regulate, but also how we regulate together.

And this is where Indigenous teachings become essential, not as aesthetic inspiration, but as long practiced epistemologies that reorient us toward relationship, reciprocity, and collective continuance (Whyte, 2017).

When we think about co-regulation and expanding our relational capacities, we should not forget the grounding and connection that comes from co-regulation with the more-than-human world. Kin relationality is a worldview in which relationships of care and responsibility extend beyond humans to include land, waters, plants, animals, ancestors, and future generations. (Celidwen, Y., & Keltner, D. (2023)

In this perspective, well-being is never an individual pursuit, it is something generated through right relationship with the entire living world.

Kin relationality shifts the question from:

“How do I stay resilient?”
to
“How do we (human and more-than-human) support each other to endure, repair, and continue?”

This is the opposite of the hyper-individualized model of emotional toughness.
It is a relational, ecological model of resilience.

A participant’s reflection from our Thicket Training beautifully illustrates this:

“As I was leaving breakfast… I felt a magnetic pull towards the lake and the foothills… I introduced myself to the land: my name, my ancestors, my intention. As I walked, I followed the pull to various plants, stumps, trees, waves, clouds and ridgelines… Some of the times I felt a pull and an invitation, I asked if I could take a photo. The response I often got was one of delight… Grateful to be part of the whole. Grateful for calm and a flexible nervous system, allowing space to take in the good.”

This is emotional resilience in action where we regulate through relationship with place, land, and the more-than-human world.

The Dialogue Practice is part of Thicket’s nature journeys and it intends to help people shift from dominance to reciprocity, from isolation to belonging, from disembodiment to participation. It supports the nervous system not just through grounding, but through kinning and remembering that we are part of a larger web of care.

To summarize, let’s remember that emotional resilience is not a trait.

It is a practice and one that must be cultivated across multiple layers of our experiences that include: 1) Regulation through Breath and Body 2) Co-regulation with people and 3) Co-regulation and kinning with the more-than-human world. 

When we practice all three, the internal, the relational, and the ecological, we become more able to stay with big feelings without shutting down, navigate the polycrisis with steadiness and participate in collective resilience and repair. 

Want to learn more about cultivating Emotional Resilience, check out our Thicket Training program.
Learn More about Eva Jahn.

References: 

Porges, S. W. (2021). Polyvagal safety: Attachment, communication, and self-regulation.WW Norton. 

Whyte, K. P. (2017). Indigenous climate change studies: Indigenizing futures, decolonizing the Anthropocene. English Language Notes, 55(1–2), 153–162.

Celidwen, Y., & Keltner, D. (2023). Kin relationality and ecological belonging: A cultural psychology of Indigenous transcendence. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 994508.