Emotional Fragility: Understanding And Strengthening The Ego

Emotional frailty has nothing to do with emotional sensitivity. While we could define the latter as an exceptional quality of the human being, fragility responds above all to the lack of tools to manage our most complex inner states, as well as to the clear difficulty of facing the simplest obstacles of daily life.

First of all, let’s clarify the difference between these two terms with an important fact. Often there are those who manage to normalize their emotional fragility by justifying it with the explanation that it is their way of being, their way of understanding and living life. “I’m a sensitive person and I can’t help it” they usually say as a self-defense mechanism.

We must understand that when a behavior generates only suffering, insecurity and a total inability to control our being, the excuses are not valid, not when what is achieved is unhappiness. Thus, while sensitive people have a broader view of their reality and a way to better connect with their needs and environment, people with emotional frailty have more limited emotional perspectives.

Furthermore, this trait  is often an indicator of some underlying problems : depressive disorders, anxiety, emotional mismanagement, etc. It is therefore worth investigating this dimension further.

Emotional fragility: causes and characteristics

The American College Health Association published an interesting paper on emotional frailty a few years ago. He highlighted an undoubtedly worrying fact: young people are increasingly exposed to depression, stress, emotional dependence and, even worse, suicide attempts. This is due to a clear emotional fragility and a lack of resources to deal with the most common difficulties.

Most of these psychological dimensions have their origins in parenting styles. Families in recent decades are well aware that society increasingly requires development skills. This has led parents to step up efforts to make their children’s education complete from an early age.

They try to put the best resources at their disposal to guide them to success, sometimes forcing them to excel and often reminding them how special they are or have to be. All of this is understandable, but this approach does not take into account several details.

One of the most important is that they are protected from failure, so many of them are unable to tolerate frustration, however small it may be. These children hardly learn to decide on their own, they feel insecure and are very clumsy in managing their emotions. Gradually, they realize that in the eyes of others they are not “that special” and that they do not have the skills, resources and strategies necessary to react to the most common problems.

Let’s now see what are the characteristics of people with emotional fragility.

How do I know if I am emotionally fragile?

In addition to those described, some of the characteristics that we find in people with emotional fragility are:

• Inability to manage and understand emotions such as sadness, anger, disappointment… Their reaction is often oversized.
• Continuous sense of emptiness.
• Feeling overwhelmed by the simplest problems, by disagreements, by any circumstances that are not what you expect or want.
• Inability to manage frustration.
• Difficulty taking control of one’s life, feeling that everything is beyond one’s control.
• Constant problems in social relationships and the perception that everyone around them disappoints them or betrays them.
• Low energy, apathy, constant melancholy.
• Lack of confidence in almost any task, feeling of inefficiency and low self-esteem.
• When things are not what they expect, want or want, they can react with anger or violence.

Strategies for being stronger and growing as emotionally strong people

To understand the process by which we can become emotionally strong people, we can visualize, for example, a porcelain cup. We know it is delicate, we can also see the cracks of some break that has already been treated. But this porcelain cup is anything but fragile, it is a wonderfully unique piece in its shape, its material and its small imperfections.

We can afford the right to be sensitive, but never fragile. We will never cross that line where we let our whole being fragmented by letting our identity, our values ​​and our inner beauty slip away. But how can we do it? How can we get rid of those frailties that limit our happiness?

• The first step is to become aware of our emotional weaknesses, of those gaps that limit us and cause discomfort. A great help in this sense is offered to us by art therapy, a great way to explore thoughts, emotions and knots through colors, canvases and drawings.

• The second step is to take on a sense of responsibility towards us. Fragile people feel victims of their environment, of society, of the people around them. They just react, like a ball being hit against a wall and bouncing back and forth. Instead of reacting, we must act by taking control and establishing a real and courageous sense of responsibility.

• Such a sense of responsibility in turn requires us to put aside our past experiences and change the present. Every change is accompanied by a sense of fear, but if we manage to get around these stones along the path, day after day we will feel more secure, in control of ourselves.

It is clear that this process is not easy, sometimes it requires the help of a good psychologist. Faced with this intrinsic difficulty, let us remember that we always have time to grow emotionally. We shape our porcelain mug to make it unique, strong and beautiful.