Taming your Dragon: The Path to Resilience

Image by Mark Frost from Pixaby

By Drs. Amanda Matejicek & Tatijana Busic

As you live and work through the challenges and disruption of this 21st century, do you find yourself really tired? Struggling with motivation or creativity? If so, welcome the human club. Your experience may be related to low grade, or small “t” trauma.

Trauma is defined as “a deeply disturbing event that infringes upon an individual’s sense of control and may reduce their capacity to integrate the situation or circumstances into their current reality” (Psychology Today).

Chronic stress and disruption have impacted human beings globally, in varying degrees and ways.  Common trauma experiences include: significant employment changes- loss of employment, significant decrease in work, or massive increases in work demands – restriction of social liberties, constraints on family and social relationships, amplification of tensions at home – whether due to isolation or spending too much time with the same people.  

Whatever direction we look to, we see that virtually every human system is strained and challenged right now.

How we recovery from this trauma is a great unknown. We won’t fully be able to evaluate our personal recovery for months, perhaps years post- pandemic. Some people will experience debilitating levels of anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), others will experience less severe, yet impactful levels of disquietude or dissatisfaction with life, yet others will come through this experience thriving, transformed, or evolved.

There’s good news! As individuals and communities, we have some say and power in our post-traumatic recovery and growth.

As humans we’re wired to survive. It’s in our core. It’s instinctual. To access it, let’s shift our attention to a fundamental component of resilience: our emotional and rational brain. How these two systems work within and with each other, helps to determine the fate of the path forward.

There’s one barrier though. Our instincts and primal emotions can sometimes be a little rigid and compulsive and often over-focus on avoiding threat. This pattern of thinking kindles the human  defense system and a strong bias toward experiencing more negative emotions.

Let us explain.

When we’re defensive, it’s easier to experience fear, despair, discouragement and we’re quicker to interpret events negatively. This is because our emotional system is primitive, instinctive, and immediate. Like a dragon, it is vigilant, powerful, and wise. It has only one goal, to keep you alive. We need to learn to tame this dragon, to harness its power and direct it towards the goal of thriving – not just surviving.

Taming our powerful dragon, requires rational thinking. Now, imagine a rider on the back of that dragon. That rider is your rational brain. The analytic, strategic thinker who wants to guide the Dragon toward the desired path. To do this we need our Rider to learn the Dragon’s language, the language of emotion and instinct. The quality of the communication and relationship between the Rider and the Dragon will determine our survival and growth.

Taming your Dragon Part 1: Learning the Language of Emotion and Instinct

How do we begin to tame the dragon?

As paramount first step is to speak our Dragon’s language. Learning how to identify and name human emotions will help us understand what the powerful Dragon is feeling and needing.

The secret ingredient – Radical Awareness – a clear, non-judgemental picture of what is going on.

Identify the Emotion

Your body is your gateway to emotion. Feelings are located in your body and are personally experienced states of physical arousal (heart rate, tightness in chest, sweaty palms etc.). These states of arousal are the result of our subconscious experience and interpretation of information from your senses.

To begin to identify the emotion you are experiencing, you need to first notice the sensations you feel in your body. Some pointers:

sadness often shows up as pain or hollowness in the chest or gut;

love is experienced as warmth and calm throughout the torso and upper body;

anxiety is felt as tightening of the chest and fast paced breathing and heartbeat.

Identifying the sensations can help us in regulating our emotions by giving us a point of focus so that we can act to change our physiological state.

Naming the Emotion

As Dr. Daniel Siegle says you have to “name it to tame it!” This means that in order to understand and work with emotion, we have to name it first. In naming our emotions we have to go beyond the usual terms like angry or good. We have to get more descriptive like outraged, worried, hopeful or joyful. Once we can accurately name our emotions, we can then find out what they mean or signal for us.

Naming is important because it’s the first point of contact between the Rider and the Dragon. The thinking Rider connects with the Dragon by being able to say “you feel… “

Understand the Message

Emotions manifest as physiological reactions and have a purpose. As we said, the role of the Dragon is to keep us alive, and each emotion is a signal about what’s happening and what we need. We need to learn to understand the message the Dragon is giving us. To do this, identify what happened to prompt the emotion? What was the precipitating event or thought that activated your emotional system? What does this mean? For example:

I’m feeling frustrated – Why? What is being frustrated?

I’m frustrated because I’m trying to achieve a goal and I’m being blocked

Find out what the Emotion Needs

Once we’ve identified what the Dragon is experiencing, the Rider has to find out what the Dragon needs. Emotions are signals of needs. When you find out what the need is, you begin shifting the emotional energy. For example,

Anger – needs space and boundaries

Anxiety – needs clarity

Fear – needs safety

When you’re frustrated, ask your Dragon, “What do you need? (Some support? A break?)”

When you’re frustrated ask yourself, “Why? (I’m not getting it and I want to!)”

Identifying the needs of the emotion is the first and most important clue for the Rider to understand what to do to help work with/through/around the emotion and shift the energy of the Dragon.  Getting the need wrong can have unintended negative consequences. Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve been really angry, like tear someone apart angry, and someone has wanted to come in and give you a hug or wanted to rationalize with you? What was that like? Chances are, at the very least it did nothing to calm you down, and more likely it actually made you angrier. That’s because anger needs space, and it needs to have boundaries restored. It needs to be acknowledged and then given room to breathe before the energy dissipates enough to let rational thinking come online.

Being able to accurately identity our emotional needs gives us the necessary tools to effectively regulate our emotions and make values-based choices, rather than emotion-driven choices.

In our next blog, Taming the Dragon Part 2: Shifting the Energy of Emotion we will explore how to effectively redirect the energy of the Dragon and harness emotional data for greater resilience.