“Emotional fragility makes connection and intimacy difficult at best. Work your emotional resiliency muscles every day with everyone in your life.” ~LMB
Emotional fragility is a pattern of negatively reacting to issues, feedback, and experiences in a way that shuts down communication, blocks growth, and breaks the connection. Often, these reactions are extreme in some form and can show up as an overall feeling of collapse or the opposite pull to blow up. Signs that emotional fragility may be present include:
- Emotional outbursts over minor issues: “Why the hell are there shoes in the middle of the damn floor!”; “STOP HOUNDING ME! I just walked in the door!”
- Emotional collapsing over minor upsets: “Why are you telling me this? You know I’m under so much stress. I can’t take this right now.”; “Fine, so I guess I just suck.”
- Constant defending: “I did not snap at you.”; “I did that because you never listen to me.”; “Do you see all the things you do?! Maybe you should work on that and stop pointing out every little thing you don’t like about me.”
- Feeling the need to walk on eggshells around someone: If you live with someone who is emotionally fragile, you may find yourself holding things or straining to figure out a way to say something to avoid their reaction.
There is a tremendous amount of emotional fragility going on in our world right now that is making healthy, respectful communication extremely difficult. Emotional fragility is not about feeling immense compassion for others’ plight or anger at injustices. The type of emotional fragility that I am talking about is an inability to take in difficult feedback about YOU without blowing up, shutting down, or emotionally shutting down the conversation in some way. In our world, this type of fragility has led many women hesitant, at best, to speak honestly about the behaviors of men, countless political issues being stymied due to the threat of retaliation or violence, and a polarization that has left humanity itself on the sidelines while heavy issues get battered around in a right-or-wrong/we or them tragic stance.
In homes across the world, this emotional fragility keeps:
• Spouses stay silent about their upsets, wants, and needs out of fear that their spouses will collapse or explode when hearing them.
• Parents and children in an unending gridlock of frustration and disconnection at the seemingly impossible ability to calmly and respectfully navigate common disagreements and conflict.
• Friendships on a surface level where the only “okay” form of “support” is agreement and surface-level interactions.
• Companies and teams flailing in unhealthy cultures.
If you struggle to take in feedback, stay grounded, respectful, and calm in difficult conversations, or quickly get emotionally reactive when someone calls you out on your actions, then pay attention to how your emotional reactivity impacts your life. Get the help you need to build your resiliency muscles because not doing so stops you from more than you can imagine.
Challenge: Don’t confuse being “humanity sensitive” with emotional fragility—one keeps you connected, and the other disconnects. You deserve thriving, connected, healthy relationships personally and professionally; invest in yourself enough to do the internal work necessary to create them.
