Exercise workouts are great for the body. If you’ve worked out for any length of time you’ve experienced the benefits of resistance training. This is where an exercise causes the muscles to contract against an external resistance, which overtime, increases your strength, tone or endurance. The entire point of training your body during exercise is to progressively overload your muscles. You might start out with 10 repetitions using a weight, but you’ll want to increase the reps overtime in order to build endurance and the muscle size you desire.
There’s another type of exercise that builds resistance in our emotional training, it is called conflict. When a person is introduced to a conflict whether it be failing at test, a relationship break up, or a job loss, moving through that difficulty and surviving actually strengthens the individual. This surviving isn’t necessarily easy. It doesn’t come all at once. You grieve, deny, and get angry, but eventually the process allows you to accept and grow through the event.
This all works great unless the person introduces something that gets in the way of the emotional workout. When a substance like alcohol, food, drugs, or other addictions are used as a substitute to get you through the moment, they hamper the strengthening of coping skills that are needed to move forward in life. Addictions don’t allow a person to grow through the difficult experience. What’s worse, you are left even more vulnerable the next time a life event comes around. You have rendered yourself emotionally weakened to handle conflict. When addictions take the place of the work needed to grow strong, many of life’s regular difficulties can prove to be too much for the emotionally weak individual.
-LT
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