Archive for the ‘Emotions’ Category

When one is a child, one lives immersed in the family ambience. For the ones who were lucky, this ambience emanates warm sympathy. Although there might be moments of tension, fights and misunderstanding, family fulfills the basic need of being part of a community; it’s a small group in which one can feel “at home”, where one is known and knows.

Each family has its own characteristic style, which is like a mark of its existence, a style created by its members but certainly mostly imprinted by the parents. Memories of fun time and experiences make the affective richness that nourishes a group from within, and grants it its survival, in spite of the harsh rocks against which relationships are thrown when they fell in the sea of incomprehension.
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It’s funny how simple things can be turned into an expertise skill. That’s give us the degree to which we culturally are as a society, quite underdeveloped.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to deal with emotions. Wait, it doesn’t mean controlling them. You may find easy to do that, having been raised in a rational and puritan-rooted society. Illness and drugs demonstrate how wrong this psychological politics went. Emotions are not beast to be tamed or monsters to be feared. They are inner experiences to be known.

First of all, let’s say that emotions are scandalous. They make a lot of noise and wear strong colors, even the pink of tenderness is intense and unmistakable. Emotions have no diplomacy, hate ambiguity and half words. No cowardice, no hidden faces. Even the emotion of fear comes into the scene full of itself, taking you over, clearly.

Second, emotions don’t tolerate being put aside and disregarded. They demand to be faced. If you pretend and fool around you’ll pay a high price for it. They’ll take you when you less expect, sooner or later, you’ll open up to anything that will bring into your consciousness what you have left behind. Thus to pass the test with emotions you need to be aware of what you feel. Avoid ending up chased by a growing snowball.

Finally, emotions are a language more important to understand than the subjects children learn at school. Emotions talk about you, your body, your spirit, your relations, your thoughts and actions. They are additional tools to relate to the environment and to people in general. Emotions are a bundle of different kinds of information extremely useful to improve your life and self, giving directions and important feedback.

So, the first step into emotional intelligence is recognizing intelligence in the emotions you feel. If you don’t understand them, stop and realize that that’s your limit, your lack of practice and familiarity. You need to learn it, as you learned Math and Grammar. What’s the big deal? That’s what a fine psychotherapy should teach, no shame in it.

In our Cartesian world, stereotyped and superficial, emotions are sought and feared at the same time. We want them because they are the power that runs throughout our days; we fear then because they can mess up our routine, threatening our balance and contradicting our expectations.

The actual cultural paradigm teaches dichotomy and one dimensionality. Dichotomy means separation in divergent directions of two parts considered to be distinct and incompatible. We separate mind from body, reason from emotions. One dimensionality means focusing on one aspect of reality and ourselves. By developing exclusively a view point or a tendency, by emphasizing only one side of things, we become one-dimensional people, having to omit or deny the other parts of ourselves and the reality around us.

Emotions are inner spontaneous movement that pull up to our perception without notice. When we repress their value, we miss their intrinsic truth but keep the agitation in muscle and mind without content. Thus, we feel confused.

To deal with emotions we need to break away from the rationalist one dimensional vision of our modern culture and open up to a different way of communication in order to make the inner dialogue possible.

Emotions are the sound, aromas, noises, whispers and cries from the unconscious part of us, which include the body itself we don’t really know. If you do not tune the ears and open your mind to the dialogue, emotions turn into symptoms and quickly become social and individual diseases.

The dialogue with emotions lays on same ground of the larger dialogue with reality and life circumstances. When times are urgent, the only way is learning while we move on. In this sense, emotions can be our friends, like the dog that leads us out of the darken woods.

Caught in a vicious circle, the envious is left to undermine other person’s life. And she will do so in the most subtle, ambiguous and hidden way. As camouflaged as her real feeling is. … Read on

Envious people never declare what they really feel. Envy is a feeling one is ashamed of. Also the envious cannot recognize the values she sees in the other person, except in a superficial way that means nothing, like noticing that the sky is blue and there is a tree in the park. No value is actually acknowledged, unless is inevitable. … Read on