“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
Khalil Gibran
Are you amazed by other people’s ability to experience feelings, but not get derailed by their emotions?
Do you long for close relationships, but despite your best intentions, they seem difficult to maintain?
Can your emotional state change many times during the day?
When we grow up in households that ignored, squelched or discouraged feelings, not only does it give us the message that we are alone, we also don’t learn emotional intelligence.
Also, people who grew up in emotional, physical, or sexually abusive homes often were never taught emotional regulation or saw good role models for healthy relationships.
Some signs that you need to work on your emotional intelligence, include:
- Getting stressed easily. If you don’t regulate your emotions well, you’re twice as likely to experience anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and thoughts of suicide.
- Difficulty asserting yourself. Lack of emotional intelligence skills often turns into difficulty handling conflict.
- Holding grudges. Holding on to a grudge is your body’s stress response to a perceived danger and going into a fight/flight response. Learning how to let go of a grudge helps you feel better and improves your health and relationships.
- Not letting go of mistakes. Keeping some distance from your mistakes, while learning from them is a sign of emotional intelligence. Not being able to do this makes people more anxious.
- Blaming other people for how they make you feel. Emotions are internal. Learning to take responsibility for your emotions and learning to develop a positive relationship with your emotions is key to your emotional intelligence, otherwise you can be left being ruled by anger, depression, or anxiety.
Given my own personal experience and training, I have developed an expertise in working with people who have trouble regulating their emotions. This ability to learn from your feelings, but not let them rule your life is integral to positive self-regard and relationships. Without being able to manage emotions, it is difficult to feel good about yourself, have close relationships, and be effective at work. Also, people who need to improve their emotional regulation skills, often suffer with depression and anxiety.
Using a combination of practical skills and in-depth work, I help people, in individual and couple therapy, learn how to access what can be called their Wise Mind, Self Energy, Adult Self, Grounded Self, or whatever feels true to you. It’s the intersection between the emotional mind and the rational mind.
These skills help you help your nervous system get out of fight/flight and into a relaxed state. For many people with trauma, they have never experienced relaxation. Once you can intentionally calm your mind and body, then we can do more in-depth work to help you build a stronger and positive relationship with yourself. This works helps build new pathways in the brain which will make responding to your surrounding with emotional intelligence easier and easier. In so doing, you can build more of the life you’ve always wanted.
