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Emotional intelligence and communication
How do emotions affect communication in relationships? Babies are bundles of emotion—intensely experiencing fear, anger, sadness, and joy within their first eight weeks of life. As an infant, your emotions attached you to your primary caregiver in what was the first interactive relationship of your life. The emotions you experienced then helped lay the foundation for all verbal and nonverbal communication in your future relationships. Understanding and owning your emotions and their correlating physical feelings benefits you by:
- Allowing you to navigate satisfying, meaningful relationships
- Helping you understand other people
- Enabling you to understand yourself
- empowering your communication process
- making you “heart smart” – emotionally intelligent
The emotions you feel and convey through nonverbal communication are the foundation of your emotional intelligence. Without the ability to communicate emotion, it’s impossible to build or maintain robust, healthy relationships, because the communication of emotions establishes the lifeline that sustains all relationships. If relationship partners do not understand and share their emotions, relationship problems inevitably develop.
Getting in touch with your emotions
Why is it so important to get in touch with your emotions? Emotions are your guide to meaningful communication. Without understanding them, you may be lost without a roadmap on the communication highway. Consider the emotional response of Bernie, Rhonda and Jim in their home and work relationships:
Bernie is a kind, steady, and dependable man whose emotional flatness inspired the nickname“Mr. Spock.” In his love relationship with his wife, Bernie remains emotionally uninvolved. His mood is always low key—nothing is too exciting, nothing is worth arguing about. It blindsides him when his wife files for divorce; he never saw it coming. Bernie likes his job, but his flatness has hurt his ability to advance. His bosses can’t imagine him motivating others.
Rhonda works hard at her marriage. Attractive, caring, and hard-working, she takes everything seriously and seldom complains or criticizes. But her lack of spontaneity, humor, and playfulness is taking its toll, as her husband contemplates romantic involvements with other women. Rhonda’s seriousness also limits her popularity at work. Her coworkers tend to forget that she is there.
Jim is admired for his kindness and generosity. Only his family knows of his extremely short fuse. After an unprovoked verbal outburst, Jim is predictably apologetic. When people tell Jim’s wife how lucky she is to have such a wonderful husband, she bites her lip, aware of how she and their children suffer in their relationship with him. His temper also keeps him from working well with others and has limited his choice of jobs.
Like misfiring pistons, Bernie, Rhonda and Jim are incapable of connecting with their strong emotions—the tools they need for compelling communication. They do not fully experience crucial visceral emotions, or gut feelings.
How are emotions devalued?
We are all born with a capacity for emotional intelligence, and emotion plays a lifelong pivotal role in relationships. Yet many people lose touch with some or all of their emotions. How do we go from experiencing sadness, anger, fear, and joy to an existence empty of emotions? Two prime factors are:
- Our culture views emotion as problematic. For centuries, cultural and religious institutions downplayed emotion. People were encouraged to think, rather than feel. This attitude toward emotion has changed somewhat as we have expanded our knowledge of how the brain works. However, in general we continue to prefer thought over feelings.
- We may have experienced a disrupted or disconnected relationship early in life. If we have had painful or confusing emotional communication in infancy and early childhood, we may substitute less hurtful, more intellectual secondary emotions in our adult relationships. Many people attempt to control their emotions, rather than experience them, thus causing relationship problems.
We get good at distracting ourselves
To avoid emotions—or at least some of them, we get good at distracting ourselves. We use mind chatter, entertainments, technologically gadgetry, compulsive thoughts and addictive behaviors to distance ourselves from emotions we fear or dislike. We get stuck in one feeling and stay there --angry all the time to avoid feeling sad or frightened --or we feel sad to avoid feeling angry. We can distort and numb emotions but we can’t eliminate them. Attempts to do this will only drain us of energy and focus.
Raw core emotions can and must be reclaimed in order to practice emotional intelligence. Becoming familiar with intimidating feelings may seem hard …....but it really isn’t that difficult, because the same emotions that automatically overwhelm an infant’s nervous system, don’t automatically overwhelm an adults nervous system.
Restoring emotional intelligence
Is there a way to restore or rebuild emotional intelligence? Restoring your emotional intelligence first requires retrieving your emotional awareness and learning to manage your emotions. This may make emotional management sound simple, but for most people it is a hard-won skill. Managing your emotions requires more than knowledge and motivation to be effective -- you need to be able to recognize and control stress, and to be aware of, experience, and take control of your emotions. When your stress levels and emotions are out of control, they will override the thinking parts of your brain.
Bernie, Rhonda, and Jim need to “get in touch” with their emotions. Ignoring uncomfortable feelings has cost each of them a great deal. Each needs to recognize the difference between basic, visceral emotions and the emotional coping strategies they’ve been using to avoid, minimize, or “manage” the feelings that they have been stuffing down all this while.
The most important Emotional Intelligence tool -- “the glue”
Moment to moment emotional awareness,”, is the most important, yet least understood emotional intelligence skill or tool. Emotion points us in the direction of what we really need and is our primary source of motivation. Remove the emotional centers of the brain, and people lose their desire to do much of anything.
Emotional glue consists of primary biological emotions that include anger, sadness, fear and joy. Un-restricted these core emotions quickly come and go. Throughout the day, we’ll see, read or hear something that momentarily triggers a strong feeling of some sort.
Generally these feelings don’t stay with us, unless we continue to think about them. If we don’t stoke our emotions with thoughts about them, even the most painful and difficult feelings will subside, and lose their power to control our attention.
Relationship communications are guided by visceral emotions that...
- flow throughout the day—changing from sadness to happiness, from anger to joy, as the day’s situations change
- inform the individual of deeply felt needs—affecting mental and physical health
- positively attract and hold the interest of others—powerfully communicating personal and interpersonal needs
Physical elements of core emotions
Core emotions have physical elements that can be felt somewhere in our bodies –usually below the bridge of the nose. People who experience traumas of loss, abuse and isolation, especially in early childhood, may not be emotionally aware. Infants are born without the capacity to calm and soothe themselves, so as a means of survival they’ll stifle emotions their caretakers don’t or can’t help them manage. This is how core feelings of anger, sadness or fear, that we are born with, disappear from consciousness along with the feelings of joy that are also our birthright. If one core feeling is dampened down, the rest are also diminished.
Riding the waves – A process for raising Emotional Intelligence
Riding the waves is process for raising your emotional intelligence by developing moment to moment emotional awareness you develop emotional. You develop emotional awareness by learning to experience all of your emotions including those you may dislike or even fear.
For the third skill see Communicate nonverbally.
This article is based on a portion of Dr. Jeanne Segal's new book, The Language of Emotional Intelligence, The Five Essential Tools for Building Powerful and Effective Relationships.
This book, published by McGraw Hill, teaches the Emotional Intelligence skills you need to communicate effectively with the people you work with and the people you love.
Related Links: Relationship Help Series
Part 1: Learning the Key Skills of Emotional Intelligence
Part 2: Delving Deeper
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