Emotional Intelligence

Popular wisdom posits that emotional intelligence comes from the following traits:

1. Being able to understand and perceive what you're feeling.

2. The ability to choose what you want to feel.

3. Being in control of what you feel.

But nowhere in this definition does it address understanding how to better feel your emotions! Because the experts apparently don't understand the inherent value of their emotions. "They're at best tools to help you succeed. And if you're lucky, to control how you feel so you can then control others and how they feel".

Wrong. Your emotions exist to be felt. Period.

Knowing just what you're feeling is always a good idea. There's even some value in being able to name those feelings. And it's almost heaven when you can feel what you want! But control them? It's guaranteed to not end well.

The glaring absence in the traditional theory of emotional intelligence is they make no distinction between real emotion and artificial, 'man-made' emotion. Not understanding the difference, you're lost in the maze of trying to manipulate your emotions somehow. Of course you'll try to control them.

But here's the problem:

By trying to control your emotions, you are creating fabricated emotion. Control creates the very problem that control seeks to end. Control is the problem. Not your emotions.

You get sucked into a downward spiral of trying to control your past efforts of control which are now causing pain in your life. You see? Trying to control your emotions starts early in life. Rather than just feeling all of our feelings instead we start repressing them.

Of course, we start with the 'bad' ones. Control a little anger here, a little fear there. A bit of despair. A bit of sadness. A little loneliness. What's so bad about that? Nobody wants to end up lonely.

So what happens? We try to not feel those feelings by repressing them. We work on controlling them, in other words. And at first it seems to work. We don't feel them so they must be gone. Problem solved!

Or is it? You can't just throw emotions in the closet like old toys and be done with them. They're a living energy. They're powerful. They're alive. You don't kill them by not feeling them. What happens when you do this is, slowly, over time, you're building a time bomb.

Here's what the experts apparently are missing:

Life is an emotional experience. It's not about feeling good all the time. What you really want is to open your heart full and wide to feel everything that comes up through your emotional wellspring.

Once you're willing to feel whatever comes up, then you can get close to feeling whatever you want to feel. You don't have to go through five units of misery to feel one unit of joy. It's nothing like that. It's just being willing to feel it all.

Also, when you feel everything, then you're less likely to have those emotional meltdowns and melodrama that traditional emotional intelligence theory tries to save you from. And it heals the suffocating web of anxiety, those black holes of pain, and the explosions of anger.

The answer is never to feel less, by repressing what you don't want to feel. You want to feel what's real, and drop what's not. Your answer lies with learning the difference between imaginary and real feelings. For more details on how to learn the difference between real and imaginary emotions, go to this site on emotional health. So you can learn how to return to your natural way of feeling. And to see how you measure up, go to this page for a free emotional intelligence test.