Emotional Intelligence: Improving Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, and Empathy | Being Well Podcast

hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forrest Hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for listening today and if you've listened before welcome back if you listen to podcasts like ours you're probably familiar with emotional intelligence we refer to it pretty regularly here and it's often listed as an essential trait for everything from being a desirable romantic partner to having a successful career but just knowing that emotional intelligence is a good thing isn't very helpful and when people talking about it emotional intelligence is often presented in a way that is both extremely Broad and kind of vague so what we really mean when we say emotional intelligence and how can we become more emotionally intelligent over time that's what we're going to be focusing on today to help me do that I'm joined by Dr Rick Hanson Rick is a clinical psychologist a best-selling author and he's also my dad so Dad how are you doing today I'm really good it's easy for people to feel kind of overwhelmed whenever they face what can feel like a big task like becoming more emotionally intelligent and even if you understand what emotional intelligence is it can feel kind of imposing right or vague and conceptual and the best way to learn anything kind of the meta commentary we're doing during this episode is that the best way to learn something that feels overwhelming is just by breaking it up into manageable chunks so emotional intelligence is this big construct a lot of of people have talked about it it's made up of many different parts and today we're going to explore what it is talk about those key elements and then detail what we can do practically to get better at each of those pieces so Dad I would love to start just by asking you what's emotional intelligence well first it's a term that was coined by Peter salovey and John Mayer I'm sure sure you'll put the reference you know in the notes especially for patreon people who really ought to sign up and become patrons to support the podcast and get access to the amazing backup material you pull together for every single episode and which resisted mightily my efforts to get you to turn it into an exam a book of some kind in any case Peter salavi and John Mayer I think it was in the maybe the 1990s maybe even before that yeah and then later Dan Goldman famously wrote the book emotional intelligence to you know building in this space so it's a label for what what's in the back basket of emotional intelligence one is awareness being actually aware of what you're feeling and being able to bring an intelligence to it including the intelligence of labeling uh people who have what's called Alexa thymia have difficulty really teasing apart and then assigning language to their feelings so one of the things you do with them is to help them do that this also relates to recognizing emotions in others another aspect of this is being able to use emotion skillfully to inform your thinking so you're not just Spock stuck in your head there's really interesting research that shows that if you do things with strong magnets to essentially knock the emotional processing centers of the brain offline a person's decision making particularly in many kinds of tasks goes down because they can't drop the intelligence of their feelings so using emotion that's important third being able to express emotion with other people in appropriate ways finding that middle Place between being Stony and repressed and completely inhibited in the expression of of ordinary feelings but on the other hand not dumping your feelings all over other people including high impact feelings like anger and then last uh regulating emotion inappropriate ways yeah which includes that middle Place between uh on the one hand not being flooded by feelings so just sweep you away on the other hand being able to tolerate your feelings and then third nudge them sometimes nudge them in a more positive direction so that's kind of the package there for me it's fundamentally about you know getting in touch with your feelings whose underpinnings um are somatic of course and then based on what you're in touch with being to use it well and guide it well when I was looking through this because emotional intelligence has a lot of bits and pieces inside of it that you did a great job of detailing many of them there dad what really stood out to me is that there are these two things that it's kind of based on and the first is curiosity we want to be interested in ourselves and in other people our experience of the world other people's experience of the world if you're just not that interested in what's going on inside of another person you really can't be emotionally intelligent in the same way if you're just not that interested about what's going on inside of you really hard to be emotionally intelligent well I'll tell you that's really interesting for us I've never heard anyone talk about curiosity as a central feature of emotional intelligence yeah no I mean I just think it it so stands out to me and maybe it's because I definitely fall into that bucket of people who's very extroverted and very interested and so maybe that's why it stands out to me so much but it just seems so essential to everything that we're going to be talking about today that kind of fundamental curiosity and then the flip side of it is you uh you know I'm gonna put this a certain kind of way but the give a factor you care on some level about those emotions what's going on again inside of you or inside of another person and this is what separates uh like a sociopath somebody who might be extremely capable at understanding and manipulating emotions from somebody who's actually emotionally intelligent which is really quite a different thing so as you've done this kind of work with other people dad um have you found in your practice long time clinical psychologist that you were able to help people become more emotionally intelligent over time is this sort of a static trait or is it one that we can actually move both my personal experience uh with myself and frankly the observation of you and also third my clinical experience and fourth all the research really shows that people can become more Intel more emotionally intelligent more competent more capable more agile with their emotions broadly stated over time I should make a little distinction here that could be useful between feelings and moods so feelings tend to be more fleeting and ephemeral they're both in the beheading of emotion moods are more stable slower to acquire slower to change and um you know obviously we can be in a mood of depression we can be chronically anxious we can be chronically irritable uh we can feel kind of in a mood of unworthiness uh inadequacy and shame you know we can be kind of stuck in um a bad place on the other hand we can over time cultivate happier mood a mood an attitude of gratitude which does have an emotional component to it a mood of open-heartedness and lovingness even so you know just want to expand it here when we talk about emotion it's both a state and trade and traits that can budge over time so yeah a central feature of most Psychotherapy probably involves certain key aspects of emotional intelligence sometimes people come in just for help in making a decision so there too though they're drawing on emotional inputs you know I find a lot what's helpful in decision making about important things is do the analysis do do The Logical rational analysis pluses and minuses risks and opportunities and then when all that's done use it to inform your gut your gut decision what's your what's your emotional read deep down about what would be the best thing to do that's really interesting what you're saying there about the rational component versus the emotional component or bringing the two components together because a lot of the time when people talk about uh making a good decision they really emphasize the rational aspect of it right you want to cut out the emotions you want to look at it in this kind of cold-blooded way and then you want to make a decisive Choice based on that logical analysis but I think the truth is much closer to what you're describing here Dad where good decisions are are often driven by the way that we're going to feel after we make that choice and the implications that that choice is going to have for our emotional relationships with other people most motivation at bottom will motivation boils down to valuing and purely rational assessments of what we value are not that common uh sometimes people can be just motivated based on values that are highly principled highly ethical and so forth but at bottom basically you know we we value those things that are ultimately benevolent for Humanity they're beneficial rather for Humanity and for ourselves which has to do with bottom line what's it like to be you and what's it like to be other people in terms of the consequences of our actions and that what it's like is at bottom very somatic and very emotional so that's kind of emotion in a lot of ways is the ultimate currency of decision making it's the ultimate metric we're going to go into more detail in how you actually become more emotionally intelligent what you actually did with people in order to become more emotionally intelligent and break into all the different bits and pieces of emotional intelligence and focus on how to develop each one of them before we do that I want to um lay the foundation just a little bit more based on what you were saying earlier about the different parts of emotional intelligence and you mentioned Daniel Goldman we spoke with him on the podcast author of emotional intelligence really great guy and he broke emotional intelligence into five categories the first one was self-awareness which is recognizing and understanding your own emotions and being aware of the impact of your emotions on other people and particularly kind of highlighted the the relationship between how people feel and how they act so that's first category self-awareness then second self-regulation and this is is the ability to regulate and manage our emotions which allows us to express them in appropriate ways and this can lead to flexibility and also facility inside of our relationships you know it's much easier to have a good relationship with somebody else if we're able to both express our emotions to them and be thoughtful about how we express our emotions to them and then third empathy and this is what I was talking about earlier in terms of the caring Factor understanding how others feel and then responding appropriately to them and those three categories are what we're mostly going to focus on today there were two others that he named that are important that we might talk about a little bit but the psychological parts of this are mostly in those first three which again self-awareness self-regulation and then empathy fourth category social skills being able to apply your emotional intelligence socially with other people we're social creatures a big part of emotional intelligence is understanding the basics of relating to others and then Fifth and finally motivation particularly the ability to intrinsically motivate ourselves toward good ends and to use our emotions in order to do that so big picture Dad after I've kind of named those categories named those different bits and pieces you've maybe thought a little bit here about your work with people and what supported them what do you think helps people become more emotionally intelligent broadly courage is the first thing my gut is telling me yeah in therapy and in life in general a lot of the process of emotional intelligence the the development of Greater emotional intelligence uh has to do with unpacking and uncovering um emotionally charged material and getting in touch even with certain emotions that that are categorically disowned pushed down you know set aside so you need you need courage to tolerate as Freud put it the return of the repressed that uncovering process that takes a lot of Courage the other thing is that um part of being emotionally intelligent emotionally intelligent is tracking the ways in which emotion is like the electric current running through the invisible bars of the cage in which we live and to push that cage out we have to be willing to risk certain feelings and risking certain feelings means that you know sometimes you're gonna feel them that takes courage as well another aspect of Courage just thinking about this really um is just the vulnerability involved in having your emotions revealed to others to be feeling it while you say it particularly the softer feelings and including feelings that may not be so gender normative as it were in terms of standard forms of socialization like like feeling weak and overwhelmed and helpless and sad as a and scared as a man or think about the emotional the emotions in women that tend to get punished when they're expressed um sustained anger particularly at male authority figures uh you know I think we're kind of scary so for all those reasons it can take courage it can take courage uh to to be on a path of of you know greater emotional intelligence including the expression of certain kinds of feelings that we don't normally think of as the ones that get inhibited like expressions of love I've known numerous people who were very brave in many regards but to be but to say to somebody else that that other person matters a lot to them and that they feel sad or hurt or scared at being pushed away by that other person that can be extremely scary and I know for myself that without a doubt one of the most frightening things that I ever faced in my life which has included a fair amount of physical challenge and and interpersonal challenge was to tell uh you know my first girlfriend in Finland that I loved her that was so scary because I had no idea what she would say in return and in my family we didn't at that time at least tell each other that we loved each other in the family I grew up in anyway so there are many forms of Courage people might reflect on this and think about then what my resource them to be more courageous I think it's so interesting that you started with that decision-making bet and how emotions contribute to our decision making and I do wonder if sometimes our kind of cold-hearted very logical top-down approaches to so many things in the world whether it's making a logical choice or it's how we relate to other people thinking in terms of you know I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine how much of that is an attempt to avoid these uncomfortable experiences that accompany dealing with the emotional underpinning of whatever Choice it is that we're making so you have to you know you're kind of avoiding the the fearful or the painful experience so you don't have to Marshal that courage in order to to make it happen I think that's very astute and I think about the ways in which in society people sometimes claim Authority by being very logical and rational I'm very guilty of this for the record particularly historically but please keep okay I did too I did too absolutely and you kind of see it in the culture and yet this part and they present as like we're strong we're the top you know we're the dominant but actually deep down they're freaking scared they're so scared of their feelings all right and it's ironic it's kind of like the the more intensive the presentation around being cerebral and logical deep down the more the person probably is just a seething cauldron of emotion that's barely held in by you know one of your favorite cultural references here Dad you know the Vulcans and Star Trek they develop their strong logical capacity in order to regulate their over overwhelming emotional experiences right people think Wilkins just like all logical no it's that their emotions were so potent so they had to develop a strong rational brain to keep them keep them yeah anyways I know how much you love that so yeah I do and metaphorically represented by this volcanic plant yeah we're gonna keep the lava down so okay so you said you said courage as one basis for emotional intelligence I'll just do another one here and we can maybe go back and forth a little bit um I think self-worth which is both really obvious and also maybe to some people not um if we don't care about ourselves on some level we're not going to be caring we're not going to care about our emotions very much if we don't care about other people on some level we're not going to care about their emotions very much and a lot of people are just a lot of people are socialized in a way or maybe brought up in a family where they had to subvert their own emotions in order to maintain the stability of the organism as a whole to maintain the stability of the group maybe you were raised in a family system where you were parentified as a child you had to regulate your parents emotions in some kind of a way maybe you had a sibling that took up a lot of the air in the room for whatever reason and so you had to kind of Tamp your needs down maybe you were just part of a culture where emotional expression was just kind of not a thing like you were saying that how you know you were raised in a family system where that was a particular time and place in Americana kind of Boomer silent generation world where just telling your parents that you loved them kind of wasn't a thing in that sort of a way at least from family yeah at least in your particular family you know and so all of that can impact how we relate to emotions as a meaningful thing and as an important thing for us to consider in our lives more broadly well I'll tell you a third motivation that's very pragmatic that I see which is somebody realizes that to get what they want in a healthy sense in their work or especially in their Intimate Relationships they've just got to become more emotionally intelligent they need to become more in touch with themselves they need to become better regulated they need to become more comfortable with emotional expression and emotional traffic they need to be more able to tolerate the expression of emotion in others and not you know run screaming out of the room so that that can sometimes you know motivate people down this road yeah and then the final thing that I would say before we focus on building up each of these bits and pieces is uh the importance of having both a a right bicep and a left bicep and here's what I mean by this that you can kind of break these emotional intelligence skills into three different areas or at least I do one is like facility how basically competent are we with our emotions and those of other people second capacity can we feel our feelings can we relate to those that other people have can we hold them without being overwhelmed and then third application are we thoughtful about where and when we express ourselves and how we do it how we relate to others for most people they're gonna be a little bit more skillful and one or two of those areas than they are in one of the other ones um for example you might be the kind of person who really feels like you can feel all of your feelings and in fact you can kind of feel the feelings of other people a little too much from time to time you have a little bit too much facility and you're a little bit too cautious about application and the capacity part is where you have a hard time because you feel like there's so much water being poured into your jug all the time how could The Jug ever be big enough and so it's about developing each of these pieces each of these important muscles because they work together to make us truly emotionally intelligent so what do you think about that Dad I think that's totally true and I hope this does not discombobulate the program here the plan it wouldn't be an episode of being well if you didn't discombobulate the program that I had laid out and like careful organizational detail at least once and also I think it's probably a lot of people's favorite part of it so you might as well knock yourself out here Dad yeah okay good we could go back and forth like what is a particular emotion including increasingly as mood or capacity to drop into it as a feeling as a state uh what's what's on the list for people currently like what are you trying to rest more in specifically like for example contentment feeling content is I think a wonderful emotional emotionally saturated experience that has often a bodily element as well and sometimes a cognitive element too right you just content uh actually that's important way for me to make a point emotions are almost always contextualized they're situated they're situated in actions and relationships in evolution there's good support for the notion that what really comes first is motivation and then emotions are in the service of many key motivations such as compassion is in the service of the caring system that evolved initially between primate mothers and their children and then gradually expanded to include the whole tribe so therefore emotions tend to come also connected with four things we talk about you know basically you know constructs in which there's an emotion alongside a cognition a motivation and a somatic dimension you know often coupled as well fifth with some behavior of some kind so they tend to come together cognitive affective structures they tend to come together okay I named contentment and listeners can think about oh what are you working on these days uh to try to make more room for yeah to try to do my best to Loop in your great Point here into the overall structure of what we're doing around emotional intelligence here Dad I think you're actually making a really important Point here which is that in order for us to be emotionally facile or um to have like an emotional smarts emotional facility emotional capability we need to be comfortable with a lot of different kinds of emotional experiences okay and we need to have like a feel for them in different kinds of ways right so you might be somebody who's trying to develop contentment as I would say most of us are I'm certainly trying to develop some more contentment in my own life but another way to think about this is like what are the emotional experiences that maybe you're not so comfortable with yeah because when those emotional experiences come along you might not be comfortable relating to them I either in yourself or in other people and that brings emotional intelligence down if you want to think about it that way kind of in line with this construct just reflecting here about this little firecracker I tossed into the into the room I think when I what we're talking about is an application so they're different applications of emotional intelligence and I think one of those applications is the deliberate cultivation of the capacity to have certain emotions and also more generally to cultivate certain moods certain qualities in the climate of your own Consciousness and part of that process in inherent in it is you're identifying things that matter to you which is always a really important part of this whole thing you're saying hey this matters to me and I care about it and I now have a goal so we've we've created a whole little habit formation structure here Dad that I love so okay that's great that's great we can use our emotions to guide the applications of emotional intelligence to cultivate certain emotions anyway uh one counter-intuitive example yeah uh is anger to help oneself be able to feel anger when anger was shamed and repressed and punished yeah in your own childhood can be really helpful weirdly sociopaths um one of the features there is they often don't have enough anxiety about the personal consequences of certain actions one thing we want to help people sometimes develop sometimes teenagers is greater anxiety about you know the impacts on them and others of what they do so it's not just the happy dappy emotions that we may want to apply emotional intelligence toward cultivation any thing else you want to add emotions you're working on these days I think the the rich one coming these days is that wants and needs stuff it's that it's all the wants and needs cocktails it's it's a it's a category that I've just been thinking about a lot recently the balance of you know having a need pursuing that need having a want pursuing that wand while also not getting sucked into clinging and craving around it in problematic ways uh discernment about the identification of different kinds of needs being able to tell when something is in support of you versus when it's not just this whole kind of subject area um which is often about the regulation and application of emotion what are the things that I really care about what are the emotions that I want to Value what are the um Expressions that I have forbade myself in different kinds of ways which I think gets to anger which is what you're talking about here Dad like what have I repressed what's down in the basement of the the mind that there's like some space for letting a little air in um that's all really been what I've been thinking about in this territory for myself and then I think that that really gets to self-awareness which is one of the um the three categories that we want to focus on developing specifically so are there things that you think help people develop more of that self-awareness dad first is awareness of sensation so often people will say I don't know what I'm feeling and one of the ways in is through sensation and finding Sensations that are comfortable for you they might be fairly externalized like just touching your fingers together there are there is sensation you are a sensing being um others might be a little scarier like the internal sensations of error flowing in and flowing out as you breathe that's fantastic that's foundational uh sensory awareness Charlotte Silver's work Lee lesser our friend has done a lot of work and is a wonderful teacher including for people dealing with trauma including people who are who are veterans and also dealing with people who are incarcerated sensory awareness in ways that are really healthy that's that's great second is to be aware of a particular feeling or emotion that um you're you'd like to get more aware of and to become more skillful with and to name it to yourself to be able to include oh that's a feeling that that I need to do some work with I want to be more comfortable doing that you know in that area so I want to be able to feel it more my sadness my my love my anger you know so just know what you're trying to get more in touch with I think that's that's the thing that also helps and then I would just say maybe third and then I'll toss the ball back to you it really helps to think about your history who are your models like very simple questions like what emotions were your parents comfortable feeling and expressing in your family of origin what emotions were uh you know where children allowed to display and what were the emotions that they were not so allowed to display and then you can work backwards from that as kind of a way of understanding your own interior better and understanding which rooms in the Mansion of the Mind have been padlocked and closed off and need to be gradually step by step opened yeah I think that that one's great and a really really good one to emphasize here because so much of our relationship with our emotions is driven by our personal experience right our personal Journey as we go through this process of like figuring out who we are kind of beneath it all something we've talked about in the past that I think the more I think about it the more the more I like it as a concept is the idea that we we pop out with this constellation of traits and then the world lands on those traits in different kinds of ways and that has different kinds of results so part of the job is figuring out what the traits were before the world started messing with them and all of these different kinds of ways because that can give really really good site into what you actually care about what's actually important to you and therefore what's helpful to develop in the course of your life because you're going to end up being truly fulfilled by it because it's yours not this other thing that somebody else has tried to give to you in one of many different kinds of ways and so that like unpacking of the personal history can be give us just like incredible insight into our own emotional experience and has been super useful for me personally um something I want to emphasize about this self-awareness component is one of the things that uh that I think it's Goldman emphasizes which is that part of self-awareness is being aware of the impact of our emotions on other people and that's a really interesting place to explore right because we don't want to be repressed in our self-expression but we also don't want to be frankly a pain in the ass or unfun to be around or problematic with other people and so balancing that can be really hard I think there's another element to just go further into the murky end of the pool where I like to play sometimes our dreams or recurring images can really tell us something and guide us toward more integration really we're talking about being integrated here you don't want to over interpret dreams but I just want to throw that out and um I think also sometimes we can be guided by the stories that we're drawn to and the characters who become proxies for what is for ourselves and what is underneath it you know I think about Wolverine and the X-Men you know Universe it's like a really angry guy I think a lot of people identify with him because they had a lot of repressed anger right yeah I don't know what do you think about this uh murky stuff I think it's a totally interesting inquiry dad because the question is like what helps us become more aware of what's going on inside of us or what's going on inside of other people and uh for me something that just I was thinking about as you were saying that is like what are the stories that we tell about other people over and over again if so many different people you meet frustrate you for a consistent reason yeah maybe it's about all of them or maybe it's about you and it's the kind of like a variation on the classic line you know if you meet one in the day you just met an but if everyone you meet is an maybe you're the it's kind of like that sort of a thing you know and we might have to bleep that otherwise iTunes is just going to cancel us out here yeah um but uh yeah but I I just like that's been that's been something I've been really looking at in my own life recently how I can have a if I just have a consistent frustration with like everyone that I'm interacting with it's like well Forest maybe there's a place for some personal exploration here and so I think that's kind of similar to what you're talking about here Dad in terms of like what are we drawn to like what do we see in others over and over again can actually give us insight into ourselves and with that um is to consider what emotions do we invite from love that I'm suddenly thinking about being a doing a better being a better husband about inquiring uh more into certain kinds of feelings that your mom you know doesn't tend to express uh she's such a nice person and a caring person and kind of well what about anger here honey uh you know is any of that going here I love that yeah so what do we inquire into which which means we've got to be prepared to tolerate it which would I would add to my little list of factors um of the acquisition of emotional intelligence you know being able to tolerate emotion including in other people so you have to be able to tolerate it when it comes out but inquiring and inviting certain Feeling by being careful about projecting your emotion onto other people or um kind of writing people into a role in a script assuming they must be feeling a certain kind of telling them what they really feel yeah not a good idea you want to be careful about all of that for sure so I think that's a pretty good treatment of self-awareness let's move on to empathy here which is a key piece of the emotional intelligence puzzle what do you think helps people develop more emotional empathy dad first I think it's to be informed by these two related systems uh the mirror neuron type system mirroring around the physicality tracking body language tracking um and attuning to micro expressions in the face subtleties of posture and gesture uh you know energy Pace uh just that physical aspect and drawing on those kind of very Primal circuits in terms of evolution that that track you know the bodily actions and kind of the underlying intentions of other people okay and also theory of mind the capacity to understand other people's intentions their motivations and and also their kind of their thoughts and perspectives and you know psychodynamics so you can make more sense of them uh and those two theory of theory of mind as well as the mirroring systems their inputs into emotion it's in the three work together to help us have a very rounded sense over here and understanding a kind of an embodied understanding over here of what it probably is like at least in some ways to be that person over there another is to get in touch with your own emotions and dance eagle has been great about this with this notion of mine sight that has that goes in two directions um we can in a sense have empathy for our own emotional interior and there is research that shows that as people get better at um mindfulness really of their own emotional Dynamics and and experiences they get better at having empathy for the emotions of other people and I think the last thing is exactly what you said at the start you have to care yeah because empathy can be some work and stuff comes with empathy you know you're letting that other person land in you you're being courageous back to that enough and uh pro-social enough to to be affected that's empathy you're affected in some way you're if only you're feeling it well we're affected by what we experience you're opening to an experience of another person and so you have to care enough to do that and to do it intentionally and I think one thing that's really wonderful about imp empathy is that it's under volitional control there might be a kind of rudimentary empathy of emotional contagion that's kind of unwitting often it just sort of happens uh people can vary obviously some people are more sensitive to others they're more interpersonally permeable just dispositionally innately okay but beyond that empathy very much under our control and uh one of the things we can do is deliberately give it to other people and then another thing we can potentially do is to ask for more empathy from others that's some scary it can be quite scary but to really ask another person to let you matter enough to be open to what it's like to be you and to be willing to be affected by it that's a request with a lot of potency I want to ask you about that volitional control part of it that you just said that their dad because let's say that somebody's listening to this or somebody's in the office with you and you're talking to them about relating to other people's emotions maybe they're talking about a friend or a family member and they're talking about you ask them oh what do you think that person's emotional experiences and they go oh well you know it's probably a b or c and you say well Bob how do you feel about that and Bob says you know what Rick I I just don't really care that much I just don't I don't really feel anything about it it's just it's their feeling they're over there I'm over here I just can't really bring myself to care how do you respond to that person or how would you help them develop that volitional control of empathy well so we have two things here first we have to what extent are they actually accurately empathizing with that other person and then to what extent do they care about what they're tracking right uh and you know sometimes I'll joke I'll say well this is you know deep profound question from Dr Phil so how's that working for you right because that's what it boils down to and and the truth is we can be flooded by other people or we can just make a choice because attention is under volitional control and we can just to say I'm just not going to allocate that much bandwidth to you whoa but we need to retain the right to do that and sometimes it's really appropriate to just disengage or say I've got other things that are priority tasks or commitments or just what I care about and I have the right to care about what I care about uh that's a two-edged sword to a street you know if we want to retain the right to care about what we care about and not necessarily what other people want to care about well other people have that right too you know we may not want them to have that same right that we you know uh claim for ourselves all that said uh I find that one thing that actually stops people sometimes in couples from having full empathy for the other person is they care so much the weight of the other person's emotions yeah they can feel quite devastated by their impact on the other person or they can feel that the other person has wants and needs that are very compelling and [Music] um you know they just it's for them it's they can't open to them because if they did they would feel compelled they would feel like they don't have a you know it goes back to our material and the book resilient about we need autonomy to sustain intimacy they don't have enough autonomy so they restrict and construct the intimacy of empathic flow of emotion with another person so then you work on that you work on the capacity to okay to open to the other you've heard my metaphor of to feel like it for example a deeply rooted tree that can really open to The Winds of the feelings of others with maybe losing a few leaves but basically still being there after the waves pass to to be able to tolerate those other feelings I think a huge part of this is just going back to what we were talking about a little bit toward the beginning about you know the Vulcans and logic versus emotion and these kind of uh the the yin yang of the whole thing a lot of this empathic piece I think comes down to how do you relate to emotions in general for that person who's like you know what I just can't bring myself to care very much one of my first questions for them would be some version of like well how do you feel about emotions how do you think about emotions maybe if you're a thinking person you know how do you how do you conceptualize them in your mind and if the person then goes well you know honestly I just think that emotions really get in the way of rational decision making and they're just this thing that like causes a lot of suffering and if we could just kind of get past it then you know the world would be a better place okay well I don't agree but that's a really place like a really interesting place of fruitful inquiry right that's a space in which you can work to change the concepts that we have about emotionality so I think just a huge question in this place is like how do you relate to emotions broadly do you think of them as mostly a source of pain and frustration and vulnerability and weakness or do you think of them as this really great thing and everyone should just marinate in their emotions all the time with very little regulation of it or do you think about it as being somewhere in between those two extremes and that can be a really useful place of inquiry for people that's great and to allow yourself to make your own choice there um I've been in cultures that were very um almost cultic in their emphasis on emotionality I think you totally see that in some personal growthy spaces for sure okay not and not just in the 1970s you mean like it's not happening for sure yeah yeah and you know I I just think a person can also be very in touch with their feelings and for all kinds of reasons including how they were raised or just how much they want to get emotionally invested here and now they might communicate in a way that's particularly intelligent uh let's say or thoughtful maybe that's a better word thoughtful and other people may say oh my gosh you're so in your head you need to get into your feelings I'm aware of my feelings and you know what we're talking here about how to balance a checkbook I don't need a lot of emotion for that or something like that right uh and then on the other hand man there are environments where uh it's so odd you it's almost like okay it's like one person is I'm looking for I don't have a great metaphor yet you know it's like one person is basically yeah one person is clicking two chopsticks together that's their communication they're very mono track another person is playing three musical instruments at once while singing That's the texture of their communication and you you'll see each one of them trying to draw the other person more into their mode all right pure logic pure reason only cognition where another person a very whole body somatic you know integrated uh way of way of communicating and they're both frustrated right and so I think that one thing that's kind of helpful too is almost to establish with other people how we're going to talk about stuff and now we're going to be together with stuff so yeah and then maybe before we just get finished perhaps with being really practical there's one thing I want to name that was a huge issue for me and I've seen it for a lot of people which is feeling it while you say it so there are some people who are very aware of what they're feeling inside but their their expression is completely constricted at the throat and all that comes out is a hyper rational track they can report in their experience like a journalist from a far-flung war zone but they they're not they're not in touch with it at the time it's not apparent to other people what they're feeling while they're reporting their feelings and to be able over time to feel sad while you name your sorrow to feel anger while you say I'm really irritated about this uh right to feel love while you speak the words of love connecting connecting you know feeling it while you say it that is a good thing uh to become more able to do at will when when it's appropriate and as you increasingly feel it while you say it uh you become more integrated in whole and then less likely to be swept away by volcanic eruptions you know of repressed feeling paradoxically feeling it increasingly helps you be more regulating of it in inappropriate ways yeah no I think that's totally true so let's close uh with self-regulation the third of these big traits that we want to develop and you know I think in some ways we've kind of left the best for last year in some senses we could do a whole episode on we could do a series of episodes on how to regulate your emotions effectively and how to relate to them in different kinds of ways and I think that for many people frankly particularly if you're the kind of person who's likely to listen to a podcast like ours this emotional regulation component is is just really tough for people because emotions are big they feel overwhelming and we need to learn how to relate to them in healthy ways so dad been working with a lot of people over the years what do you think helps people learn how to regulate their emotions a little bit better now my regulation Forest um I think we're talking here because we've talked about the side of Regulation that's about unpacking them and and freeing them I think for this we're feel your feelings without becoming overwhelmed by them is sort of how I would put it yeah that balance right or being able to choose when you're expressing a certain kind of emotion to somebody as opposed to feeling just wrapped up in the Cascade of it where the boulders rolling down the hill and it's just flowing through you and you've got no access to either the gas or the break it's just happening yeah noting and then there was labeling finding language for what you're what you're feeling is a mode of Regulation and research shows that uh as people label their experiences at the time activation in the amygdala the alarm Bell kind of of the brain among other functions goes down and prefrontal regions behind the forehead the seat neurologic live are executive functions increases okay just naming them name entertainment as or as the saying puts it that's one thing a second is to ask yourself um what uh what are you wanting because emotions are in the service of motivations what are you wanting and maybe what has been frustrated uh what is an unmet unfulfilled want related to a a need that has not been that has been thwarted here and that is a great way to become more uh regulating of emotion because if you fulfill the need or find ways to fulfill the need or give you or find ways to get what you're wanting here then you're going to regulate the emotion that's associated with it and that was helpful another thing is to learn from dysregulation and uh to be able to look back on times that just felt so compelling in the moment anger is a is a very common example of this me and yet there was a real cost other people were damaged relationships became damaged your reputation could become damaged to learn from those to learn from when you just kind of lost it uh other forms of dysregulation might be that you just got swallowed up by guilt and shame and inadequacy when you just didn't need to or other forms of dysregulation where you just bought what somebody was telling you about how you were a damaged goods or a screw-up and yet it was wrong they were lying to you so you know learning from different kinds of dysregulation and then in the learning from them uh going forward right one of the things that has been a learning for me over the last 10 years in reflecting on previous periods of my life is to just kind of look at subtleties of uh expressions of anger with exasperation or criticism judgmentalness uh annoyance things like that in ways that I thought were pretty minimal And yet when I look back I think uh I don't really need to do that there are other ways to to get what I need and to to communicate with other people and in a fair amount of what I was getting all frustrated by let's say uh was was about me it wasn't about other people and I needed to to do things to be less frustrated let's say in different situations exacerbated and so on so yeah so we can you know apply the learning and I'm giving an example of that yeah what I've seen in myself and also seen in other people is that most unregulated emotion just kind of spilling out of us in a moment is inherently kind of Habitual almost there's been a certain kind of cue that really gets us in some way maybe it pisses us off maybe it makes us really sad whatever it is we've been queued and then that habit Loop a response to it just gets hyper activated without there being any regulation out of it any top down or bottom-up control and so what we're really trying to do here is we're trying to widen that space right um the classic space between stimulus and our response to it so what are different practices that support people in doing that well a lot of mindfulness practices can support people and learning how to see those feelings as their arise and kind of Catch The Habit at the start of it and go oh wait I know this situation I know this feeling I'm aware of that internal experience real time yeah thank you yeah and um and as you catch it you can kind of be like the roller coaster that's going up the hill and you're able to stop at the top before it starts flying to the bottom yeah and even if you're you don't have to repress is what I want to be clear about here that there's there's a version of this where we stop at the top all the energy has been gathered up we still have all that energy we learn how to pause we're able to find a different situation go to another room uh take 30 minutes whatever it is and then let it flow you know where we've been able to think about it we've been able to consider it maybe we've been able to put ourselves into a better situation for it maybe we've come to grips with it a little bit internally and that takes the takes the tone down on it it goes from being the nine emotional experience to being a four or five and so you haven't just like bottled it up into the basement you've given yourself the freedom to express it but you've been thoughtful about like how you do it where you do it and how intensely you do it both in terms of the consequences for others but also for yourself which is a huge part of this too so I think that that like identification of it as a habitual pattern that we can intercede in is really helpful and has definitely been really helpful for me to have these moments where I just start feeling a feeling and for me it's often like irritation it's less like explosive anger and more just me being like uh like that makes me mad you know and I can kind of catch that in myself and go oh Forrest you're having that feeling again this is your habit this might not be about the situation this is a habit of response that you have and then we can be more thoughtful about it um and sometimes in thoughtfulness there's a place for being like yeah that's an appropriate emotional response I should be pissed off about this like there's the space for that but you're at choice and the whole point of this is about becoming more at choice so to build on what you're saying in real time it's also to look beneath the surface of what you're feeling yeah what are the feelings beneath those feelings what are the longings the yearnings what is the history underneath the surface here that's really relevant and that then is a way to regulate the emotion like often there's there's anger say on the top and Underneath It All um is some kind of feeling of hurt or or fear or frustration and so getting in touch with that those you know fear hurt frustration can be a mode of regulating the anger as you get beneath it and get in touch with and in the flow of those other more fundamental causes of the anger I think that's a huge point to add in terms of how we relate to ourselves it's a part of the self-awareness piece but I think it contributes to all of these other ones too which is getting more granularity about like what your actual feelings are as opposed to what the presenting emotions are that are like bubbling out of you yeah another one is to slow it down yeah that's a great way to regulate the expression including uh giving yourself a pause to get in touch with your courage to speak more from your heart so I want to close uh by asking you about a situation and it's kind of a version of what I was talking about earlier let's say that somebody's listening to this and they say to you man Rick you know to be really honest with you I feel like my problem is that I'm too emotionally intelligent I'm I'm too aware of my own Sensations and emotions I'm too aware of the sensations and emotions of other people I feel kind of overwhelmed and flooded by it all the time I can really see people's motivations particularly their emotional motivations and this very granular way it makes me second-guess myself and all these different kinds of situations I feel like I have bad separation between my emotions and the emotions of other people it all gets kind of Cloudy and it actually makes it harder for me to sort of figure out what I want or or how I'm feeling inside of myself so I don't think I need to develop more emotional intelligence I feel like I need to almost become less emotionally intelligent it's what's going on inside of me right now how do you respond to that person uh several responses I'm really interested by the second guessing like that part I would wonder what what was meant by that maybe you could add to that maybe you're thinking about sorry yeah I can I can kind of play act this person and you can maybe finesse what I'm saying a little bit more as this as this character the way that I meant it was that because other people's emotions feel so big to me and like so overwhelming and I'm just kind of flooded by them I have a hard time differentiating what I'm feeling from what another person is feeling so I second guess my own emotions I can't tell if they're really mine or if somebody else is kind of infecting me with theirs like I'm very prone to emotional contagion oh that's really interesting so I yeah it's like I'm I'm not I'm not always clear about sort of the inner authority of what is mine and what is you know theirs um well my first response to the person would be this would be compassion and and listening in and getting it second probably would be well uh it sounds like you have some wonderful capabilities and you're looking for they've gone a little too far A little bit and you're you're looking for ways to to add some things in like boundaries between you and other people so then we're in the conversation about boundaries and I think there's some things that really develop that one is to be able to turn up the volume on the sensory track in your own experience to be able to just focus on your own Sensations while you're with other people that really brings us into a kind of abiding a kind of being in our body and there's there's only one body we're in no you're you're actually not sensing their Sensations really the sensations you're sensing are your own in and in interception and and sensory awareness is the foundation really of the early psychological development of a sense of an independent psyche uh related to that you can do little things that promote a sense of agency maybe they're talking away decide to move your elbow decide to move your shoulder you are the one who is moving your elbow you're moving your shoulder weirdly it's kind of a trick it works another thing is to be cognitive to remind yourself uh different things you're over there I'm over here uh you are responsible for your karmas I am not responsible for your karmas uh my job is to be a good person that my job is not necessarily to take care of you you know you're just reminding yourself you're giving yourself good self-talk which is a really useful aspect of emotional regulation to to talk to yourself about what you're feeling at the time so I think that's helpful another one is imagery I I love imagery so for me I imagine I've talked about that there's a wall of glass very thick like submarine window foot thick high pressure class between me and another person or you could do practices that I've done a lot of where you imagine that a force field is surrounding you and you get to decide who comes into it or not and you move people in and out of it at will do that those practices even before interacting with somebody that maybe you're getting flooded around so you're really heightening that sense of boundary and differentiation those are things I think that are that are really helpful yeah I think that would be helpful to the person in question like you've already named a lot of really good stuff here another one it's it's it's kind of moral I just have reflected a lot about the um the Deep teaching really that I got from a book um called what the Buddha thought the point that was made was that inherently there has to be differentiation if we are to be responsible for the results of our own actions there must be differentiation even morally between our own wave and the and the wave next to us in the ocean of causes okay and that has to do in part with duty to self and duty to other and to be really clear that you are not the source of most if not all of that other person's karmas what I mean by that is the results the fruits of their actions they are the author they are the director of their movie they are responsible really fundamentally uh and not just they thousands of causes are flowing through to make that person's manifestations right now they're not yours they're not yours right this is like a deep understanding um that we're both connected and we're different we're differentiated from each other and so there's a limit in a way to our responsibilities we're for others you know we didn't make it happen generally speaking and our responsibilities for them are limited and just kind of getting that which in a weird way frees up a lot of love because you can you can rest in a lot of love while really being humble about your power and that you and you know Powers responsibilities and proportion of power if you have very limited power over another person's fate well then you have very limited responsibility for it and then the person for over whom we have great responsibility is the one over whom we have tons of power our future self the boundaries part of it is the part that I would probably be inclined to highlight for people um a lot of people particularly with more anxious sensibilities often the person who says this kind of thing or who I hear say this kind of thing tends to lean a little bit more toward the anxious side of the spectrum than the avoidance side of the spectrum tied up in anxiety is often a fundamental uncertainty that we can keep on being without the support of other people and so we can become emotionally wrapped up in other people because it's very high stakes for us like our continued happiness existence stability whatever is attached to those others outside because anxiety is about fundamentally not trusting that you can rely on yourself at bottom yeah and so the more that we can cultivate a sense of self-reliance the more that we can become able to get that sense of division from other people because we're no longer dependent on them and so I think that that kind of balance of establishing separation like you're saying bad the thick wall of glass I'm over here you're over there tapping the body feeling it as your body while also going on this kind of Adventure of all of that is true and I'm still okay all of that is true and I can rely on myself even with that separation as a big piece of the puzzle too yeah being able to say to yourself in your mind as it's appropriate thinks along this line I love you and I cannot save you that's really great I think that's a great note to end today's conversation on so thanks so much for doing this Dad I think this was a great one oh I got a lot out of it myself Forrest today we talked about how we can become more emotionally intelligent and we started the episode by exploring what emotional intelligence is and what are the various bits and pieces that make it up so emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize understand and manage both our emotions and the emotions of other people effectively and this includes things like perceiving our emotions accurately using our emotions to guide how we think understanding emotions and their impact on our Behavior and the behavior of other people and then the ability to regulate our emotions now the concept of emotional intelligence came from Peter salivi and John Mayer Who conceptualizes I think in 1990 it was either the late 80s or the early 90s and then it was later popularized by Daniel Coleman in his book emotional intelligence and I think that emotional intelligence is really based on two things first curiosity if you aren't interested in what's going on inside of somebody else or curious about your own emotions you really can't be emotionally intelligent and same thing for caring if we don't care about other people and their emotions can't be emotionally intelligent we then talked for a little while about Rick's experience helping people develop more emotional intelligence as a part of his practice which is a core Target of therapy so many of our issues in life everything from issues with or motivations to our relationships to identifying good goals to figuring out what we really care about so many of those questions come back to our emotions and our relationship with emotionality and very early on we talked about this seeming contrast between people who have a very logical rational approach and people who have a very emotional approach and how we often try to prune emotions out of our decision making but the truth is we can only make a rational choice if it incorporates our emotional experience if it involves caring about how we feel and how other people feel because so many of the major consequences in life that we can experience from a choice come back to how we feel about it long term we then spent a little time detailing what's in emotional intelligence and Daniel Goldman the author of the book emotional intelligence who we spoke to on the podcast a number of years ago broke emotional intelligence into these five core components and they are first self-awareness that's recognizing and understanding your own emotions and I would also toss in the emotions of other people and this includes things like being aware of the impact of your emotions on others and recognizing the relationship between how you feel and how you act then second self-regulation the ability to manage your emotions which allows you to express them appropriately and this includes things like impulse control which is uh being able to apply the brakes or the gas as is required by a given situation and then Stress Management the ability to calm yourself down or how about being able to adapt your emotional response to different contexts then third we have empathy understanding how others feel and responding appropriately and this could include things like emotional Attunement compassion being able to walk a mile in their shoes and often something that we didn't really talk about during the conversation but a sensitivity to power dynamics in relationships and including how those different Dynamics can impact our emotional experience then there are these two other categories that we didn't really talk about during the episode in part because we've explored them in great detail in many other episodes of the podcast and they are fourth social skills being able to apply apply your emotional intelligence socially and fifth motivation particularly the ability to use emotions to motivate yourself towards certain ends and this got to something that Rick talked about that I think is really important to emphasize here emotions are motivational in nature there's a lot of evidence that we have emotions that we evolved emotions to serve different kinds of motivational purposes in life think about love love kind of emerged as near as we can tell based on the relationship between parents and children and particularly to motivate parents to care for their offspring and to motivate Offspring to attach to their parents both of these purposes really really good for passing on more Gene copies which is what we're built to do and this means that if we're gonna care about where we end up in life if we're going to care about our goals if we're going to care about being fulfilled we need to inherently care about our emotions because they are just intrinsically tied to our behavior and to our motivation in life broadly we then talked at some detail about how to develop each one of those first three categories that's self-awareness empathy and self-regulation with the self-awareness part of it rick really emphasized developing interception a feeling for what something feels like in the body what does it feel like in the body when you're angry what does it feel like in the body when you're sad and there are some people who are going to hear that and go it's patently obvious it's totally obvious to me inside of my experience what sadness feels like but many people actually struggle to identify their emotions as they're experiencing them this practice of naming can be really helpful and we can get better at labeling our emotions over time then empathy in order to be empathic we need to develop just a basic pro-social orientation toward other people if we don't care about people we're not going to care about their emotions and another thing that I would layer on top of this is thinking about what our relationship is with emotions broadly if we come from a cultural framework where emotions are basically a source of weakness and they're this thing that we just have to deal with but they're basically frustrating and they really stop us from making those logical decisions that we were talking about earlier in the podcast episode well it's going to be really hard for you to be empathic toward other people because just sort of humoring their emotions at all is framed as a bad thing so we can look bigger picture at what our relationship is with emotions as a category and then we can drill down from that and start taking a look at what our experience is personally and this is part of the self-awareness aspect where Rick talked about getting uh digging into our personal history and getting Clarity around why we might have a hang up around a particular emotion what was an emotion that you were permitted when you were younger what was one that you definitely weren't permitted when you were younger and how might those different circumstances impact how you relate to emotions generally then finally we talked about regulation developing those regulation skills that allow us to be more like a cue ball and less like an eight ball in terms of how we handle our emotions and there's a form of Regulation that allows our emotions to flow without becoming totally hijacked by them because we don't want to become just repressed here around emotional expression at the same time we don't want to be uh like we talked about the Vulcans during this episode because of course we did we don't want to be the volcano that just explodes with no regulation whatsoever we want to be able to find the happy medium between those two extremes and a huge part of self-regulation gets to what we talked about at the very end of the episode where I presented this kind of case study of somebody who just becomes empathically overwhelmed and flooded by other people and a huge part of Regulation is getting that space from others getting a little bit of space between ourselves and our emotions I talked about interrupting our habit loop around a certain emotion while it's happening and also cultivating a little space between ourselves and other people's emotions Rick talked about developing the feeling of a thick wall of glass between you and others or increasing granularity of your own physical or emotional experience separate from what's going on inside of somebody else and Rick even mentioned an almost moral Dimension to all of this where part of the reason that we have so much responsibility for ourselves is because we have so much power over ourselves we have so much influence over both who we are today and the person that we will become tomorrow and we don't have that same level of influence over other people but we often find ourselves feeling enormous responsibility for them even though our agency is quite limited and this can even go to a really problematic place where we start to limit other people's agency over themselves because we feel so implicated by what they do and so we can increasingly come into to a full acceptance both of our own influence over ourselves our own ability to cultivate all the skills that we talk about on the podcast to deal with our own content and just become more the person that we want to be over time and we can also fully accept the limitations of our influence over other people and the fact that they are a separate being from us that is differentiated by that thick wall of glass and accepting that can be a painful process particularly for somebody who has a little bit more of an anxious sensibility but it is a huge piece of the puzzle and it really can support us in becoming more emotionally intelligent over time so I hope that you enjoyed today's episode I had a great time recording it with Rick if you've been listening to the podcast for a while and you'd like to support us the best way to do that is just by subscribing wherever you're listening to it now on the second best way is by telling other people about it and the third best way is by supporting us on patreon and you can find us patreon.com being well podcast you'll get ad free versions of the episodes uh transcripts you'll also get all of these expanded notes that I write for most of the episodes where I really dig into the research Behind These topics and just kind of expand everything that we talked about so once again thanks for taking the time to listen today and we'll talk to you soon foreign [Music]

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 32,427

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, emotional intelligence, EQ, Improving Self-Awareness, self-regulation, emotional regulation, empathy, Improve emotional intelligence, increase emotional intelligence, become more emotionally intelligent

Id: WcOfNkbiO_o

Length: 72min 28sec (4348 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2023