Emotional Intelligence – a Scary Road
I grew up in a family where it seemed to me that the only one who was allowed to get angry was my mother. I seemed to be allowed only to be happy or hurt – at least that’s how I interpreted it all. As a result I not only lost touch with my real feelings but I acted the same way in my first marriage as I acted in my family. Happy or hurt.Then I found people, places and tools to teach me functional emotional intelligence. Beyond all the healing I did, my watchword was “tell the emotional truth quickly”. And that’s what I did – particularly in my relationship with the Martian. It was very scary at first. I thought I was risking losing him because my feelings were not all the popular ones. But a funny thing happened. We became closer and closer and we trusted each other more and more.
But we’ve refined that as time has gone by and we know neither one of us is going anywhere. We both try to remember timing.
Do I actually need to 
tell him some deal I’m going through when he is just walking out the door to work or when he is going through a rough patch himself? Well, sometimes I do but I have learned to be much more thoughtful and conscientious about my timing. I don’t let things pile up unexpressed but I do pay attention to the state my partner is in before I bring up difficult stuff. It works way better and sometimes things even get resolved before we’ve carved out the space to have that kind of communication.
July 22, 2010 | Tags: Communication, emotional intelligence | trackback
Category: life tools
This entry is about “telling the truth”. Sounds OK, right?
But hold on. In order to tell the truth, you have to know the truth and know that your truth may not be the truth for someone else.
Is that all? No. You have to learn to tell the emotional truth. “What’s that?” you say, Well, obviously in order to know and tell the emotional truth, you must be on speaking terms with your emotions – on first name basis with your emotions, so to speak, which is not a skill really taught on Mars.
Actually, on Mars the prevailing wisdom is to cover up, hide and, for goodness sake, do not show your emotions under any circumstances because if you do, somebody will laugh or take advantage of you.
So after a lifetime of practicing that behavior, if you are a Martian, you probably would not even recognize an honest emotion if one came up and smacked you in the face.
Last thing is you have to do – this emotion truth telling quickly according to Maia’s entry.
So we have emotion, truth and quickly to contend with and that is why us Martians need to have guides standing by from other places, preferably Venus, to help us decode these instructions, so that we will develop new skills in relationships that will keep the passion alive.
I know this is kind of tongue in cheek so far but but but …. know this for sure…. if you don’t develop this said skill, you will never never have many years of passion in a long term committed relationship so choose to decide what you want and do the work to learn what it takes to get there.
I believe Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQ) is a greater barometer for health and happiness than IQ. I liked how you explain it Maia.
I’m finding that sometimes just naming the emotion, not necessarily doing anything about it or talking about it is enough to create shift.
Thanks for your post.
BE
Great stuff Maia and I also like what the martian had to say. I really like when we get the mars and venus interpretation! I also think the timing aspect of communication is important when communicating with your kids and vise versa. My oldest always wants to talk about everything she needs to take care of at 11 O’clock at night. Being a problem solver….this stresses me out. I cannot solve anything at bedtime. So, I have asked her to not bring this up to me late at night. Instead I suggested she write it down so she can get it out and sleep, and then I can also take a look at what I can help with when I am ready.