How Emotional Intelligence Works

According to popular wisdom, emotional intelligence comes from certain characteristics:

1. Having the perception and understanding of what you’re feeling.

2. Feeling what you want to feel.

3. Being in control of what you’re feeling.

But nowhere in this definition does it say anything about learning how to better feel your emotions! Why? Because emotions apparently have no real value. “Emotions, at best, are tools to help you succeed. And perhaps along the way, to control how you feel so as to help you control others and how they feel”.

Wrong. Emotions exist to be felt. Period.

Being in touch with what you’re feeling is always good. A little value also exists when you can identify those feelings. And it’s almost heaven when you can feel what you want! But control them? That will absolutely end up painful. Guaranteed. You can’t win that game.

The glaring absence in the conventional study of emotional intelligence is they make no distinction between real emotion and artificial, ‘man-made’ emotion. Not understanding the difference, you’ll always be lost in the trap of trying to manipulate your emotions somehow. Of course you’ll try to control them.

But understand the problem:

By trying to control your emotions, you create artificial emotion. Control creates the very problem that control tries to end. Control is the problem. Not your emotions.

You get lost in a downward spiral of struggling to control your past efforts of control which now create pain in your life. See the problem? Controlling emotions starts in childhood. We started supressing our feelings instead of feeling them.

Of course, it’s only the ‘bad’ ones at first. Control a little anger here, a little fear there. A little sadness. A little despair. A little loneliness. What’s so bad about that? Who wants to feel lonely? Nobody, obviously.

So what happens? We try to not feel the feelings by repressing them. In other words, we seek to control them. And at first it seems to work. They seem to have disappeared and we don’t feel them. Problem solved!

Or is it? Emotions are not old toys you can throw into the closet and forget. They’re a living energy. Powerful. Alive. You can’t kill them by repressing them. What happens when you do this is, slowly, over time, you’re building a time bomb.

Here’s what the experts seem to be missing:

Life is an emotional experience. Your goal is not just to feel good all the time. It’s about opening up your heart wide and full so you can feel every feeling that comes up through your emotional wellspring.

Once you’re willing to feel whatever comes up, then you can pretty much feel what you want to feel. There’s no need to suffer and feel bad first, to then feel what you want. It’s nothing like that. It’s just being willing to feel it all.

Also, when you feel everything, then you’re not going to have the melodrama and emotional meltdowns that conventional emotional intelligence theory wants to save you from. And it heals those black holes of pain, the suffocating web of anxiety, and the explosions of anger.

You don’t want to feel less by controlling your feelings. Feel what’s real, and drop what’s not. The answer is to learn the distinction between real and imaginary 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 stack up, go to this page for a free emotional intelligence test.