Emotional Intelligence

I’m learning how to understand and manage my emotions rather late in life. Growing up, I thought of myself as a rational person; I would have sudden, severe bursts of anger but didn’t much know how to manage them. After leaving home, I never got close enough to anyone to feel that angry; I didn’t cry much—so it was rather a shock when my first year of marriage involved all kinds of angry and emotional outbursts that I had great difficulty managing.

Since then, I’ve learned a lot about regulating emotions—and it is something that has to be learned. Emotions aren’t just something that you “fall into” or have no control of, and you can’t fully address behavior sometimes until you address the root emotion. Looking back, the process has involved a few steps.

First, identifying my emotion. Calling out what I’m feeling before it automatically starts controlling my behavior and mind, which requires a certain level of awareness and intentionality. Before I start banging doors or shutting down from someone, stepping back to ask: okay, am I feeling frustrated? angry? hurt? sad? What’s going on? And where on the spectrum of that emotion am I? How far has it already carried me?

Then I think I sort of acknowledge and process the emotion. Okay, I feel hurt. Why do I feel hurt? How long have I been feeling hurt? I talk to myself about it. Because sometimes it’s easy to suppress how I feel, particularly if it seems illogical, or high-maintenance, like it would take a long time to deal with. But repressed emotions always come screaming back later, often to a degree that’s much harder to manage and ends up hurting someone.

Then I figure out how and whether to express the emotion, which involves evaluating the emotion and being aware of others. Evaluating the emotion is asking: is there a constructive or okay way for me to let this emotion out? Sometimes when I’m sad, I need to curl up in bed and cry awhile, and that’s okay. Sometimes when I’m mad, I need to close myself into a room to throw some pillows until I calm down. But sometimes the emotion is bad, or bad to express, and I need to help myself get out of it. If I’m feeling disgust I may need to call out the selfish or judgmental attitude that led me there and stop my train of thought. If I’m feeling overly anxious I may need to recall some verses to mind to reorient myself in the truth.

The second part of regulating expression is being aware of others: how are my feelings affecting the mood of the whole house? How are they changing my facial expressions or tone of voice, and what are my kids picking up on? Am I crossing a line of behavior I shouldn’t be? Am I getting so bogged down in the feeling I can’t function enough?

Learning how to identify, evaluate, control and express emotions is something we try to teach our kids. We try to give them the words for how they are feeling, which sometimes involves drawing cartoon expressions, or offering them suggestions to pick from. We encourage them to tell us why they feel this way and understand their perspective. We try to be present with them in the emotion—usually that means holding them, or telling them it’s okay that they feel sad, or hurt, or mad. We try to help them be aware of how their emotions affect other people, and be clear on what lines can and can’t be crossed. It’s okay if you’re angry to have some alone time in your room, or maybe punch a pillow, for example, but it’s not okay to hit someone, or say a bad word about someone. I try to explain to them how I’m feeling, to help them get used to the vocabulary and hear someone else processing how they feel.

If it sounds exhausting, it is, particularly at the beginning. But it gets easier and easier. Right now Elijah has prolonged tantrums and I have to walk him through the steps as best I can, but Eric can come up and tell me he feels mad without hurting someone else to show it, and tell me he needs some time alone but then can I hold him, but without talking? And Ellie will disappear and I’ll find out later she went to her room because she was feeling frustrated from being tired. Of course there’s plenty of line-crossing too, but if they’re going to learn how to manage their emotions anywhere, how to appreciate their feelings but not be ruled by them, home is probably the place to do it.