We don’t control the physical things in our lives when we can’t control our emotions; we control the physical things in our lives to control our emotions. We think that if we find a “soul mate,” we can’t get heartbroken, if we’re attractive, we’ll be respected, if other people think of us fondly, we’ll always think of ourselves that way, too.
This emotional disassociation begins in childhood, as the product of being punished for “bad” feelings. Children do not know how to self-regulate their emotions. They don’t understand them, and like the way they don’t understand how their bodies work, or what it means to have manners at the dinner table, or treat others with respect, they must be taught, yet very often, they are not.
Instead, kids are taught that acting out will get them punished, and so begins the cycle of suppression. They learn that their parents will love them more when they are “good,” they shut down the parts of themselves they fear are unacceptable.
What they are responding to is a lack of feeling loved. What they are wired to chase is their parents' love. If it is not being given naturally, they will try to manipulate how the parent sees them so it is created. Unfortunately, in this process, they disassociate from a crucial part of themselves.
And this is how they evolve into panicked, judgmental, anxious adults who cannot function in relationships. This is how they learn that it’s crucial to control everything around them—if they don’t trigger a feeling, they don’t have to deal with it.
The way we raise adults who don’t struggle with anxiety is by being adults who accept anxiety. We must be the voice of reason that they do not have yet. The voices they hear from us—especially in their most fearful and vulnerable moments—will become the voices in their heads someday. The way we raise adults who don’t struggle with anxiety is by being adults who are loving and kind and nonjudgmental. Kids do not do what we tell them; they do what we do. If we want the world to change, we have to change ourselves. If we want to inspire them to cope with their feelings, we must learn to cope with our own.
And right now, we have the very unique privilege of learning how.
Without the emotional intelligence to cope with anxiety, we have the opportunity to consciously grow to understand it. We have the potential to
give our kids and their kids and the kids after that the gift of self-knowledge, but it can only come from giving it to ourselves first. (Ain’t that how it always goes?)
80
the idiot’s guide
TO EMOTIONAL
INTELLIGENCE:
WHY WE NEED PAIN
Pleasure cannot cure pain. This is one of the largest psychological misconceptions out there. Pleasure cannot cure pain because they exist on opposite ends of the same spectrum. Biologically, both our pleasure and pain responses are headquartered in the same part of the brain. The
“pleasure chemical” that brings us joy is involved in the pain response as well. Alan Watts says that is the price we pay for increasing our consciousness. Simply: We cannot be more sensitive to one emotion and not also then experience the others to the same degree.
You know how people say that if you didn’t have rainy days, you wouldn’t be able to appreciate the sunny ones? The truth is that if you didn’t have rainy days, the sunny ones wouldn’t exist. This is called duality.
We live in duality. We exist because of duality. That sounds like a buzzword, but this a very important thing to understand. Our bodies exist in duality: our lungs, hearts, gonads, they all function because they have an opposite and equal half. The same is true of nature: It sustains itself through a cycle of creation and destruction, as does human life. It’s important to understand that we are not separate from the anatomy of the universe. There is no good without bad, high without low, or life without pain. The problem is not the presence of pain. It’s the inability to see the purpose of it.
We believe that “happiness” is the sustained state of feeling “good.” It is because of this belief that we are not happy. Happy people are not people who “feel good” all the time; they are the people who are able to be guided by their negative emotions rather than paralyzed by them.
Happiness is not about “how good you feel,” but why you feel it. A life built on meaning and purpose feels good, though so does a life built on greed and selfishness. Yet one is better than the other. Why? Greed and selfishness are quintessential traits of someone seeking a high to eliminate pain. Meaning and purpose-driven work or ideologies are traits of people
who have accepted their pain and have chosen to work with—not against—
it. The former is destructive and unfulfilling. The latter is more difficult, but worthwhile.
Our pain serves us. It is a crucial, guiding force. Suffering begins to thrive when we don’t listen to it. Imagine what happens when you place your hand on a burning stove. You feel pain because your body is signaling for you to move your hand before it disintegrates. Our emotional lives are no different, except for the fact that we understand the consequence of keeping our hand on the stove. We do not yet understand the consequence of what our emotional pain is guiding us from.
We see pain as being in opposition to our well-being rather than a key component in creating it.
The first thing that’s required to fix this is understanding that we don’t inherently want to avoid pain. In fact, a lot of what we think we want is not what we want at all. (Some of the most emotionally empty and unfulfilled people are those we idolize for being rich, or “successful.”) Next, it’s shifting our goals from wanting to transcend the pain to aiming for a more neutral emotional pH. Some call this “shifting the baseline.” We usually avoid the actual work of adjusting our mental/emotional receptivity because doing so eliminates the possibility of attaining the external “high.”
We think we’re giving up on the dreams and hopes we assumed would make us feel incredible. In reality, what we are giving up is simply the illusion that those things will bring sustained happiness, in favor of a shift in perception, which actually will.
In the absolute simplest terms possible, we call this peace: when neither the desire for a high or the suppression of the low is present. When you’ve shifted your baseline from “survive” to “thrive” and have detached from outcomes, you can enjoy what each day brings.
Once you step out from the endless race of chasing elusive happiness, you realize that you were never running toward something better, you were just trying to outrun yourself. You will also realize that it was only because of pain that you were able to understand this. Your pain lined the pathway; it was guiding you to that understanding all along.
81
EVERY
RELATIONSHIP
you have is
WITH YOURSELF
It’s interesting enough that human beings are the only (known) species that have relationships with themselves, but it’s even more to consider the fact that human beings are the only species that have relationships with themselves through other people.
That is: Our perceptions of other people’s mindsets largely dictate how we see ourselves.
What binds us in love, in companionship, in friendship? Familiarity. The sense that you understand each other at a visceral level. It’s just being able to see yourself in someone else, and more importantly, being able to change your inner narrative when you know, see, and feel that someone else loves and accepts and approves of you no matter what. Ergo: You can do the same. (It’s a survival mechanism, I’m pretty sure.)
The most meaningful relationships tend to be the ones in which we’re completely reflected back to ourselves, because this is what relationships serve to do: open us. We only recognize this in the big, overwhelming, usually heart-wrenching ones, but it’s true of every relationship. And it’s the crux of our issues beyond basic survival: how we are in relation to other people. How we are in relation to ourselves.
The relationships we tend to be most happy in are the ones in which we adopt that other person’s supposed narrative—what we think they think of us.
We feel most loved when we feel understood, when we are thinking that someone else is thinking in alignment with what we need to hear and believe. We feel most loved when we think someone thinks highly of us—
their efforts and displays of affection serving to prove this.
