Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

Emotional Intelligence
Why it Can Matter More Than IQ
Copyright © 1995 Daniel Goleman
Bantam Books; New York,New York
ISBN 0-553-37506-7

Jacket Blurb:

Is IQ destiny? Not nearly as much as we think. Daniel Goleman’s fascinating and persuasive book argues that our view of human intelligence is far too narrow, ignoring a crucial range of abilities that matter immensely in terms of how we do in life.

Drawing on groundbreaking brain and behavioral research, Goleman shows the factors at work when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well. These factors, which include self-awareness, self-discipline and empathy, add up to a different way of being smart – one he terms “emotional intelligence.” While childhood is a critical time for its development, emotional intelligence is not fixed at birth. It can be nurtured and strengthened throughout adulthood – with immediate benefits to our health, our relationships, and our work.

This eye-opening book offers a new vision of excellence and vital new curriculum for life that can change the future for us and for our children.

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Kat’s Book Nook Review

I first picked up this twelve year old classic with the intention of learning something useful I could share with my clients. However, I doubted that I could actually learn anything I hadn’t already learned.

I was wrong.

Not only did I learn about how to be more emotionally intelligent myself, but I also learned that – had I known about the book back in 1995 when it was first published – I could have been saved the recurring emotional pain that I have continued to experience in my own personal life because of extreme trauma that occurred when I was a young teenager back in the late-60s/mid-70s.

Isn’t that why so many therapists become therapists? To help others through and out of the same kind of emotional pain they, themselves have endured?

Being an astrologer as well, I wondered if some of us aren’t predisposed to experiencing emotionally debilitating events which result in post traumatic stress disorder. I also wondered if a person’s astrological sign, or more precisely, the element (i.e. fire, earth, air and water) in which our natal birth planets are located, might not have something to do with one’s tendency to not only be emotional in the first place, but to ruminate.

In astrology, water is equated with emotion, fire with passion, air with stoicism or the lack of emotion, and earth with dullness and bluntness. I am a fire sign with six planets and my ascendant or Rising Sign in a fire element, and five of those same planets plus an additional planet (which is in Cancer and ruled by the Moon which symbolizes our deepest emotions) in a water house. Consequently, I tend to be passionate and emotional. I am also extremely empathic: I feel what others feel to an extreme degree. And, yes, I speak in extremes, because that is what the fire and water signs do. And I am both.

Therefore, I was looking for something that would help me to be less emotional.

Additionally, my initial motivation was to assist others to be emotionally stable in their relationships. However, as I continued to read, I realized that emotions are rarely isolated or static occurrences. They don’t exist in a vacuum, in other words. Generally, there is a reason we become emotional, even if often (for those of us who have PTSD) that emotion is triggered by an event or by something someone in our current life does, and thus the emotion that stems from an event that occurred in the past, is projected onto a virtually innocent individual in our present.

Consequently, I realized also that before I could figure out how to solve my emotional ‘problem,’ I needed to get to the root or cause of it.

So what, you might wonder, does emotional intelligence have to do with relationships? Everything. The way in which we relate to each other determines the success – or lack thereof – of any relationship.

Unfortunately, I had to learn this the hard way. My second husband was a wonderful man who had no idea what he was getting into when he married me. And I – unsuspecting as I was – had no idea how insidious the effects of the trauma I had previously experienced, were, and how deeply they would affect my husband, myself, and our marriage. In fact, because I hadn’t received the help that I should have received when I was a teenager, by the time I married my second husband in my late teens, even though I was numb most of the time (from shock), my emotions were nearly out of control to the point that I ended up divorcing him by my mid twenties because I feared that I might harm him.

This, of course, is an extreme case. But then, I was so full of emotion that it’s not surprising that I went overboard. Had I received the help I needed as soon as the traumas occurred, I would have been able to work through the resulting emotions without projecting and inflicting that pain onto my husband.

In the chapter entitled, Trauma and Emotional Relearning, Goleman says that, “As patients retell the horrific details of the trauma, the memory starts to be transformed, both in the emotional meaning and in its effects on the emotional brain.”

Somehow, I instinctively knew that. I tried to talk to anyone and everyone I could. Sadly, no one would listen. Not even the police. And I didn’t have a therapist at the time. My husband, bless his heart, wasn’t able to handle my attempted confessions; he just didn’t know what to do for me. Plus, being an air sign, he tended to run at the first sign of emotion.

Additionally, Goleman states that “patients need to mourn the loss the trauma brought – whether an injury, the death of a loved one or a rupture in a relationship, regret over some step not taken to save someone, or just the shattering of confidence that people can be trusted. The mourning that ensues while retelling such painful events serves a crucial purpose: it marks the ability to let go of the trauma itself to some degree. It means that instead of being perpetually captured by this moment in the past [which PTSD patients are prone to do], patients can start to look ahead, even to hope, and to rebuild a new life free of the trauma’s grip.”

It’s been forty years, exactly, since the first traumatic event occurred. But thanks to the therapy I finally received that helped me to put those events in the past where they belong and leave them there, I’m finally able to say that I have reached that level of emotional intelligence for which I had been striving.

Many thanks to Dan Goleman for his excellent work.

Namaste,

Kat Starwolf

Radical Forgiveness: Making Room for the Miracle

© 2002 Colin C. Tipping
Global Thirteen Publications; Marietta, Georgia, USA
ISBN 0-9704814-1-1

Jacket Blurb:

This book will more than likely change your life. It will transform how you view your past and what is occurring for you in the present, especially where relationships are concerned. Unlike other forms of forgiveness, Radical Forgiveness is easily achieved and virtually immediate, enabling you to let go of being a victim, open your heart and raise your vibration. The simple, easy-tools provided help you let go of the emotional baggage of the past and to feel the joy of living in total surrender to the process of life as it unfolds – however it unfolds. The result is vastly increased happiness, personal power and freedom.

Kat’s Book Nook Review

Each of us, whether we wish to admit it or not, has emotional baggage. Even the most cerebral, in-his-head, die-hard Gemini who would rather do anything other than emote – especially about the past and those sticky issues known as feelings – has accumulated baggage that he has stuffed away in his mental and emotional attic. The problem is, we can stuff and bury and hide as much and as diligently as we’d like, but that baggage has a way of resurfacing when we least expect it. And often, when it does reappear, it brings with it lots of painful, festering memories, that unless we’re prepared to finally and fully confront, only get worse.

Short of spending ten years in therapy, what does one do to short circuit the process required to eradicate painful memories?

According to Colin Tipping, the quickest and easiest way is through Radical Forgiveness which “challenges us to radically shift our perception of the world and our interpretations of what happens to us in our lives so we can stop being a victim.”

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m all for that. Who wants to be a victim?

Due to the fact that I’ve continued to experience the residual fallout from several ancient, yet severe issues in my own life, I decided to utilize Mr. Tipping’s suggestions. What did I have to lose, except the painful baggage I’ve been carrying around with me for the past 40 or more years? (And boy, are MY arms tired!) Miraculously, his suggestions actually worked.

One of the things I’ve come to realize independent of Radical Forgiveness, is that our view or our perception of events colors them greatly. That is, an event may not have happened exactly as we remember it, nor have been as traumatic as we remember it. But because of our own filters, which include the experiences we’ve accrued that have shaped who we are, we each tend to perceive the same situation a bit differently.

Conversely, sometimes those same events are as traumatic as we remember them, and attempting to release the pain, anger and trauma that so often accompanies such memories can be quite difficult, at best, but oh-so-rewarding if it can be done.

The challenge is that, for someone who has, say, post traumatic stress disorder, letting go of the past can be extremely difficult. According to Tipping, “Forgiveness should be about letting go of the past, and refusing to be controlled by it.” Easier said than done, one would think. And for me, it has been.

Additionally, even within traditional religions, most of which teach some form of forgiveness, we’re not prepared to deal with the feelings that inundate us when attempting to forgive someone for something as heinous as child sexual abuse or murder.

The one possible ‘bone of contention’ in Tipping’s offerings is that he bases the concept of Radical Forgiveness on reincarnation. While I, personally, believe in reincarnation, not everyone does. However, at one point in my life I was a ‘devout’ Christian. Therefore, I was able to peruse Radical Forgiveness through the eyes of someone with Bible-based beliefs, as well. Unfortunately, I found it difficult to reconcile what I was learning from Tipping’s book, with what I had been taught as a Christian. However, once I shifted my perspective to a more Universal, if you will, perspective, I was finally able to grasp and apply his theory of Radical Forgiveness. And, for me, it worked.

From this more Universal perspective what I was able to see was that, as Tipping points out, there is nothing to forgive. Everything is as it was meant to be.

The concept for this is based on the ‘assumption’ that we, as Souls or spiritual beings, are having a human experience and have come to earth to learn over a period of numerous incarnations. Says Tipping, “…our Souls keep coming back time after time again with others from our soul group to resolve particular karmic imbalances.”

My own view, even previous to reading Radical Forgiveness, has been that we, as reincarnating Souls, write out the script we will use for each incarnation. As we’re composing our script in the In Between Time, we get together with those of our Soul Family whom we wish to assist us in our Journey, and request their assistance at certain points in our upcoming incarnation.

Seeing what happened to me from this perspective: that is, that those by whom I was harmed were merely following my own script so that I could learn whatever lesson I felt I needed to learn this time around, has helped tremendously. I no longer cast blame or feel anger. I’ve come to the realization that continuing to hold on to angry memories that do nothing more than cause pain and resentment and prevent me from accomplishing what I came here to do only holds me back from reaching my ultimate goal.

Along with loads of excellent advice, Tipping shows how to ‘collapse the story,’ or condense it, utilizing a worksheet that can be downloaded for free from the Radical Forgiveness website.

Yet, while I’ve been able to finally forgive those who harmed me when I was a child, it’s been a bit more difficult for me to forgive myself for things which I’ve done or said to harm someone else. Especially my 2^nd husband. But I’ve learned that this is all part of the ‘game’ of life which we, as Souls, play. And after all, we’re all ‘works in progress.’

Namaste,

Kat Starwolf