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