Connecting (Emotionally) Intelligently

Are you emotionally intelligent?
Do you even know what this means?
Can you handle your relationship with compassion and fairness?
How easily can you say how you feel AND also say how someone else feels?
Can you say how you feel and control your feelings simultaneously?
What’s your score?

(learn even more about emotions and EQ on my recent TikTok and Instagram videos!)

People don’t go to therapy “to be fixed”.  Lots of people I see are building their EQ.  It helps our clients not just at home, but at school and at work.

What is talked about in therapy?  If I could list the topics in simply a day of sessions let alone a week or a month, one thing that might really strike you is how real (authentic) it is.

 What does that sentence even mean?
If your Emotional Intelligence is low, that might be a harder question for you to answer!
Complaining about others is not therapy.  Therapy is recognizing someone is affecting you, asking why they are in your life in the first place, what your boundaries are and where your boundaries came from and then…. Considering what you want to do about that person you are complaining about.

Being able to talk about these things leads to clarity, relief and even other ripple effects like better sleep and productivity.

Something else therapy does is it helps with is how you are processing what is happening in your life.  Talking through events (for example, whether grief, break-ups, how you parent, or how you perform) helps!  You can try not to think about it and risk processing it as a mini trauma vs. an uncomfortable memory that can literally become simply an event of your past (my associate David also does this through EMDR, which is another method than what Ellen and I do).

So how do you use your therapy to also build your emotional intelligence? It’s still all about that one thing.  It’s not the framework the therapist uses (CBT, DBT, etc) as much as it is about the connection.  They keep saying it is the “secret ingredient” but over the decades it seems to keep coming back to the same “revelation” of just that:  Connection.

Effective Therapy relies on the connection.
Get uncomfortable with us!
And do the work.
And watch your Emotional IQ grow.
We are up to the challenge.

Are you?