Emotional Intelligence And Emotional Competence In Psychotherapy And Self-development

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

A huge number of articles and books have been written about emotional intelligence and emotional competence - the topic is now quite fashionable. However, in addition to being fashionable, she is also important. In some ways, even key - in the sense that it is very important for working with the human psyche both in psychotherapy and in self-development.

The motive for contacting a psychologist is most often some kind of suffering, emotional suffering, a large number of negative emotions experienced by a person. It is a negative emotional state, often chronic, accompanied sometimes by anxiety, sometimes by poor physical well-being, sometimes by something else that makes you come to a psychologist with the goal of helping to do something about it, helping to get rid of this negative state. Often times, the person visiting the therapist is not even aware of these emotions. He just feels bad, but when analyzing what exactly is bad, it turns out that the person is experiencing a lot of negative emotions.

What do you feel? One of the most frequent questions of a psychologist. This is where the work usually begins - with a description of your situation and your feelings about this situation. Emotional competence lies precisely in the ability to recognize your emotions, and then only in working on them. Managing your own (with the development of the skill - and other people's) emotions.

The concept of emotional intelligence (EI) appeared not so long ago - in the 1990s, and was developed by American psychologists Peter Salovei and John Mayer. EI includes the ability to understand emotions in oneself and others, as well as to emotionally adapt to changing environments and changing demands. You can read the works of these authors, as well as many of their followers, but we are now interested in a specific aspect of this problem - namely, the development of the emotional competence of a person who turned to a psychologist as a way to get rid of suffering (more precisely, to reduce the level of suffering, since to completely get rid of any suffering impossible).

So, the client turns to a psychotherapist about some of his condition, which he does not like, which makes him suffer. This can be a depressive state, increased anxiety, feelings of hopelessness, apathy, unwillingness to do anything, etc. In this state, if you start to disassemble it, there are a lot of things. Here are some thoughts about my own, for example, failure, worthlessness (if we are talking about a depressive state) - nothing will work for me, nothing good in my life will be … Often these are some somatic manifestations: pain in various parts body, pressure, etc. Well, and the component that interests us now is emotions.

People usually regard a wide range of emotions they experience as negative: sadness, sadness, despondency, apathy, shame, guilt, etc. The first stage in such work (and, at the same time, increasing the level of one's emotional competence) is the ability to recognize these emotions. The person learns to recognize these emotions and name them. It may seem surprising, but even the simple fact of naming the emotion we are experiencing now has a therapeutic effect. The client understands that he is not just feeling bad now, but how and why. What kind of emotions make him feel unhappy, rejected, etc. And that's about emotional competence.

The next moment is very interesting here. At the moment when we define and name an emotion, we, as it were, separate it from ourselves, consider it from the outside. By naming and classifying an emotion, we make it the object of our study and, thereby, reduce the intensity of this emotion itself, weaken the power of affect. Emotion, at the moment when we start talking about it, becomes information with which we can work. Then, already, working in one or another approach, the psychologist can offer to understand the client - why in this typical situation he begins to experience just such emotions, when in childhood he learned this. Why, for example, if another person does not maintain communication with him, he feels resentment and anger - perhaps there are some episodes in childhood when, when ignored by the mother, it was the manifestation of these emotions that forced her to return to him, etc. …

The next step can be the very principle of dividing emotions into positive and negative. Studying - how and for what we used our affects in childhood, what we defended ourselves from, what our emotional manifestations were frustrated and suppressed by our parents and our immediate environment, how it turned out that we now suppress our own, often quite necessary and necessary emotional reactions. But more on that in the next article.