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Support and Nature While reading my friend David Style's website, I started thinking a bit about nature. It occurred to me that emotional support is a little like sunshine and rain. A plant can go for a few days without rain or sunshine. Maybe even a long time, but eventually, without either one or the other, the plant will die. In the same way, humans can go for perhaps years without emotional support. They can live in an environment of criticism, disapproval, judgment, fear, discouragement. But eventually the lack of emotional support will kill them. Maybe not necessarily kill them physically but emotionally or spiritually. I don't use the word spiritual often, but here it seems to fit. There is something which we can't see or touch which lives within us, perhaps it connects us to something outside ourselves somehow in a way I do not at all understand. Also, some plants can live longer with no rain. Some can live longer with no sunshine. Humans are the same. Some of us need more emotional support and need different types than others. One thing which is different, though, is how easy it is to see the effects of no rain compared to no emotional support. With a plant, we can see when it is drying out. We can see it before it dies. It may not be so easy to see what is happening, or what is needed with a human though. We might even tell a human, you don't really need more water, you have plenty and there is no reason to be drying out. Another difference is that plants, as far as I know, don't fake their true state of health. Humans though, often learn to be quite good actors and actresses. I spoke to someone the other day here in Australia who told me she had several friends who killed themselves. She said she didn't even know anything was wrong before they died. So let's try to give each other the sun, water and other life-sustaining emotional nutrients we all need, in the amounts that we each need it. S. Hein |
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