Emotional Intelligence | Stevehein.com

Motivation, Insecurity, EI, Romance

Today I am feeling a lot more motivated than I did the past two days. Two days ago I found out that someone I have feelings for had sex with someone else. I will be very un-Steve like and not give you all the details. I don’t really think they matter much. They probably never did but writing has long been therapeutic for me.

Mainly what I want to say is that I was making things worse in my mind than they actually were. And I was afraid of being emotionally honest with this person I will call M. M and I don’t really have a romantic relationship so I can’t accuse her of “cheating on me” in the insecure adolescent sense. We have a pretty mature, adult type relationship, although we both also act very childlike at times..

I will give you one example of how I made things worse by my own incorrect and negative thinking. Last night I was very depressed and felt very alone. I felt a little sick thinking that M was sleeping in the same bed with someone else just as I was walking around the streets alone. I didn’t want to tell her how depressed I was. My thinking went something like this:

“If I tell her she might feel burdened by me. She might get tired of having to think about my feelings. She might tell me she can’t handle me feeling bad so much and feeling so insecure and then she might reject me.” M tells me she loves me and sometimes I feel loved by her a lot and pretty secure. When we are together I feel pretty secure for example. But right now we are not in the same city and I haven’t gotten the physical reassurance I would get if we were in the same place.

What is good about our relationship, surely one of the best things about it is that we can tell each other how we feel very specifically and directly. And we don’t hold the other person very responsible for each other’s feelings. I have written about this kind of relationship on my site for years, but this is the first time I have actually had a chance to be in a relationship so close to my ideal in terms of communicating feelings and taking responsibility for our own feelings, while still caring how the other person feels.

I will admit that we are both a little or maybe a lot codependent, but not nearly as much as I used to be in pretty much all of my relationships. So to those of you who are codependent, there may be hope for the future!

M and I have noticed that codependency takes up a lot of time. Being emotionally needy takes up a lot of time. We are probably both still too dependent on each other for our sense of security and feeling cared about, loved, special, important etc. I would like to be less dependent on her at least. It helps me a lot when I have a good emotional support network. I chatted with two very understanding people last night and this helped a lot. One of them recommended I stop avoiding M and tell her how I feel. I decided to email M and then we talked today and cleared up a lot of things. For example I found out that she actually had already stopped seeing the guy she slept, in fact she had stopped seeing him several days ago. So like me, she slept alone last night.

By the way, both of the people who I chatted with last night are teenagers. And they have both thought of or tried to kill themselves. They both are very good at listening and they both are very caring;. I believe they both have high emotional intelligence, which is more evidence to me that the Mayer Salovey Caruso concept of emotional intelligence, and their test, is flawed.

But I want to be sure to say that it is not enough to be able to say “I feel…” followed by a feeling word when you are in a relationship. I have known this but it has become more clear to me recently. Just telling someone how you feel is not enough to make the relationship successful. For example, I could say “I feel betrayed” and I could be being very emotionally honest when I say it, but I could be wanting to change the other person by saying it. I could be wanting to lay a guilt trip on them. I could be saying something that makes little sense rationally. For example, if we have an “open” relationship, then would it be rational to tell someone else I feel betrayed and expect them not to sleep with anyone else just because I felt betrayed? Now if the person had said “I promise you I won’t sleep with anyone else”, and then they did, it would make more sense to say “I feel betrayed.” But that wasn’t the case with M and I.

Still I did feel hurt by what M did. And I felt a little hurtful. I do something very interesting with M though. It is something I would like others to do. I am aware when I am feeling hurtful and so when I talk to her I tell her “I feel a little hurtful.” But as soon as I say it I realize that I do not truly want to hurt her. It makes me feel very sad to think of hurting her. I grew up in a very punitive culture, as most everyone who is reading this did. It is normal for us to think “You did x to me so I am going to do y to you.” We believe the other person deserves it. But this kind of mentality is primitive and it is what we see in the Middle East and it is something which obviously has not brought peace. As I write this the Israelis are still inside Lebanon where they recently carried out a deadly and destructive bombing campaign, mostly with the intent of punishing someone for doing something Israel didn’t like.

In relationships, as in the Middle East the revenge and punishment mentality simply does not work.

And really what good would it do me to hurt someone I cannot control? Someone who is free and well-informed? A person with any self-respect would surely leave anyone who deliberately hurts her. And if she didn’t I or anyone else would lose respect for them and treat them worse in the future.

The reason I felt hurt is because I want to be a special person in M’s life. I want to be in a relationship with M. I want her to want to be in a relationship with me. So hurting her would be totally self-destructive and counter-productive. I can say this very easily and I can see it fairly easily now. But this was not the case until the last few years of my life.

When we were talking I said something like this to M. I've edited it just a bit, but it is nearly exactly what I said right off of the top of my head when we were talking. Please really think about all that it says.

I wish I wasn't raised to be so hurtful and to instead to understand my own needs and pain, and how to communicate both my needs and my pain in a healthy, connection maintaining way.

To me, these few words say a whole lot. In a way I feel good that I can say them. By that I mean I feel good that I have so much insight now into what I was and wasn't taught and to what I need, but I feel bad that I have to say them in the sense that I wish I wouldn't have had to live this long to figure things like this out.

Finally I want to say again that I don't think my EI suddenly went up today. As I have written about before, many of the people who claim to be EI consultants seem to believe that there is a simplistic connection between motivation and EI. They got this from Dan Goleman's very popular and profitable, but misleading and unscientific writings on EI. So I don't believe that a person with high EI is always highly motivated, or a person who is not feeling motivated has low EI, or that EI goes up and down with a person's motivation.

To me, trying to tie EI to motivation in the way Goleman and others have, is simply more exploitation of the concept.

S. Hein
August 17, 2006