Emotional competence

I had a ridiculously large pile of library books that sounded interesting that I had begun reading. Some I started and decided that I didn't need to finish them. Either they weren't what I thought they would be it they were so similar to books I had already read that there wasn't a whole lot of new information to be gleaned from them. I dislike it when the partly started pile of books grows too large, so the past few days I've been sorting through and deciding what I really want to finish. 

One of the books that hasn't made the cut because it falls into the second category is When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection by Gabor Maté. I like the book, but I have read quite a few on very similar topics and it's time to move on. However there were two passages I had marked that I wanted to share with you. 

"There is another way to look at it [the body's fight or flight response]. The fight-or-flight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all. As Selye [author of The Stress of Life] pointed out, the salient stressors in the lives of most human beings today -- at least in the industrialized world -- are emotional. Just like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals." (p. 36)

And...

"Emotional competence requires

• The capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress;
• The ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries;
• The facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past. What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood. If distinctions between past and present blur, we will perceive loss or the threat of loss where none exists; and
• The awareness of those genuine needs that do require satisfaction, rather than their repression for the sake of gaining acceptance or approval of others.

Stress occurs in the absence of these criteria, and it leads to the disruption of homeostasis. Chronic disruption results in ill health. In each of the individual histories in this book, one or more aspect of emotional competence was significantly compromised, usually in ways entirely unknown to the person involved.

Emotional competence is what we need to develop is we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal. We need to foster emotional competence in our children, as the best preventive medicine." (p. 38)

I know I have said it before, but working with horses is an excellent way of developing self-awareness into our physical and emotional state. I offer sessions for adults as well as parent-child sessions. Much of what we do revolves around the idea of learning to recognize emotional states. Bittersweet Farm LLC