Blog Response: Charlotte

All three sources were interesting and had to do with emotional intelligence (obviously), so I’ll just try to combine it all and sense of it as best as I can. 

I’ll start with the article from Psychology Today—totally mind blown! I wish I knew about this sooner (then again, maybe I knew it all along but was too lazy to take action). But like the author says, we all hide our emotions and a lot of the time it can lead to bad stuff…

I’d say I’m a pretty “codependent” person. Whenever someone asks me how I’m doing I give them a half-assed two-word response and go back to them. I know I shouldn’t do that, but I know they won’t listen to me anyway because they’d rather talk about their day. I like making people feel comfortable and content, so I sacrifice sharing my life and feelings. 

Last year, I learned that such a mentality was actually super harmful, traumatic even, and living with four girls, all my friends, all PMSing, and all concealing their feelings was a recipe for disaster. In the end, confrontation was the culprit. None of us had the guts to tell someone to do the dishes or take out the trash. In my case, two of my closes friends started to ignore me and treat my like scum and I had no idea why. It came to the point that I never wanted to go back to my apartment for fear of seeing either of them. I was too scared to ask them and I guess they were too scared to tell me what I was doing wrong. It’s sad to think that all these tucked away emotions were the reason I lost my friends. 

That’s why I think it’s so important to teach emotional literacy in schools (here’s where the other two articles come in!). Confrontation, is probably the hardest thing in the history of the world. You have your story and they have theirs and you both think your right and the other is the bad guy. It’s a complicated talk and most people don’t have the emotional energy to go through such tug-of-war argument. Fights, separation, and a lingering anger are the result. So why not ease the pain and teach kids how to rationally approach such a sticky situation. It’d save them from a lot of stress and anxiety, because the older you get, the more you’re going to run into people that make you feel uncomfortable.