“Having healthy boundaries not only requires being able to say “no”, but also being willing and able to enforce that “no” when necessary.”
― Jessica Moore
Intro
Dating someone who hasn’t been appropriately loved takes a lot of emotional patience. It’s not that it’s your fault or anything. It’s just unhealed trauma they haven’t coped with yet, which makes it harder for them to accept pure & genuine love. Also, they might have difficulty accepting it because they don’t know much better.
We usually know this as “baggage.” The important question is, is it fair for someone to deal with someone else’s baggage? Well, this I will save for another post because it deserves its own.
So let’s talk about emotional intelligence & how important this is to have. Why is it important? Emotional intelligence gives you the unique ability to identify and control your emotions while also understanding the emotions of others. When we can’t control our emotions, it leads us into conflicts we can’t understand. It will make us wonder why you were in the situation to begin with.
Let’s take a look at some critical points as to why increasing your emotional intelligence is important in your everyday life.
Handling Tough & Emotional Conversations
Sometimes when we talk to people we are interested in, it’s hard to explain how we feel. So we start acting like our non-typical selves and start saying words that even we don’t understand. Dealing with difficult conversations can stir up all sorts of emotions. However, when you start to have more empathy towards situations, being able to connect during a conversation emotionally goes a long way.
This has a more substantial effect when you engage in a conversation with someone who comes from a tragic background. It’s already hard for that person to open up about the situations they went through. So if they approach someone who understands their origin, a new profound bond will be born.
Assessing Situations Easier
As we discussed earlier, understanding someone’s perspective and emotion about the topic makes engagement easier. The bond between you and your friends/relationships tends to grow naturally. Now, if we gain the ability to do this with our friends, how about applying it to our everyday life? Every time we approach a situation, our emotions give us our first response to it. So having emotional maturity will help give you a clearer vision of how to assess a situation.
Recognizing Body Language
Even though speaking is our primary source of communication, our body communicates as well. Our bodies convey our thoughts and feelings and send messages that others pick up to use. It’s pretty essential to learn this type of skill so you can apply it to your everyday life. For example, it helps when trying to build relationships or searching for a partner because when they communicate with you, it’ll be easier if their words are genuine. You’ll notice patterns such as their voice tone and the eye contact they make when saying certain words.
So when you become more sensitive and emotionally aware, you won’t be easily fooled by words or appearances anymore. Recognizing bad energy, weird vibes, or people with bad interiors becomes easier. You’ll start responding to their intentions because you are more emotionally mature than they are & they won’t know how to persuade you anymore.
Emotional Self-Control
Emotional self-control is the ability to stay in control of your disruptive emotions. It helps to keep our impulses in check and maintain our effectiveness in stressful or hostile situations. Unfortunately, when we get upset, we let our emotions run through us more, in which we start to lose the ability to focus and think logically.
Being able to manage the feelings of stress, anger, fear, or even joy stems from experiences you dealt with in life. Past experiences tend to mould your character until you reach peak adulthood.
Even then, we can go back to the years as an infant plays crucial. For example, suppose your parents raised you in a healthy environment that taught you to value your emotions. In that case, you become more emotionally prepared for situations that will cause more emotional damage.
Compared to people whose parents did not value their emotions as an infant, this increases the chances of distancing themselves from their emotions. As a result, it becomes harder to understand how to cope with emotional pain.
This is why self-reflection is a crucial method to practice because you learn more about yourself. You understand why you feel the way you feel in certain circumstances. When you keep practicing, you’ll become more aware of who you are, how to take control of your emotions & react more responsibly.
Conclusion
“We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us — -how we can take it, what we do with it —- and that is what really counts in the end.”
– Joseph Fort Newton
The best thing you can do for yourself is raise your emotional intelligence level to the point where toxic people’s mind games won’t play or affect —remembering these triggers from past experiences so that narcissistic-type people can’t gaslight you—having the ability to say no to people who try to manipulate you into changing your no to a yes.
I’m sure we got to a point in our life where we have experienced this at least once. We live in a society where perception is everything. Being genuine has become a rarity.
I came across a quote the other day which caught my attention. It went, “My experience is not the experience of everyone else, and I don’t expect it to be.” It took some time to digest this statement and realize that most people view life through their own goggles. Remember the saying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes?
We naturally think about ourselves first before we think of others. Sometimes we feel we have gone through the worst relationship(s) compared to anyone else. Until you hear about someone else’s unfortunate history and realize there are experiences you haven’t felt or seen yet.
We must remember that we are not born with a high degree of emotional intelligence. So, unfortunately, we have to go through experiences that will change our perception of how we view life to see or understand what we just went through entirely. These epiphany type of events is what stirs us down the path of self-reflection; it’s just our choice to decide if we want to do it.
What methods do you practice that help calm you down?
What type of events have you experienced that changed your life?
If you have any other questions, feel free to leave a comment!