Integrity
Working with a couple last year, I mentioned casually that it sounded to me like they wanted an emotionally intelligent relationship and Beth asked me to repeat what I’d said. ”Emotional intelligence?” ”Yes” she said “never heard it before.” I was surprised, but perhaps my decades in California familiarised concepts to me not yet widely known in the UK. And if emotional intelligence is an unfamiliar concept, then I imagine emotional integrity is a new one for some of my readers. So, what is emotional integrity? Well, how about emotional intelligence on steroids?!
Daniel Goleman, Ph.D. coined the term EQ to mean Emotional Intelligence (and has written a book by the same name) and this refers to someone who has an intelligence beyond the IQ (intelligence quotient) with which most of us are familiar. EQ is about our emotional landscape. Are we familiar with the terrain of mood and emotions? Are we able to experience a wide range of emotions (the good, the bad and the ugly)? Can we communicate our moods and emotions with clarity and honesty? Can we manage our moods, are we able to access them, act accordingly and process them? For some, I get that even these questions will be somewhat alien.
The relationships experts talk about partnership needing to be an emotional safe zone – where we know, absolutely without a doubt, that we are safe to explore our deepest joy and our darkest fears with one another, without fear of attack or retribution. Such a safe zone can only be created when we have a deep knowledge of one another, a means of managing conflict, appreciate and nurture each other, and a capacity for emotional integrity that provides a safety net to reinforce an already strong foundation.
I often find my clients don’t know what an emotional safety net or zone is because they didn’t have one as a child. And this points to the first obstacle facing many couples in building this part of their foundation. Pretty difficult to build anything without a model. If, like the majority of us, you have “hot buttons” or triggers which set off moods of anger, anxiety, fear, sadness or a desire to distance and protect yourself, they were likely developed for good reason while you were growing up to defend against things going on around you which were difficult to manage.
To consider:
- if you are in a relationship, does it provide an emotional safety zone? if not, how do you know and what keeps it from being safe?
- what could make your relationship have an emotional safety zone?
- what would you need to do differently to provide safety? how about your partner?
- do you know what your emotional triggers are? your partner’s?
- if you are single, what do you look for in a potential partner to tell you whether or not they have the capacity for having emotional integrity? providing an emotional safety zone?
- do you know what your emotional triggers are? where they came from?
- reflecting on past relationships, can you see how partners’ triggers have affected you?
