8 Keys to Building Your Best Relationships (8 Keys to Mental Health) by Daniel A. Hughes

Author:Daniel A. Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

KEY 5

BUILD YOUR EMOTIONAL COMPETENCE

Ann Marie was in her second month at the clinic where she worked as a speech therapist when she started to spend some of her free time with Brenda, an occupational therapist. They had a lot in common and enjoyed their lunches together. She envisioned Brenda as a friend to get together with once in a while on weekends. If only Brenda didn’t like Christine so much! Ann Marie didn’t see what she saw in her. Christine seemed shallow and moody and too into drama. It didn’t really matter though; she and Brenda were just friends.

As the months went on Ann Marie liked spending more and more time with Brenda. Ann Marie felt safe with her, they had a lot of fun together, they helped each other through the frustrations of work and going out with guys, and they exchanged little gifts. As these positive experiences and related emotions increased, so too did some distressing ones. Ann Marie would often feel disappointed when Brenda had commitments with others, or when she was withdrawn or irritable. She became a bit jealous when Brenda mentioned that she and Christine had made plans to do something together. She became angry when Brenda did not remember her birthday. She was hurt when Brenda didn’t seem interested when she told her about how worried she was about her sister’s divorce.

As relationships develop, they are tinged with more and more emotions. Great! Emotions add vitality to our lives. Emotions give energy to our thoughts and actions. However, just as relationships engender enjoyable emotions, they create stressful ones. Qualities that we like about a relationship tend to have parallel qualities that we do not like. We like that we spend time with a person, but we don’t like that there are times when we are not together. We like when our friend is interested in a story we’re telling, but we don’t like it when our friend does not appear to be interested in our story. We like knowing that we can rely on someone in some things, we don’t like that we can’t rely on the same person for other things. As sharing what we have in common becomes more enjoyable to us, conflicts become more stressful. The more important the relationship becomes, the more intense are the emotions—both positive and negative—associated with it. If we want to avoid intense relationships, we might choose to avoid having important relationships. Of course, we might then find ourselves struggling with emotions associated with loneliness.

It is relevant here to consider that the word mind refers to the flow of energy and information in our brain. (This clear, succinct, definition of mind is presented by Dan Siegel in many of his writings, including The Developing Mind, referred to earlier.) Our reflective functioning represents an important component of the information in our mind, while our emotions represent the energy of our mind. Remember from the previous chapter, reflective functioning is what our minds consider, and emotional functioning is how our minds consider it.

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