542 - Is Emotional Intelligence the Key to Getting Out of Our Own Way?

Podcast

Aug 12

Thoughts, feelings, and facts

We often get in our own way and end up sabotaging our own success. We do it to ourselves, but we also sometimes do it to our relationships, so for this episode we explored emotional intelligence and how to stop engaging in destructive patterns of behavior.

Thoughts are subjective, sometimes unproductive, sometimes devolve into ruminations, and originate from your cerebral cortex.
Feelings are deeply personal, subjective, originate from your limbic system, and sometimes can cause or be a source of misinterpretation, as they are shaped by our individual experiences.
Facts are objective, the reality of the situation, what clearly and concretely occurred, and can be difficult to determine when in the midst of conflict.

Some of us are more thought-driven, others are more driven by feelings, but either way, sometimes our emotions get in the way of our success and happiness and we engage in destructive patterns. Even if we want to do the right thing, we have trouble getting out of our own way.

Some ways that you might be stuck in your own way could look like:

Holding onto limiting beliefs about yourself.
Procrastination on big and important projects.
Being overly perfectionistic.
Being overly judgmental of yourself and the people around you.
Having an overly negative attitude/complaining.
Having apathy about the people or important things in your life.
Making excuses regarding important decisions.
Not learning from past mistakes.
Engaging in destructive addictions and behaviors.

A few ways you might sabotage yourself or your relationship could look like:

Picking fights or withdrawing when things get intimate.
Constantly testing your partner’s love or loyalty.
Avoiding vulnerability out of fear of rejection.
Being obsessed or clingy with your partner.
Choosing to people please or fawn rather than stand up for yourself.
Repeating toxic patterns from past relationships.

These behaviors are completely understandable and no one can stop maladaptive behavior entirely, but even if they feel better in the short term, they can have long term effects as well.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.
The Oxford Dictionary

Daniel Goleman, author of the 1995 book Emotional Intelligence, outlined five different components to the term:

Self-awareness: The ability to recognize what you are feeling, to understand your habitual emotional responses to events and to recognize how your emotions affect your behavior and performance. When you are self-aware, you see yourself as others see you, and have a good sense of your own abilities and current limitations.
Managing emotions: The ability to stay focused and think clearly even when experiencing powerful emotions. Being able to manage your own emotional state is essential for taking responsibility for your actions, and can save you from hasty decisions that you later regret.
Motivating oneself: The ability to use your deepest emotions to move and guide you towards your goals. This ability enables you to take the initiative and to persevere in the face of obstacles and setbacks.
Empathy: The ability to sense, understand and respond to what other people are feeling. Self-awareness is essential to having empathy with others. If you are not aware of your own emotions, you will not be able to read the emotions of others.
Social Skills: The ability to manage, influence and inspire emotions in others. Being able to handle emotions in relationships and being able to influence and inspire others are essential foundation skills for successful teamwork and leadership.

Emotional intelligence sounds great on paper, and it can help us be more cognizant of our own behavior, but knowing what it is doesn’t really help us if we can’t develop the skills necessary for it.

Here are some tips on strengthening and developing skills around some of the components of emotional intelligence:

Developing self-awareness:
- Cultivate a mindfulness practice like meditation. Remember that mindfulness is building an awareness of yourself and your emotions without having judgment of them.
- Learn to identify your emotional triggers and dig into why they may be occurring (for example: something from the past is causing a more intense emotional reaction than is necessary).
- Journaling prompts to explore your reactions and patterns:
2. Practicing self-regulation:
- Try techniques for calming your nervous system (e.g., breathwork, HALT, meditation).
- Build tolerance for emotional discomfort:
- Reframe negative self-talk:
3. Identify and interrupt self-sabotage loops:
- Catch yourself in “protective” behaviors that limit intimacy such as shutting down when a partner asks how you are feeling, saying, “It’s fine” or “It’s nothing” when something is actually wrong, resorting to people pleasing behaviors instead of voicing what it is that you want or need, or starting arguments when things are going well in a relationship.
- Set small, achievable goals to shift your patterns.
- Use relationship check-ins to build mutual awareness and growth.

Being emotionally intelligent doesn’t mean being perfect, but every step you take to understand yourself, and being present, curious, and honest about your relationships will help them become stronger and healthier.

Transcript

This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're talking about how difficult it is to be objective about our own thoughts and emotions. Sometimes our insecurities and negative beliefs about ourselves can cause us to engage in self-sabotaging behavior. How do we stop these intrusive thoughts from hurting our relationships and ourselves, and how can we learn to get out of our own way?

We're going to explore all of that and what we mean by all of those terms in this episode. If you'd like to learn more about our fundamental communication tools that we reference all the time on this show, then check out our book Multiamory Essential Tools for Modern Relationships. It covers our most used communication tools for all types of relationships, and you can find links to buy it in print, ebook, and audiobook formats at multiamory.com/abook

Emily: Have the two of you ever had just a thought that has been pervasive throughout a period of time in your life that led you to feel like, "I really can't get past this thought. It keeps coming up again and again. Maybe even that thought is leading me to act in a specific way in my life or in my relationships."

Something like, "I'm not worthy of being loved," or "My partner's too good for me," or "I'm damaged goods," or something like that. I definitely have thought all of those things, and I find myself maybe subconsciously feeling like, "Oh, something's got to be wrong here," if that makes sense.

Jase: Like seeking a problem.

Emily: Sure, yes. Trying to find a problem or trying to create a problem and being pissed at yourself after the fact, why did that happen, why did I do that, why did I think that, but having an issue come up simply because you have these kinds of limiting beliefs about yourself.

Jase: Sure. With your question, like reading those, I'm like, yes. Good episode, everyone. See you next week.

Jase: I'd rather not open that can of worms. Yes, definitely have had those. Sometimes even just like a feeling that's hard to shake, that's maybe not even tied to such a specific thought, but just that, getting stuck in a feeling, if you will, of just like feeling sad or feeling anxious or feeling worried about something or like, yes, that can be hard to shake that and can lead to some self-destructive behavior.

We could get into that, but everything from like really wanting to drink or smoke or something, or it could just be procrastinating and not getting the stuff done that I actually know I need to for either self-care or for keeping a job or something like that. I've definitely gone through all of those permutations.

Dedeker: It makes me think of, I know there's a certain period of time in my journal when I go back and revisit old journal entries that there's a particular relationship, where in these journal entries I was writing about feeling NRE for this person, but really determined to not let myself feel NRE, because I was just so convinced he's going to reject me, it's going to go bad, it's not going to go anywhere good, you can't trust your own feelings of NRE.

Whenever I read these entries, I feel really, really sad for myself, because even looking back and seeing how that relationship eventually didn't work out, I really wish that I just let myself feel one of God's only natural highs-

-in this existence, instead of just freaking out about it the whole time. I don't know if I can do the calculus of figuring out, did that particular self-sabotage spell the end of the relationship. I do think at the very least, my own doubts for sure sabotage my ability to even be present and enjoy what was happening in the relationship in that present moment.

Emily: Oh, that's a huge one there. Yes, I think that's the big thing that I find myself doing sometimes at this particular moment in my life, where I'm like, "Things are going really well. Oh, God, that's really bad," because it's the shoe is going to drop.

Emily: I agree that all of those things are just something that I think probably most people have to deal with at some point in their lives. After listening to an episode of the Ezra Klein podcast, and we've talked about him some on the show, really great podcast, New York Times podcast, go out there and check it out. He had a Buddhist psychiatrist named Mark Epstein. The title of the episode was Why Does My Mind Keep Thinking That? They talked a lot about meditation and the mind, and why the mind ruminates on certain thoughts.

I wanted to have a conversation with the two of you briefly about that and just start this off with those questions of why do we get into these patterns of obtrusive thoughts and mental ruminations, and how those can lead to bad behaviors on our part, and maybe how things like mindfulness in general can help get us out of that.

Dedeker, I mean specifically you, I know that you've had a really long history and practice of meditation. Have you felt that that's helped you in these issues over the years, if this ever has been an issue for you?

Dedeker: I think the biggest thing that meditating has done for me is, at the very least, it makes it a little bit easier to catch myself when I am ruminating in this particular way. For instance, actually I have a memory of years ago, when I was caught up in some relationship drama that I was driving, and I was just thinking about this, thinking about this, obsessing over it, obsessing over it, obsessing over it, that at a certain moment there's, my observer comes online, is sometimes what it's called.

The observer actually comes online to be able to be like, you're thinking about that a lot. Just being able to reach for that observation sometimes is enough to, not like magic wand, stop the thoughts or stop the upset, but at least to turn the volume down a little bit, to have a sense of control.

Not necessarily control of the thoughts themselves, but maybe control more of my attention and how much attention and weight I put on particular ruminations, or thoughts that like, if I can catch myself and even literally just save it to myself, like without any judgment, not like, "You should stop thinking about this," or, "Wow, you're really obsessing over this. That's really stupid of you." Literally just being like, your brain is having a lot of thoughts about this subject right now. Yes, it's not magical, but it definitely serves as a little bit of an interrupt.

Emily: Jase, do you agree with that in any of the stuff that you've done? I know you've been on more silent retreats than I have. For instance, I went on one with the two of you, and I was so struck by the end of it and then coming back online, as it were, because literally we got our phones taken away from us. We couldn't speak for three days.

Dedeker: We didn't get our phones taken away from us. This is a little dramatic.

Jase: We willingly gave them away.

Dedeker: We willingly put our phones to the side.

Emily: . Yes, but we didn't have really access to anything other than ourselves, the people that we were with, but we couldn't speak to one another, and then we journaled during that time, which I found really profound and meaningful. Do you think that you are better now at being able to also be an observer of any thoughts that come into your life that are not helpful?

Jase: Yes, that's the part that I was going to say, based on what Dedeker was talking about is. I think that for me, the biggest thing that I took away from learning more about Buddhist philosophy, about thoughts, and from meditation and stuff like that, is more the ability to separate the thought from the thing that's doing the thinking, like separating the thought from the thinker. Meaning, being able to experience something, experience a feeling, or experience a thought, but not necessarily have to have that define me.

I found that especially at the worst of my depression, before realizing what that was and getting help with that. That was I think what let me keep functioning, though was that I did have this ability to notice it and be aware of it, and it didn't make it go away, it didn't make it so suddenly.

All my motivation came back, it didn't make it, so I wasn't having

those thoughts anymore, but it did at least take just enough of that edge off that I'm able to see, I know that I'm thinking this thing, and I know that objectively this might not be true, that this isn't necessarily a full, complete objective truth, but it's still there. I do think that definitely gave me just that little bit to hold on to avoid getting completely pulled down by it.

Emily: Let's get into that a little bit in terms of the difference between what a thought is, what a feeling is, an emotion, and then also what facts are, what objective reality is, because we have heard all of those things about feelings are not facts. I think I would have to agree with that, but a thought sometimes even starts before the feeling, and then--

Dedeker: That's debatable, actually.

Jase: Yes.

Emily: That's a good point.

Jase: There's a lot of debate and research about that of is it's the thought first or is it the feeling first, and then the thought is the interpretation of the feeling.

Emily: That's really interesting. They were talking about that quite a lot on this episode of this podcast, and one of the things that they said was, "A thought is just a little more than nothing."

Jase: Yes, I like that.

Dedeker: Just a little bit more.

Jase: A very Buddhist way to describe it.

Emily: Yes, exactly. Just a little bit more than nothing. An emotion, a feeling, to me, that's a deeply personal thing.

Dedeker: You don't think your thoughts are personal? My thoughts are very personal.

Emily: They are. You're absolutely right, but everything comes from an emotion or your cognitive biases or whatever it might be that leads you to think a certain thing. When I looked up the difference between thoughts and feelings, apparently, thoughts come from your cerebral cortex, and your feelings come from your limbic system. They are actually coming from two different areas of the body.

Jase: Right, and that's a lot of where the debate comes in-

Dedeker: Sure.

Jase: -of, do we bodily have a reaction that is the feeling that we have, and then we interpret that feeling, and that's where we have the thoughts about why we might have felt that way, or do we have thoughts which then cause us to have feelings, and which way does it go?

Dedeker: This comes up in different therapeutic approaches, because the CBT model takes it as a given that really it's your thoughts that are amplifying your feelings of distress. If we can change the thoughts, then we can change the feelings.

For instance, maybe I am plagued by the thought that like, "Oh, my partner doesn't respect me, my partner is going to leave me," then if I was working with a CBT trained therapist, that they might be encouraging me to reframe, and to try on a different narrative in that particular situation, in the hopes that would then change the feelings of distress that come in response to that particular thought.

There's also the argument to be made that maybe my partner is looking at their phone while I'm trying to talk to them, and my body can pick up on that microsecond lag in their response to me that it takes. Before I even have a chance to put any kind of thought into words, I have a feeling of discomfort in my body, of discomfort and unease, and then the thought comes in, "Oh my goodness, my partner doesn't respect me. They're bored with me, they're going to leave me." It is a question of which part of the loop are we actually looking at here that is the source of distress?

We have the thought of, "Oh, my partner doesn't respect me, they're bored with me, they're going to leave me," we have the feeling that is the discomfort in your body that lives somewhere in your body, and then maybe the fact of your partner's eyeballs lingered on their phone screen for half a microsecond longer than they should have or than you were expecting in responding to you. We take that whole soup, and hope that we can fix it-

Emily: We make a huge story about it.

Dedeker: -and make a huge story, yes.

Jase: I do think they echo back and forth like that. Like you mentioned there, that then I have that thought of, "Oh, it's because my partner doesn't care about me," and then that probably echoes back into then feeling more of a body sensation, or a different type of emotional sensation there that then feeds back into, "Oh yes, that's definitely true. Now I'm really worried about it," and they can bounce back and forth.

Which I think is why in the research, there is a lot of research to back up CBT as being effective, but then there's also a lot of research that more like somatic approaches to things that start more from the body, rather than starting from the mind, are also effective. That makes sense. If they amplify and modulate each other, that affecting one would affect the other as well.

Dedeker: The self-sabotage comes in when then you're in the soup of everything, and then you snap at your partner to pay attention to you, and your partner doesn't appreciate that, and then that reinforces both the feelings and the thoughts of maybe insecurity around this particular partner, and then we're off to the races.

Emily: I do want to point out what you said before, which is the fact in all of that is simply that your partner may have just looked down at their phone and taken a millisecond longer than normal to go back and say an answer to your question or whatever it might be. I think in the middle of all that, of course, it is just so hard to distinguish or objectively look rather at the fact of the situation. Instead, we put all of these different things on those facts and say that that is then our truth, and that is then our reality. That's what I wanted to get into today.

Jase: Just one last thing I wanted to throw in on this that I just always think is so fascinating what we think of as thoughts and being logical and rational, versus being emotional, is that there have been studies of people who have a particular disorder in their brain where they don't exhibit physical sensations of emotional triggers, where they just don't physically have certain reactions. I don't know all of the details of this, but what's interesting is you would think, oh, then they're like Vulcans from Star Trek who don't have emotions, and so they should be hyper-logical.

What they find is that these people end up being completely paralyzed by choice, trying to make simple everyday decisions like what to eat for lunch, what clothes to wear, that we actually rely on very subtle little emotional cues from our bodies for everyday little decisions like that. This theoretical idea of being able to be a completely rational, emotionless decision maker is actually a false premise that would not be helpful. We would actually find ourselves overwhelmed by choice and the lack of good data that we need to make choices most of the time.

Emily: I love that. That's really interesting. Let's talk a little bit about what happens if we let those emotions and those thoughts get the best of us, in ways that we just discussed there of even that example of seeing your partner look down at their phone, and then you getting pissed at them and then them getting pissed at you and going back and forth in an endless loop. Some of these emotions that we have they can end up causing maladaptive patterns of behavior that are just damaging to our relationships overall.

Sometimes, even when we really, really want to do the right thing, we can't help but get in our own way. Let's talk about some ways that we personally and our lives make it in our own way, right off the bat, holding on to a limiting belief about yourself. "Oh, I didn't go to a really great college, so therefore, I'm never going to succeed in life. Or I expect everything and everyone around me to be perfect, so I'm not going to finish anything because it has to be perfect before I do so, and that, therefore, limits me as well.

Dedeker: To speak from personal experience, there's like certain things I will refuse to start because I don't think that I can do it perfectly.

Emily: Wow, really?

Dedeker: Oh, yes.

Emily: Got it. Okay.

Dedeker: That's not worth doing it unless you can do it perfectly. Haven't you had that stitched on a pillow?

Emily: I think sometimes that does happen for me, and I like to be good at everything as well. I think the longer you live, the more you realize it's impossible to be good at everything, and you shouldn't necessarily let that limit you and what you want to be doing.

Jase: Yes. I don't find for myself that perfectionism hits me in that way of not being able to start things or complete things. Maybe it affects how I feel about those things once I've done them, or the amount of stress I put into them, but I feel like for me, especially when I'm caught up in these more negative thoughts that it's usually about not doing something, just procrastinating on it, or just feeling like I just can't get myself focused on that thing, or I'll just put that off.

I don't like procrastinating. I don't think of myself as a procrastinator, but I go through periods sometimes where I just can't seem to break that pattern of procrastinating. I think it can be tied to some of these recurring negative thoughts.

Emily: Oh, yes. I feel like there's fear-based stuff that comes up with procrastinating for me, where I need to do a Multiamory episode and it's due tomorrow, and I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to clean out my fridge,"-

-or I'm going to clean the entire apartment right now. This is the perfect time to do that. Clearly, I feel like a fear-based response regarding the task at hand that I really, actually need to get done. I think just making excuses about important decisions in general, or choosing not to do things, because you're just great at making excuses about all the reasons why you can't do X, Y, or Z thing.

I've had friends in my life who do that, and it's really frustrating to see that happen over and over again, even when you're like, “What about this thing? You could get out there more and we live in such a great city. Why don't you utilize that and take advantage of it,” but constant excuses as to why they can't do this thing.

Jase: In our relationships, it comes to things like picking fights, like causing drama when there doesn't need to be any. I think we've all probably done that at some point.

We've tried to find a problem where there wasn't one, maybe stir things up, or doing things to test your partner, like see how they'll handle challenging situations. I think some people can do that really intentionally, and that's maybe a different problem, but I think that more unintentional thing could be due to this self-destructive or relationship-destructive behavior.

Dedeker: I know that often, at least a pattern that I often see play out in couples, sometimes that I work with, that if they're caught in an unhelpful pattern or a toxic communication pattern, both people can feel motivated, to feel like this sucks, I want to get out of it. I feel like I'm not afraid to be the change that I want to see.

They can both be on the same page about how they need to change their pattern, but then changing the pattern actually involves needing to be a little vulnerable, like needing to not try so hard to win in a particular argument, or needing to let something slide, or needing to be a little bit more forgiving. When they get confronted with that, then I see a little bit of the self-sabotage play out, where it's just a lot easier to reach for the baked-in toxic pattern that they're used to than to try to do something different. I would categorize that under self-sabotage.

Emily: Something that I did all the time, and I'm trying to do less of it, but people pleasing and fawning rather than standing up for myself. I did that over and over and over again in my long relationship, and it definitely caused a huge amount of hurt and pain for a much more prolonged period of time than it needed to. As I was doing research for this episode, really trying to figure out what the through line was with all of this, and figure out how the heck we do get out of our own way, the term emotional intelligence came up a lot.

I do think that it ties back to things like self-awareness, figuring out how to manage your own emotions, how to motivate yourself, and get out of these negative feedback loops, these negative patterns that we tend to get into with our relationships sometimes, and even just in our own lives. We're going to talk about that a little bit more after the break, and how that can maybe help us get out of our own way and stop these patterns from taking over our lives and our relationships.

This term, emotional intelligence has been around for quite a while, but what does that actually really mean? It is this capacity to be aware of and control and express your emotions, and then also be able to handle interpersonal relationships, empathetically, judiciously, kindly, all of those things sound really great. However, there are some caveats, some issues with emotional intelligence as a whole. It has come under fire recently, just simply because it's used a lot in corporate settings. We're about to reference a corporate questionnaire for leaders that we found.

There are a lot of different questionnaires out there. If you're interested in finding one and discovering what parts of emotional intelligence are you really good at, what parts maybe do you need to work on, go Google it. You can definitely find a bunch of different ones out there. Those assessments might not have a huge amount of reliability or validity, especially depending on your mood and how you're feeling that particular day, your results may change.

Also, as we always say, don't weaponize this shit. This stuff could be used as a way to manipulate people to either work harder or just manipulate in general. Anytime you have a better understanding of the way in which people tick, that can be used for bad. Please don't do that. Try to take everything that you learn here and put it forth into the world in a kind, understanding, and empathetic way. This term was first brought to a wide audience by the author Daniel Goleman, and he wrote the book in 1995 called Emotional Intelligence.

These definitions of the five key components of emotional intelligence it comes from this questionnaire that we're going to talk about in a little bit. The reason why this is connected to all of this stuff that we just discussed about getting in our own way, to me, it can be a useful way of just exploring the parts of emotional intelligence and the parts of yourself that you already have a really great handle on. Things like self-awareness or things like managing emotions, or motivating yourself, things like that.

If you discover maybe I'm not great at certain aspects of emotional intelligence, maybe I can work on those things. Just having more of a holistic, full understanding of self can hopefully help us move away from maladaptive behaviors or getting in our own way, and instead, point us towards the ways in which we can stop those behaviors in their tracks, and then move on to better behaviors or better ways of thinking and feeling about the situations that we're in.

Jase: Yes, it reminds me a little bit of when we talk about things like the five love languages or something, where it's like not necessarily that this is the be-all end-all and that's actually how we work, but by breaking something up into subcategories. It gives you a way to look at it and go, "Oh yes, I'm not as strong in that area. I could work on that," rather than just seeing the whole thing of like, "Oh yes, I communicate so good," or, "I manage my emotions-

Emily: Totally.

Jase: - so good that it helps you to break it down and see individual pieces of it. I think that's what's really appealing to me, at least about things like emotional intelligence that people have spent time trying to break down what are the parts that make this up, so that it gives you a more manageable way to investigate for yourself.

Emily: Absolutely. Let's get into some of those five key components of emotional intelligence. The first one is self-awareness. That's just being able to recognize what it is that you're feeling. Also, doing things like understanding your habitual emotional responses to different events that happen, and see how your emotions tend to affect your behavior and the things that you tend to do in your life in general.

When you're self-aware, you're more able to see yourself as others see you, and then have a good sense of your own abilities and then also your own limitations. The things that you may need to work on more, as well as the things that you're already really great at.

Dedeker: Another key component of emotional intelligence is the ability to manage your own emotions. As in being able to stay focused to still think clearly, even when you're in the grip of powerful emotions. I suspect this is the part that's been given the bad rap for how it's been incorporated in corporate settings, to maybe just like discourage people to not feel things at work or to-

Emily: Oh, interesting.

Dedeker: -be like, "Yes, sure, feel it, but keep going. That's emotional intelligence." To power through that would be mine.

Emily: It's an important skill to have.

Dedeker: It is important. That's the thing. Yes, it's not a bad skill. Your own ability to manage your emotions is crucial in order to be able to make decisions, take responsibility for your actions, and to be able to prevent you from making purely emotionally based decisions or knee-jerk decisions. It's like 100% it is very important. I could also just see how the shadow side of this is just about don't feel anything-

Emily: Sure.

Dedeker: -or your emotions are not that important, ironically.

Emily: We have talked a lot about that and managing one's emotions to the point where you just suppress them completely. We've had multiple episodes on that. Again, that's something to be aware of and not necessarily do, but you do have moments in your life where you do need to be able to manage your emotions for sure and not fly off the handle and be reactive.

Jase: Yes. We have that first one is the self-awareness of the feelings that you're feeling, and then the second one is managing emotions, so how do you sometimes suppress those when you need to or get things done in spite of them? The third one is motivating yourself, which is using your emotions to help move you and guide you toward your goal. This is about being able to take the initiative and persevere in the face of obstacles, setbacks, discouragement.

Emily: Being tenacious.

Jase: Yes, tenacious, or some people maybe would call this, "Grit," but that's that idea of persevering.

Emily: Yes. The next one is empathy, so being able to sense and understand, and respond to what people are feeling. It's definitely important to have self-awareness in order to be empathetic for other people, because if you're not aware of your own emotions, it's probably unlikely that you're going to be able to read the emotions of others as well. This is something, I think, in certain work environments, you have to do a lot of.

I find myself needing to do this a lot at my restaurant job. You have to anticipate the needs of others. Dedeker, I'm sure you have to deal with that all the time, dealing with the emotions of others, either if they are not speaking to you explicitly about what those emotions are, or if they are speaking to you about them and trying to figure out, like, "Okay, what's underneath the surface here."

Dedeker: I don't mean to brag, but I feel like after 10 years of working with clients, I've got some empathy, vanity muscles going on here.

Emily: Nice, sure.

Dedeker: I've got some just bulging, what counts as vanity muscles, anything bulging. My empathy is bulging.

Emily: Amazing.

Dedeker: Also, connected to the empathy piece is, I would say, social skills. The ability to not only understand emotions in others, but also the ability to help other people manage their emotions. I think this is why this gets connected to leadership in corporate settings very often. It's not just about being able to help calm people down, help them focus, or help fire them up for something. Being able to influence them, being able

to inspire them.

I'm trying to think about how this plays out not in a corporate setting, where even with a particular group of friends, if you're someone who's able to, I don't know. I imagine someone who's like a really good host or hostess, who can make sure that everyone's attended to and everyone's having a good time, and people are connecting with each other.

I think about that in this realm of emotional intelligence, being able to tell, "Oh, is there some tension in this group? Are there people who aren't getting along? How can I help facilitate it so that everyone is still able to feel some ease and have a good time when we're all hanging out together?"

Emily: Absolutely.

Jase: I think this also includes things like just being a good listener and being attentive to what's going on with other people. Not just the empathy and feeling them, but also taking the time to try to understand them as well. I could see that also being great for helping co-regulate with somebody else.

Emily: Oh, yes.

Jase: Co-regulation is something that I'm seeing more and more in research that I'm looking into about emotions and stuff like that, but basically, how a lot of the previous research focuses on our emotions as if we're in a bubble and we're all just dealing with it in our own minds. That there's been a growing body of research that's looking at how we co-regulate with our family members, with our friends, with our loved ones. How do we deal with emotions collectively? That's really fascinating, and it's cool to see that it's related here to the literature about emotional intelligence.

Emily: That was on the Ezra Klein podcast as well. They talked so much about how we are relational beings, we are not just separate from one another, but we all exist and we can understand each other's traumas and pain, because we've all had trauma and pain, and how important that is to remember with all of this.

We're going to get into a study that was done on emotional intelligence and self-destructiveness, and it was called Emotional Intelligence, Indirect Self-Destructiveness and Gender, by Professor Tsirigotis, published in 2021 in the Journal of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology. This was a Polish journal, and this was all translated from Polish. Specifically, they were using the Polish versions of the assessing emotion scale and the chronic self-destructiveness scale. It was just translated into Polish. This is a thing that has been used in quite a few different studies over the years.

This was done with 130 men and 130 women between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. A couple of examples of some of the questions that were on the self-destructiveness scale, there were things like, using contraceptives is too much trouble. "I generally don't find myself in health or life-threatening situations," and then deciding how true that is on a scale from one to five. "I frequently don't do boring things I'm supposed to, even things like I have my car serviced regularly."

Jase: Yes. it's really interesting the broad range it covers because there's-

Emily: Indeed.

Jase: -some stuff that's about high stakes gambling, but then others it's just about not getting my car serviced. Yes, it really covers a pretty broad range of different kinds of self-destructive behaviors.

Emily: Absolutely. They were specifically also looking how gender affected this, and, of course, it's only looking at people who identify as women, and people who identify as men, and not people who identify in a different way. That wasn't included here, but it was interesting to read about the differences between the two there.

They found that the two types of psychological phenomena are negatively correlated with each other. Emotional intelligence protects against indirect self-destructiveness, whereas indirect self-destructiveness disturbs or even impairs emotional intelligence.

Dedeker: Interesting. The idea that if you have emotional intelligence already, you're maybe less likely to be self-destructive, versus if you do engage in these indirect self-destructive behavior patterns, that actually makes it more difficult for you to develop emotional intelligence. It's like the rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poor, kind of situation

Emily: I guess so, yes.

Dedeker: Interesting.

Jase: It does seem to imply that might be the case, or at least there's a correlation there.

Emily: Indeed. Yes. They found that, "A person with high emotional intelligence is less likely to engage in what they called problem behaviors, and avoids negative and self-destructive behaviors such as smoking, alcohol abuse, drug use, or violence." Also, I found this to be unsurprising. This is something that we could debate or talk about, but they posited and found that women in general were more emotionally intelligent than men, and they had an easier time recognizing and managing their emotions in times of crisis.

Also, the indirect self-destructiveness categories showed the strongest negative associations with emotional intelligence in the group of men, meaning that if you are engaging in self-destructive behavior, then you're also probably not emotionally intelligent.

Jase: I guess it is.

Dedeker: You're also probably a man, is what they find.

Emily: Also, you're probably a dude.

Jase: They're saying they found that the negative association was there for everybody. We just said that before, that self-destructive behaviors being higher tends to mean emotional intelligence being lower, but for men, that was even more of a negative correlation-

Emily: Yes.

Jase: -and that women were generally more emotionally intelligent than men, and had an easier time recognizing and managing their emotions, specifically.

Emily: Also, women in general displayed less poor health maintenance than men, which is interesting. I would maybe agree with that, and I think that this happens less now. You've heard of the guy who loses his wife, maybe at 65 or something, and then he truly cannot take care of himself at all. He doesn't know how to cook himself a meal, do the laundry, do the dishes, or any of the above. Maybe it could relate to that a little bit.

Jase: I feel like all this is fascinating fodder for a much longer tangential episode about all of these things.

Emily: Sure.

Jase: I've held for a long time that I think men are actually quite emotional. I know they get a bad rap for not being emotional. I think it's this double-edged sword that perpetuates this whole problem.

It's like we tell you you're not emotional, but you actually have a lot of emotions, and so therefore you'd never learn to identify them or to handle them well, because you keep getting told that you don't have them or that you shouldn't have them. It's this weird cycle. None of this is surprising to me, but it definitely feel it could easily jump off onto a whole other episode talking about all this stuff.

Dedeker: If I'm going to take these study findings and extrapolate from there, I do think some of this, it makes sense why the halt framework, the hungry, angry, lonely, tired framework originally came out of a addiction recovery framework because when I think about it, I think about how if you're willing and able to tap into your own emotions, let's say, and have a sense of, "Yes, I feel really sad right now," or, "I feel really lonely right now," and that's very clear to you, you understand that.

Also maybe if you're someone who in this whole emotional intelligence package also has more motivation, perhaps like maybe you're better able to motivate yourselves toward actually solving the actual source of the sadness or the loneliness or the anger, instead of maybe turning towards, "I'm going to shave my head," as an impulsive decision, or, "I'm going to take a substance," or something like that. I feel like that's where I'm connecting the dots here.

Emily: I think all of those things make sense. The last thing that I'll say is they found that, "The final indirect self-destructiveness category helplessness, negatively correlated with general emotional intelligence and ability to recognize one's own emotions and the emotions of others in the group of women, which may suggest that emotional intelligence in general, and the ability to recognize emotions in particular protect against inability to cope with problems and giving up or refraining from taking remedial measures in problematic situations."

That helplessness thing is really interesting, because I do think that, often when we get in these self-sabotaging behaviors, we sometimes feel like we can't do anything about it. Like, "Ugh, this is just the way that things are. This is just how I am and that's the way that it's going to be," or we make excuses and say, "Yes, that's just the way life is," or, "That's how I was brought up," or whatever it may be. Therefore, you can't get out of these feelings or self-destructive or self-sabotaging behaviors.

I think that hopefully cultivating a sense of self-awareness and understanding that we're not alone in this life, that there are ways in which we can learn to be better, maybe using this tool or using other tools that that can hopefully steer us in a direction of feeling like we're not alone and we're not helpless and we can change our fade.

We teased in the middle of this episode that we took this quiz, and you all out there can take the same quiz, you can take different quizzes on the parts of emotional intelligence that you are specifically good at, and then maybe parts that you are not as good at. We took a 50-question quiz, it was pretty long, but it makes sense that it's as long as it is, so that you know you can get specifics on each of the different parts of emotional intelligence.

The one that we took was the NHS London Emotional Intelligence questionnaire. Again, it was four leaders in NHS London, but you can find your different one out there if you don't want to take this one. I

I thought it was pretty comprehensive. It went into a lot of different things and asked a lot of different questions, and then we got specific results in each of the five different areas of emotional intelligence.

Jase: I found for mine, I had a clear winner and a clear loser.

Emily: Oh, really.

Jase: The other three were in the middle.

Dedeker: Because the way that it works, after you do the whole questionnaire, it does break up your score into those five buckets, the self-awareness, managing emotions, motivating oneself, empathy, and social skills. What was your winner and loser, Jase?

Jase: My winner, by a good margin, was empathy.

Dedeker: That's what I would guess.

Jase: I think, yes.

Dedeker: You also have some empathy, vanity muscles.

Jase: I guess so, yes.

Emily: My winner was also empathy.

Jase: Oh, really.

Dedeker: Sort of surprising.

Jase: What about you, Deds?

Dedeker: Empathy was my second runner-up. That was my number two. That was the silver medal for me.

Jase: Okay, wow.

Emily: Was self-awareness your number one?

Dedeker: No. My number one was motivating oneself. It shouldn't be surprising to anybody.

Jase: That does make sense, yes.

Dedeker: Very disciplined. I'm not 100% all the time, but I'm pretty good at getting myself to do the boring stuff.

Jase: I do often marvel at how much you are able to do the boring, not fun stuff. Yes, it's true.

Emily: Well done.

Dedeker: Those are even bigger vanity muscles. Those are more my functional muscles. Empathy is the basic part of it.

Jase: I see.

Emily: There you go. Love that.

Dedeker: Who wants to show their clear losers? Did you have a clear loser, Emily?

Emily: Managing emotions.

Jase: That was mine, too.

Dedeker: Really?

Emily: I'm not surprised. He's like, Mercurial emotional people here. It wasn't crazy, but I got a 28.

Jase: I got a 27 on that out of 50.

Emily: Not great.

Dedeker: My loser was the social skills. I got a 26.

Emily: That was my second-highest, and only by one point. I would agree with that. I think I'm pretty good in a social situation.

Dedeker: I think my baked-in misanthropy got in the way. Mine tends to be like, "No, I want to just be left alone to do my GED job, idiot."

Emily: Motivating oneself was also on the lower side, it was 33, so it was almost okay, but still one that I need to work on. That's hard because in some capacities, yes, I'm good at it, and then at some, less. Those were my two lowest. Then, my self-awareness was, I think, kind of in the middle, it was 36. I did like a 36, 37, 38 on my highest ones.

Jase: This was interesting that the managing emotions one. I would define, based on the questions they asked, that some of that is about, "How can I turn my mood around," or "Leave work problems at work." Some of it was that type of thing, which makes sense, but also some of the questions were directed more at how good are you at hiding your emotions from people?

Dedeker: Sure.

Jase: That also included questions like, people can tell what kind of mood I'm in, or people rarely have to ask how I feel about something, those sorts of questions where you let your emotions leak through. I don't always think that's necessarily a bad thing. I feel like it might depend on the situation. With all of these, a little bit of a grain of salt there.

Dedeker: I wondered about that, too. Can I just call your attention to question 22? This one was listed under the managing emotions, and this was, "Difficult people do not annoy me." Of course, I put 1 on a scale of 1 to 5, I'm sorry. Different people do annoy, too.

Emily: I put a 2.

Jase: Mine's a 2 as well. They do annoy me, yes.

Emily: What does that say about all of us? No, I would agree with that one.

Dedeker: After you total up your scores here, there's a little table where you indicate, based on my scores, which of these five buckets are a strength, which needs attention. For me, the ones that needed attention were managing emotions and my social skills, but then I have questions around like, okay, great, you get this, and you have a sense of like, "Oh, these are the areas that I need to work on," but how do you work on them? How do you take your empathy muscles to the empathy gym that they might become empathy vanity muscles?

Jase: Your empathy muscles are already too strong. Maybe-

Dedeker: It's my social skills muscles that are really weak.

Jase: -managing emotion and social skills muscles, yes.

Emily: There you go, exactly.

Dedeker: Nobody posted those on Instagram.

Jase: Yes. For me, it's my motivating oneself and managing emotions. Those are the ones I need to go to the gym-

Dedeker: Me too.

Emily: Me too.

Jase: -maybe do a little bit of rehab on a little bit, like you're not ready to fully pump some iron, you go to build up some basic strength first.

Dedeker: Overall, do we have a sense of, if someone's listening to this and they they're like, "Okay, I can see the ways that maybe I'm self-sabotaging in my life, or in my relationships, and I can also see the ways that my own emotional intelligence is tied to this, and I want to get better at this," what are the areas that people can look at? What can people actually do?

Emily: Something that you can do if you want to develop more self-awareness, for instance, I think it is important to learn to identify your emotional triggers, and then try to dig into why those might be occurring. For example, maybe something from the past is causing a really intense emotional reaction to be taking place, and after a while, or after digging deeper into that pattern, you realize, "I'm responding to something that my partner says, because it reminds me of this time when my father said something similar," for example.

We have a couple of journaling prompts to explore your reactions and patterns. You can just answer the following questions. What emotions did I feel today, and what triggered them? What situations caused me to feel reactive or off-center? What do I need that I'm not giving myself right now, and then, in terms of asking for something from a partner, is there anything that I can request from my partner in order to help me regulate? That might even just be like--

Jase: The co-regulation coming back again.

Emily: Yes, exactly. Even if it's a, "Hey, anytime we get into a conversation, can I request maybe we take a 5 minute or a 10 minute period of time where neither of us are on our phones, so that we can actually have a really nice conversation with one another at the end of our day, for example, where we're not distracted by our phones? If that is something that keeps coming up as an issue, like we talked about at the beginning of the episode.

Jase: Yes, this could be an interesting case for the poor baby exercise. I think we talked about a long time ago on this show that came originally. I think, from the ethical slut, at least, I know it's referenced in there. I don't know if they invented it, but this thing of, just like, "Give me five minutes where I can just tell you all the bad things I'm upset about," and you just respond to all of them by saying, "Poor baby," and just to get it out, and then you move on.

I'm not dwelling on it, you're not responding, asking me deeper questions. It's just, "Let me get this out," and you just say, "Poor baby," after each one.

Dedeker: This seems like this is an arena where the more that people can work on just their self-regulation skills, the better, like those particular muscles. Anything that helps you to calm your nervous system. What I really like to encourage people to do is, at a time when you're feeling relatively calm and you're not in the midst of distress to create a toolbox for yourself.

List out 10 different things that you know normally are calming to you, whether it's going for a run, doing a headstand, making a meal, doing particular breath work like sitting down a meditate, whatever it is for you that you can whip this out when you're in the midst of feeling distressed, and when your brain may not be online enough to help you remember to turn towards these things.

Not only does that build your muscle of feeling like you have the confidence, like you have the tools to be able to get through difficult or overwhelming emotions, but then the more that you're able to turn towards that and regulate yourself, then you build tolerance for emotional discomfort as well.

You build tolerance for when you're stressed out, or when you're feeling hurt, or you start to calibrate more of when you're noticing a little bit of emotional discomfort that's creeping in as well, and learning to tolerate it. I think that's also really important skill for being able to just have good relationships in general.

Jase: I think it's great here to have a number of different techniques, because sometimes you may not have time for one, or may not really feel like it. I know going for a walk is a really good one for me. That's something, if I'm feeling really overwhelmed, where I just can't decide what to do, there's just too much that going for a walk helps, but that takes some time, and I don't always have that kind of time. For me, they tend to be very physical.

It's like going for a walk or doing some push-ups, or doing something to get my breath rate up a little bit, and get myself breathing a little harder, helps reset my brain. It's just something that I've found. With all that, you have this resource to calm yourself a little bit, but then you can take a look at those thoughts more from the CBT, like thoughts thought-focused side, and reframe those.

If you find you have that thought of, "I'm a failure, I'm always screwing things up," to take a step back and say, "Okay, that's just a thought that is happening here, it isn't my identity. It's just a thought that's happening," and then look at, "How could I reframe that to be more accurate with what's closer to the truth?

Maybe I made a mistake, but I'm learning and growing," or, "I did the best that I could with what I had at the time," or something like that, of realizing, "Okay, that thought that I was having, maybe there's a more truthful way to have that thought," of just, "Okay, this one thing happened. That doesn't mean I'm this way forever."

Another example would be thinking, "I'm not good enough. That's why no one loves me," to change that to, "I'm doing my best, and that's enough right now, and I love other people when they're doing their best." Reframe and try to think about

what's a more accurate way to say this, if possible, or "I'll never get this right to say it's okay to not be perfect. I can try again. If I did this perfectly every time, it wouldn't be interesting to keep trying to do it."

Emily: If you're looking at trying to identify and interrupt some self-sabotage loops that you might be getting in, try to maybe catch yourself in protective behaviors that limit intimacy. When you find yourself maybe shutting down when a partner asks how you're feeling, saying something like, "It's fine," or "It's nothing." I do that all the time. I try to be aware of that. Recognize that, okay, I said this, I know that I'm not fine. Why don't I instead try to say what it is that's going on and be honest about it?

Maybe if you find yourself resorting to people-pleasing behaviors, instead of voicing what it is that you want or need, actually stop, take a breath, and say, "In this moment what I'm looking for is X," or, "I actually don't like it when you do this thing," or any number of things that you might do instead of just trying to people please.

Additionally, we talk about radar a lot, but I think it is really important to be able to have a relationship check-in, to try to build a mutual awareness of the things that are going well in terms of the progress that you're making over time, with trying to figure out how to interrupt these self-sabotage loops.

With radar, we always recommend writing down notes or taking notes on what it is that you talked about or what your actionable goals are that month. If you're able to look back at your radar over time and say like, "I actually really have come a long way over the last six months, or over the last three months." Having a written record of that, I think, is a really powerful tool to be able to help you realize, look at how far I've come.

Finally, as we finish this today, realize that you are not broken. You're just learning how to stop self-sabotaging behavior, and you're trying to just cultivate a healthier and happier lifestyle. Using a tool like emotional intelligence it's great if you use it. It's great if you already deem yourself to be someone who is really emotionally intelligent, it doesn't mean that you're perfect, it doesn't mean that by working on that, you're going to become someone who just is so enlightened and you're going to know exactly how to act in every situation.

It hopefully does mean that you are more present and curious, and honest about your relationship with yourself and with others. If you're listening to this podcast now, you're already on that path to self-discovery, you're already working on being better at communication, to celebrate that and be excited about that. Every step that you take to understanding yourself better improves all of your relationships, not just the relationship that you have with other people, but also the relationship that you have with yourself.

emotional intelligenceEQsabotageself-sabotage

Multiamory

542 - Is Emotional Intelligence the Key to Getting Out of Our Own Way?

Thoughts, feelings, and facts

Emotional intelligence

Transcript

543 - My Metamour Refuses to Meet Me: Listener Q&A

541 - Make Agreements with Yourself, Not With Your Partner