Yesterday , at my brother’s terrace over barbeque lunch, I conducted a short social experiment. Their son was going back to college campus after being at home for 10 months.
I asked my brother, ‘How are you feeling about Sunny going back to college?’
“I’m happy for him”, he said.
“And how do you feel for yourself?”
“He has spent 10 months with us, that was a bonus”.
My sis-in-law’s reply was more straightforward: “I’m sad that he is going. Covid also worries me, though I know the college will take all precautions”.
And the young man in question was very direct: ‘I’m happy to be gone.”
What did my social experiment reveal? That some people have difficulty in expressing directly how they feel, like my brother. In both his answers, he didn’t (couldn’t?) say how HE felt (I’m sad, I’ll miss him, or I’m relieved, etc).
Why is it important to feel?
If we don’t acknowledge emotions (whether in your relationship with a colleague, co-founder, or a dear one) they lurk under-cover and impact you insidiously. They creep up in unconscious expressions like fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop. And leave us unable to access reason, logic, looking for alternate perspectives, which enable us to ‘stay and play’.
There is even a word for the inability to recognize or describe one’s own emotions: alexithymia. The core characteristic of alexithymia is marked dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relation.
Integration of thoughts and feelings is intelligence.~ J Krishnamurty.
In a study of college students, researchers found that when females disclosed feeling depressed to their roommates, they received nurturance. But in response to the same kind of disclosure, the roommates of men were isolating or hostile. Our culture, unfortunately trains men to fear vulnerability.
An excerpt from an interview of a young man who was a friend of the killers of Matthew Shepard—the man who in 1998 was bludgeoned in Wyoming just because he was gay:
“If you’re telling your feelings, you’re kind of a wuss.”
“So what do you do when things hurt?”
“That’s why God created whiskey, don’t you think?”
It is oftenest through intensity of emotion that the psychic being awakens and there is an opening of the inner doors to the divine ~Sri Aurobindo.
If we want to humanize the workplace, is it important for us to be in touch with our emotions?
Is there a gender difference in the way feelings are felt and expressed?
Are millennials more in tune with their emotions- regardless of their gender?
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Here is information about our 5-week program DEEP (Developing Emotional Intelligence for Executive Presence) (Group 7 starts in end-March)
Shared with permission of my brother and sis-in-law, the protagonists of the social experiment.
Thank you Vijaykumar V for these two quotes which came up in our conversation last week.
(art by Marie Carduot for Dixit Odyssey base game)