What Made Jesus Marvel?

Are you familiar with the concept of “emotional intelligence?” Emotional intelligence. Sometimes it’s referred to as “EQ.” Here’s what emotional intelligence is: it’s the ability to identify and understand what you’re feeling… and why you’re feeling it.

Now I know that I lost a certain percentage of you right out of the gate here. I said the word “emotions” and some of you immediately pulled out your phone and checked your fantasy football line up. Come on back.

Emotional intelligence is something that we’ve invested a good amount of time and energy on with our staff at Prairie Lakes. Questions like:

Why did that make you angry?

Why did you shut down in that meeting?

Why is it hard for you to get along with this person? What are you feeling there in that work relationship?

You know… really fun questions that nobody really wants to talk about—but that really get down to what’s going on inside of us and why.

People who are really good at this—who have a really healthy emotional intelligence—those people can do it pretty much in the moment. Like… rather than blow up in the meeting and then a few days later go, “huh… probably should think about what was going on there”… they’ll be able to identify what they’re feeling and why they’re feeling it before it becomes a bigger problem.

But that takes a lot of work. It’s not easy becoming an emotionally intelligent person.

And usually… usually it requires to go back in your own personal history—back into something the counseling world calls your “Family of Origin.” Like… how you were raised. What kind of wounds you might have. What kind of things were imprinted on you that still might be emotionally impacting you today.

How’s that fantasy lineup?

Again: we’ve found this to be really, really valuable at Prairie Lakes—both for understanding ourselves, becoming healthier ourselves—but also for understanding why some relationships are more difficult than others, and how to be healthier together.

Now:

There is a dark side to this. There is. And I’d say it’s the same dark side whether we’re talking about emotional intelligence… or family of origin… or any of the other personality assessments that are pretty popular these days for increasing our self-awareness like the Enneagram or the DISC assessment or the Meyers-Briggs or the Colors or whatever.

Here’s the dark side:

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We settle for labeling people as products of their upbringing.

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Oh—he came from a broken home and probably has some unresolved issues.

Oh—she’s a “4”, so...

They came from a more progressive home, or a more conservative home, or a poor home, or an abusive home, or were born with a silver spoon, or...

And without throwing the baby out with the bathwater here—because there’s such value and potential health when you’re willing to dive deeply into those areas—let’s just understand that there’s a real dark side to this:

You can start to think that people fit some pretty clear categories—and that if we just put the right label on them, we’ll understand them.

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