You are not an a**hole… when responding to trauma
Part One: Debunking the myth of emotional intelligence
“Why does that happen?”
A faint whisper came from the woman seated next me. I looked over to see eyes that revealed both a genuine curiosity and a deep embarrassment. She sat on the edge of her chair as the weight of her own self-judgment intensified. As soon as she spoke, she averted her gaze and stared down at her hands as she waited for my response.
I had just finished presenting about Empowered Conversation at a startup event in Ann Arbor and shared some of the research around sexual assault and its effects on differing sexual identity groups.
She approached me to pose this question as I took my seat after my closing remarks. Responding softly, I answered her question with what I knew. I gave a smile to try to ease her anxiety, but the tension remained obvious in her demeanor. She nodded solemnly in return, and with her question answered, she left to go refill her now empty cup of coffee.
I was glad she had approached me to ask her question. But her obvious discomfort during the interaction stayed with me, far after I left the event.
The topic of sexual assault is not pleasant to discuss. Talking about violence, pain, and trauma is far different than talking about what you watched on tv last night… the cute barista’s new haircut… the weather. But beyond its weight, my work in this space has shown me something else that is going on underneath the surface of this silence. And, for that matter, the silence that takes place around all trauma.
As a society, we operate under the assumption that emotional intelligence (EQ) is innate. An “either you have it or you don’t” mentality, as if some people are gifted with empathetic connection and understanding from birth, while others will just never understand.
Have you ever heard someone say, “Oh, she’s so good with feelings” or, “He’s always been good at having those kinds of conversations”? We attribute the ability to ease someone through a difficult conversation as a “talent”.
This understanding takes you down a misleading path, because in reality, emotional intelligence is a learned skill.
Let’s compare EQ to another learned skill, math.
Starting at a young age you begin by learning the numbers, then your multiplication tables, fractions and long division and… (that’s where I stopped.) Through time and practice you build upon what came before. You develop an increasing understanding of all that math encompasses. To assume a newborn arrives out of the womb and just knows the Pythagorean Theorem, would be completely ridiculous.
So why don’t we conceptualize emotional intelligence in that same way?
In truth, EQ can be learned much in the same way as any other skillset, though it rarely is.
Imagine how different things would be if our school system were to focus on EQ as well. If, in kindergarten you are guided through how to name your feelings… next up, you’re taught what words to use to convey your needs… around 3rd grade you have in-depth lessons on how to share feelings with others… in your angsty teenage years, your teachers are required to assist you in the navigation of complex emotions… and as you prepare to graduate high school and go off on your own, you participate in an intensive training course on how to respond well in conversations and grow deeper emotional connections with others.
Unfortunately, this is not a part of our curriculum.
Rather than EQ being taught, our learning comes from more unreliable sources: movies or songs, the way you overhear someone speaking to their partner, or even our politicians, coworkers and social media influencers.
These are skills to be learned and improved upon, a lifelong journey of understanding our emotional landscape with greater clarity and awareness.
Instead, we get a haphazard hailstorm of mixed messages and less-than stellar examples of how to grow ourselves emotionally. So, we don’t.
Upholding this misinformed belief that people should just know how to respond to hard topics creates another harmful effect. Judgement. If you don’t know how to respond well to someone you love, people may see you as a bad friend or as a person who lacks empathy and care.
Is someone who doesn’t know calculus an inherently flawed human being?
The judgment associated with emotional intelligence is what created the recipe for why that woman’s demeanor, and why her question came out no louder than a whisper.
She was ashamed.
She felt inadequate for not just knowing the answer to these things.
But she shouldn’t have just known the answer.
If we aren’t being taught the basic skills of emotional intelligence and are being made to feel ashamed to even admit we may need help in knowing how to approach a hard topic, then of course there is silence around supporting each other in the important and vulnerable work of healing trauma.
Responding to trauma is one of the hardest skills of emotional intelligence. Without having opportunities to ask the right kinds of questions, it’s hard to actually be prepared in how to respond to trauma well.
So we keep getting these negative disclosure experiences, experiences where a survivor walks away from the conversation with a new set of pain to deal with and a resolve to stay silent moving forward.
The problem is not you, it’s the container we’re all existing within.
Developing the skills to respond well to trauma means going outside of this container, and accessing qualities that aren’t readily admired in our society, though they ought to be… The grace to allow yourself and others to sit in the murky unknown… the courage to make mistakes and not have answers… and the trust that taking stock of these imperfections will allow you to do better in the future.
This is how we grow and start to change what we know.
We live in a society that is increasingly black and white, that finds nuance to be a threat rather than a challenging yet welcomed part of reality. A trauma happened to someone you love. That experience cannot be undone, no matter how hard you try to or want to undo it.
Engaging with trauma requires you to leave behind those absolutes, and instead prioritize the subtle open-endedness of healing.
Because our society is so afraid of this space, societal scripts have been created as a way to deter us from building up the skills to tolerate this discomfort. By instilling the fear of being judged or seen as a bad person or not innately emotionally intelligent, we have been cut off from the opportunity to engage in these conversations with the attention and care that they deserve.
Your emotional currency is your most valuable resource. You carry the capacity to bring comfort with your words, to help heal pain, and to offer the security someone needs in order to fall apart and rebuild themselves up again.
This currency shapes not only your own inner landscape but can do so much more in re-imagining the backdrop of our society as a whole.
With each hard conversation, each time you choose to sit with others in pain, allowing for silence and discomfort, you point the compass of society toward a direction of more humility, authenticity, and responsiveness.
When we start asking questions in something louder than a whisper, when we change the assumption around emotional intelligence, when we admit out loud that these conversations are hard, we give ourselves permission to begin building necessary skills and, more importantly, we give those we love the permission to bravely heal with us by their side.
No offense to math, but these skills are the ones I want to be improving.
Be on the lookout for part two of this series, where we take a look at trauma responses and why you’re hardwired to actually respond badly in those situations. Also, I’ll share an exciting announcement about a new Empowered Conversation initiative. Stay tuned…
