You can understand perfectly well that a critical remark is no great catastrophe and still spend the evening arguing with its author in your head. You can know that someone loves you and find their temporary unavailability intolerable. Being intelligent helps you explain these reactions, sometimes with impressive sophistication, but the explanation may do remarkably little to change them. You remain upset, now with a theory. Emotional competence concerns what you can do with this discrepancy: how accurately you recognize what you feel, how you understand its causes, and how much choice you have in responding.
Much of your life depends on these capacities, including parts you may think have little to do with emotions. Whether you can enjoy an afternoon off depends partly on what happens when you stop being productive. The work you postpone may involve a task you dislike, or the prospect of finding out that you are less accomplished than you would prefer. A disagreement can remain a disagreement, or become an exhausting attempt to establish that you are still loved. In each case, understanding the emotional difficulty changes what you can do about it. Another productivity trick is unlikely to resolve the humiliation you anticipate whenever you attempt something unfamiliar.
Feelings have reasons, including some you may disagree with
The affective science, evolutionary psychology, and neuropsychoanalysis that inform my work explain basic emotional systems as part of human evolutionary inheritance. These systems help organize responses to needs and opportunities, including protection from danger and connection with others. You are born with basic emotional systems, but experience shapes what triggers them and how you respond. For example, the capacity to feel fear is innate, while a fear of disagreement can develop through experience. Learned responses can change, even though the capacity to feel fear remains.
Evolution has supplied no guarantee that your emotional reactions will suit the life you want. You can want people’s approval even when you disagree with them. You might be entirely certain that you do not want children, for instance, and still feel guilty when your parents express their disappointment. Feeling guilty doesn’t mean you’ve made the wrong decision. It may reveal how difficult it is to disappoint them, what you believe you owe them, or what you expect will happen if you refuse. You can explore why you feel guilty without questioning your decision not to have children.
Feelings influence what attracts your attention and what seems plausible. When you are ashamed, an ambiguous expression can look like contempt; when you are angry, you may find evidence of someone’s selfishness with an efficiency otherwise unavailable to you. This does not mean every emotional judgment is mistaken. Someone may actually be treating you badly. It means that a feeling and your explanation of that feeling need to be examined separately. “I feel rejected” tells us something about your experience. Whether you have been rejected, by whom, and on what grounds requires further investigation.
Getting beyond “I feel bad”
Emotional competence begins with identifying what you feel. “Stressed” can describe the way you feel before a difficult conversation, but it leaves much unexplained. You might fear the other person’s anger, resent having to accommodate them again, or feel ashamed of wanting something they may refuse. Several feelings can be present at once. Differentiating them gives you a more useful account of the situation: resentment about an arrangement you keep accepting calls for a different response from embarrassment about asking for something reasonable. Research on emotional awareness supports the importance of identifying and distinguishing feelings for their regulation.
Even when you recognize what you feel, you may struggle to accept it, especially if it conflicts with how you like to see yourself. This becomes difficult when it conflicts with your preferred account of yourself. You may value generosity and envy a friend’s success, or value independence while wanting rather a lot of reassurance. If envy is unacceptable, you can spend months developing an unnecessarily elaborate critique of your friend’s work. Admitting that you want something they have is less flattering but considerably more useful. You can then consider what you want to pursue, what disappoints you about your circumstances, and whether your friend really needs to suffer for any of it.
Emotional competence also helps you understand and communicate with other people. When you can explain what upset you and why, you give the other person something specific to respond to. Understanding their feelings helps you make sense of their behavior and consider what matters to them, even when you disagree. You can then address the difficulty more directly: discuss what each of you needs, negotiate a disagreement, or decide what you are willing to accept. This also makes closeness easier, because you can express affection and ask for support more openly.
What we examine in psychoanalysis
In psychoanalysis, we explore why you react in ways you find difficult to change. Suppose you agree to something you do not want to do, then spend the next two days resenting the person who asked. Advice to be more assertive may be perfectly reasonable, but it leaves open why saying no was so difficult. We might examine what you expected the refusal to cost you, how quickly that expectation arose, and whether you even noticed your reluctance before agreeing. The aim is to understand the process well enough that the familiar response becomes available for reconsideration.
Some of this process may happen outside your awareness. Perhaps being agreeable became a reliable way to preserve affection, and you now comply before consciously considering what you want. That is one possibility to investigate. Your present circumstances also matter: refusing a request sometimes carries a real cost. Questions and interpretations help us distinguish what is happening now from what you anticipate on the basis of previous experience. Psychoanalytic work also examines how familiar expectations appear in the relationship with the analyst.
You might, for example, agree with an interpretation because disagreeing feels rude, then leave the session irritated that you were misunderstood. If you can examine that exchange, the difficulty becomes something you can address while it is happening. You get to question the interpretation and discover how the other side responds. Repeatedly experiencing a different response can help change what you expect from others, even when understanding why you expect it hasn’t helped. Understanding why you accommodate people does not automatically make it easier to disagree with them.
My focus on feelings informs these conversations. We identify and differentiate what you experience, trace connections with your expectations and behavior, and use relevant concepts when they clarify something. We can develop ideas and experiments together during our conversations. There is no requirement to turn every feeling into a project, and no special merit in producing a beautifully reasoned account of yourself while continuing to live exactly as before. Understanding yourself can help you notice your reactions sooner and choose how to respond.
Understanding your feelings can also help you enjoy life more. Emotional competence is useful even when life is going well, too: recognizing what interests you, allowing affection without immediately questioning it, or enjoying time off without having to earn it through exhaustion. You will still experience feelings you would rather do without, and occasionally behave in ways you understand better afterward. The change we are working toward is greater agency over how you live with those feelings, including the capacity to reconsider the arrangements that keep producing them. You don’t need to have a problem to benefit from understanding your feelings.
