Divorce & Emotional Intelligence
Divorce and Emotional Intelligence
By: Brian Muldoon
A client was in my office the other day, trying to explain to her husband why she was leaving him. “You just don’t get it,” she said. “It’s not the money or the big house I wanted—it was you. I wanted someone to listen to me, someone who cared how much it hurt when my mother died, someone who didn’t think money was the answer to all of life’s problems. But you were always at the office. Or on a plane somewhere.”
Another client explodes and then walks out of the meeting when her spouse proposes a settlement that would give him a portion of the value of her consulting business. “She’s always been like that,” he sheepishly explains. Her motto is ‘My way or the highway.’ I’m tired of getting screamed at. That’s why I’m leaving.”
Although there are libraries full of sociological studies that document the reasons why marriages end, most practitioners in the field would agree that the failure to develop and maintain a strong emotional bond with one’s mate is near the top of the list. That bond isn’t really possible unless both partners have full access to the range of feelings that make long-term intimacy possible.
Why do some people instinctively know how to negotiate the world of emotions while others of us struggle to connect? Why are some people able to channel their anger and frustrations while others require an order of protection to keep them contained?
Best-selling author Daniel Goleman, who received his PhD at Harvard and was nominated twice for a Pulitzer Prize for his journalism at The New York Times, coined the term “emotional intelligence” to describe the difference Goleman builds on the ground-breaking work of Harvard psychologist and educator Howard Gardner, who identified a minimum of seven different kinds of human intelligence (including spatial awareness, musical ability and interpersonal skills). Gardner found that the prominence we have given to math and verbal skills (the traditional measure of “IQ”) in our educational system is misplaced. Studies have confirmed that a high IQ has very little to do with career success—or with success in a marriage.
Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence explains how strong emotions can “hijack” the brain of an otherwise rational person. Giving his lay audience a compelling introduction to the emerging field of cognitive neuroscience, Goleman shows how otherwise brilliant people can suffer in life from their inability to correctly assess and respond to internal and external emotional challenges.
More importantly, he gives practical direction on ways that we can more happily manage our emotions, and thus reduce the level of loneliness, depression and hostility in our world. (Depression is currently one of the leading causes of death and soon may be the number one medical burden throughout the world.)
Complementary findings have led to the publication of The HeartMath Solution and the establishment of the HeartMath Institute in California, which teaches people from all walks of life how to work with the recently-discovered neural network in the heart that governs our higher emotions.
At the leading edge of the field is educator Joseph Chilton Pearce (The Crack In the Cosmic Egg, The Biology of Transcendence), who has shown how further utilization of the prefrontal cortex, which acts as a governor on our emotions, leads to extraordinary states of awareness previously associated with religious experience.
What does all this tell us? That emotional competence is not simply a matter of personality, but that it can be learned. That we have the ability to reduce the incidence of divorce, and to make divorce less traumatic, if we choose to do so. And that we aren’t really smart in any meaningful way until we learn to balance our heads and our hearts.
