Emotional intelligence when words are too small
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Last week, I attended the yellow lady bugs conference and have been spending some time unpacking my learnings, some for myself, some for my practice — this one I think is mostly a self-learning but one I hope will be informative for readers about the variety of ways of engaging with concepts and feelings. Readers may like to consider this for their interactions with folks who think differently to them, especially if wishing to convey or receive ideas with them. The session that particularly came back to me today was one speaking to gestalt language processing (where what you are communicating may not be your exact words but nonetheless aligned to the block of words used — hard to find a good link on this but hopefully this helps), alexithymia (described as a difficulty understanding or describing your feelings), and interoception (your awareness of the internals of your own body). In that session, Caroline Gaddy (@vibrantmindsslp) said something that really stood out to me: “this little word ‘mad’… is too small to explain what this feeling is inside my body… the way other people are trying to explain it… doesn’t make sense to us” As an Autistic person with both alexithymia and limited interoception I often find that the feelings part of my mind are not accessible to me in the same way as they appear to be with others who can immediately pluck a singular word from the air and know it to be their feeling. I generally have to spend analytical time talking through (sometimes in writing, sometimes verbally, or sometimes painstakingly word-by-word as they float away within the silence of my mind). I only know the feeling when I sense the “rightness” or “correctness” that arises after I have described the feeling in ways that are true for me. And yes, to me, “rightness” is a distinct feeling, even though you won’t find it on the feelings wheel. I have not yet spent the reflective time on encapsulating that feeling but I did recently do so for another feeling which I will describe below.
Aside: Alexithymia does not mean a lack of empathy, Autistic people can be highly empathetic and I myself regularly engage in work that requires me to hear and reflect back the emotional experiences of others. I invite you to read about the double empathy problem on the point of empathy. The feeling of injustice and wrongness: Observing, experiencing or hearing about others who are persistently or significantly mistreated. After reflecting on multiple conversations I had recently about people experiencing what I would call an injustice (which is a feeling but not represented by the word itself) I went through a process to unpack exactly what that feeling was. It was Greta Thunberg saying “How dare you” to world leaders at the UN climate summit. It was Aurora’s ‘The Seed’ blasted at max volume as I sing along at the top of my lungs. It was Lovecraftian horror, the being that cannot be described and to look upon it would be to damage the integrity of your mind. It was wrongness. WRONGNESS. And finally, the feeling of ‘rightness’ arose at the representation of this feeling in this last imagery, the sense of my physical form releasing tension as the mindbody’s emote was acknowledged: It is looking at yourself in the mirror, and observing through that mirror a world around you that is warped, the air shimmers with its wrongness, darkness is carried within the air. As you turn away, the warping, the wrongness, disappears and yet you now,now you know that it suffuses the very air around you and you simply could not perceive it before. It is now a felt thing, through senses you did not know you possessed before, but it cannot be perceived directly. Now in its presence the air has become thick and viscous like treacle. Like treacle who’s sweetness has become sickly so as to cover up the true taste that sits beneath in the undernotes. Walking through the world of realness, the treacle stops me, demands to be felt and observed, demands to be shouted until one’s lungs are empty of air as only one truly intending to may, past the point exhaling to the point near collapsing. And speaking to one who has not looked through this mirror, they walk right through as if nothing were there at all. This is how I experience wrongness and injustice. Like Gaddy, “mad” is too small a word, “furious” is too small a word. No single word provides a sense of acknowledgement of such feeling for me. The above reflects my personal experience only, I would never presume to speak on behalf of all Autistics. There is a rich heterogeneity of experience across us, so this is just one human sharing their truth. So now I want to turn this post towards yourself. In reading this, what insights arise? Not just about me, but the nature of feelings, words, and communication? How might you connect with others and understand them where their ways of thinking, acting, being, or perceiving differ from your own? How might this vary across culture and languages? And if you were designing a space or experience, perhaps social or interpersonal, how could you make it accessible and welcoming to a variety of ways of expressing oneself? |