Emotional intelligence is the ability to notice, understand and handle our own feelings, and to recognise and respond well to the feelings of others. The idea was set out by the psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990 and made famous by Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence in 1995. Therapeutic Shamanism names it as one of the qualities of a healthy Adult and a true ElderElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this, and approaches it through the body and through relationship, seeing feelings as there to be felt, not managed away.
What is emotional intelligence? #
A set of abilities to do with feelings. In Emotional Intelligence (1995), Daniel Goleman sets out five areas, which he credits to Peter Salovey’s definition:1
– Knowing your own emotions: recognising a feeling as it happens. Goleman calls this self-awareness “the keystone of emotional intelligence.” – Managing your emotions: being able to soothe yourself and bounce back from life’s setbacks and upsets. – Motivating yourself: marshalling your emotions in the service of a goal. – Recognising emotions in others: empathy. – Handling relationships: in large part, skill in managing emotions in others.
These are often summed up as self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills.
Is it a kind of intelligence, or a personality trait? #
Psychologists still debate this. Some measure emotional intelligence like an ability, with tests that have right and wrong answers. Others measure it like a trait, with questionnaires about how a person usually behaves. The two kinds of measure are only weakly related, and the trait kind overlaps a lot with ordinary personality.2 The psychologist Howard Gardner, known for the idea of multiple intelligences, sees emotional intelligence as roughly a combination of two of his own, the understanding of ourselves and the understanding of others.3
Goleman’s book was subtitled Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, and he wrote that “At best, IQ contributes about 20 per cent to the factors that determine life success”. He also says that IQ and emotional intelligence are separate abilities, not opposites.4
Can emotional intelligence be learnt? #
Goleman thought so: “Lapses in emotional skills can be remedied: to a great extent each of these domains represents a body of habit and response that, with the right effort, can be improved on.”5 Some research supports this, with limits. In one small controlled study, students who took four short training sessions became better at identifying and managing emotions, and the gains were still there six months later, though their understanding of emotions did not change.6 Another review found that people high in emotional intelligence handle their feelings flexibly, “thereby leaving room for emotions to emerge”, and do not simply keep them under control.7
The same goes for empathy: “Psychopaths aside, it is a learnable thing for most people. It can even be taught.” Empathy “is an embodied, emotional and visceral thing”, and “we do not so much learn empathy, but learn to open up and reconnect, and empathy then follows.”8
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see emotional intelligence? #
As part of what it means to be a healthy grown-up. Amongst the qualities of healthy adulthood is emotional intelligence. Hunter-gatherers were emotionally fluent and comfortable with emotions: they could laugh heartily and grieve deeply, and be fully embodied and present in their bodies and experience. Most people today, by contrast, live very much in their heads, disconnected from their bodies.
The qualities of a True Adult, drawn from anthropology and from psychotherapy, “particularly from Rogers, Maslow, Reich and Jung”, include many that Goleman describes. A True AdultTrue Adult. Not someone with a job and a mortgage, but a person shocked out of childish separateness who has taken up their place, interdependently, in both the human tribe and the more-than-human web. Adults decide; Elders advise. Read the full answer “Has a good degree of self-awareness”, “Is in touch with their feelings and emotions. Can show vulnerability when appropriate”, “Is empathic and compassionate”, and “Has healthy self-control and self-discipline (mental, emotional and physical).”9 Among the qualities of a true Elder, in so many words: “Is empathic and emotionally intelligent.”10 See What is the Adult, and what does healthy inner leadership look like?
Where do the two meet? #
In self-awareness, first of all. Goleman describes it as attention that takes in what passes through the mind “with impartiality, as an interested yet unreactive witness.”11 Therapeutic Shamanism speaks of the Aware SelfAware Self. The Witness: not a part of the self but a capacity for awareness, cultivated by hollowing-out, that can watch the flow of thoughts without being caught in them. More about this, “our self-awareness, our consciousness”. Meditation, psychotherapy and other practices “teach us to be able to step back from our middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer stories and not be so entangled up in them”, and the shamanic practice of hollowing-out cultivates the same capacity.12
They meet again in refusing to push feelings down. Goleman writes that “The goal is balance, not emotional suppression: every feeling has its value and significance.”13 Feelings “need to be felt and allowed to move through the body”, and “not by-passed or suppressed.”14
And they meet in empathy. Therapeutic Shamanism’s understanding of empathy owes much to the psychologist Carl Rogers, whose person-centred approach has the therapist “listening without judgement and with empathy”, so that the client “learns to go inwards and trust their own feelings, intuition and inner knowing”.15 See Who was Carl Rogers, and why does he matter to Therapeutic Shamanism?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism go further? #
In two directions. The first is the body. Emotional intelligence is usually described as something the mind does. Therapeutic Shamanism sees the body as having an intelligence of its own: “the physical body is not just some vehicle for the soul. It is not just some ‘thing’ we inhabit. Rather, it has its own consciousness, intelligence, wisdom, needs and drives.”16 Being emotionally intelligent, from this point of view, means being in the body, where feelings actually happen, and not only thinking about them.
The second is the wider story of why so many people struggle with their feelings at all. Therapeutic Shamanism sees this as one of the costs of domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer: “the Fall was characterised by the left hemisphere of the brain and the ego seizing control, and suppressing the emotional and sensitive right side of the brain. The Fall was an act of the mass suppression of the human psyche.”17 So the work is not only to learn new skills, but to recover something we once had.
It also reaches beyond the human: “in order to deeply regain empathy, we have to go beyond the human. We have to reconnect with the more-than-human world too.”18 See What does domestication do to us?
