Emotional Competence

The concept of emotional competence is rooted in understanding emotions as normal, useful aspects of being human. Anger is a reaction to aggression and gives a person the strength to repel the aggression. Grief is a reaction to abandonment or feeling unloved and it has the effect of eliciting sympathetic responses from others. Fear is a response to danger and has a clear physiological effect of heightening our senses and speeding up our reactions.

From this it can be seen that the suppression of emotion is not useful and that teaching people to suppress their emotions is part of trying to control them. Emotionally competent people will express emotion appropriate to the situation and their needs and they will not seek to suppress emotions in others.

It is fairly widely believed that if appropriate emotions are not expressed some sort of memory of them becomes stored.Later events may trigger off the old emotions resulting in inappropriate emotional responses. This particularly applies to emotions that children are prevented from expressing. Releasing these old emotions is a key feature of co-counseling.

Emotional competence can lead to improved health through avoiding stress that would otherwise result from suppressing emotions. It can also lead to improved relationships since inappropriate emotions are less likely to be expressed and appropriate behavior is not avoided through fear of triggering some emotion.

The concept is distinct from emotional intelligence which, while recognizing the importance of emotions, gives emphasis to controlling or manipulating them.


~kavip preya~