Improve Your Emotional Health with Online Counseling in Illinois

What Is Emotional Fluency?

Two of the most common ways of responding to challenging emotions are like two sides of a coin. On one side we have a tendency to hyper-focus on distress and on the other we have a tendency to dismiss it and distract ourselves. Hyper-focusing often leads to feelings of helplessness, obsessive thinking and negatively impacts our relationships. Whereas dismissing suffering interferes with our capacity for authenticity. Chronically pushing things away makes it difficult to reach them when we need to know how we truly feel. And distraction is now the air we breath, pervasive, undetected and exerting massive manipulation in numerous numbing and addictive ways. Neither of these responses are very effective, both of them miss the point. This two sided coin is what social science researcher Karla McLaren calls the “express or repress” options. McLaren’s work educates her audiences to understand what emotions are actually for; our flourishing.

Why Emotional Intelligence Matters

If you feel like you’re white knuckling your way through intense personal and/or societal turbulence these days you’re not alone. We are living through a disturbing age. That does not recommend numbing out or getting hijacked by worry loops. More than two decades ago neuroscientist Antonio DaMasio wrote that we humans have a biological mandate not only to survive but to thrive. Going all the way back (the fourth century BC) the temple at Delphi bore the inscription “Know Thyself”. In the year 2021 neuropsychologist/ analyst Mark Solms published The Hidden Spring an empirically grounded masterwork showing the intimate interconnection between the part of the brain that generates feeling and our bodily states.

Benefits of Online Therapy in Illinois

Somehow we got away from the wisdom of emotional fluency as a skill worth cultivating. Yet consciousness of emotion remains a foundational domain of human intelligence and crucial for thriving. At Kelli Fitzgerald Counseling, we offer online therapy in Illinois to help you develop emotional intelligence and navigate life’s challenges with greater ease.

Practical Tips for Managing Emotions

When people get better at actually hearing what their emotions are trying to tell them they’ll often discover a sense of well-being they hadn’t believed possible. You can learn to soften their intensity and shift out of distress states with greater ease rather than getting stuck or repressing. Here are a few tips to start:

• Learn what source or “feeling family” your emotion is coming from: It may surprise you and knowing helps with next steps.

• The mindful pause for conscious questioning: You can learn the most beneficial questions for the particular emotion. They are not all the same (!) but they are easy to learn.

• Seek Professional Support: Working with a licensed counselor can help you follow the wisdom within your emotions to where they are telling you help is needed.

We often experience challenging emotions as obstructive when in full blown expression but you can learn to detect and respond long before this point. Attending to their wisdom in their quieter, more fluid states enhances understanding of them. This is a clarity threshold for emotional intelligence that often illuminates meaningful next steps. In McLaren’s work on the language of emotion she presents tools for finding hidden obstructions or interference. This guidance hones in on what she calls our “hidden contracts” with surprising accuracy.

Emotions as a Path to Well-Being

When this process gets energized it unfolds a natural sense that even the hardest of emotions are not properly seen as problems but conveyance of core wisdom from the hidden spring. If you’ve been feeling stuck with hard emotions with nowhere to go or if you’re sick of numbing out through distraction, there is a better way. In fact there are better ways. We now see many therapeutic approaches that carefully sequence intentional processes to foster growth of this skill. When you learn it you begin a practice that will serve you throughout your life. Things can begin to move again, things begin to flow.