The levels of distress for the great mass of human kind are of disabling proportions. Large numbers of our fellow beings live in want of the basics: food, shelter, and security. Many, many millions more live in insecure political, economic and social arrangements, and those of us who live in the more materially secure (for the present) societies of the developed world have uncovered massive forms of emotional exploitation and abuse. Distress on such a scale might easily lead some to view the human being as an unfinished project - therefore capable of developing in unexpected and altogether creative and glorious ways but the result so far leaves little to inspire one to any great hope. However, emotional competence lies at the root of much of the change that is needed to create the kinds of conditions for us all to flourish - rather than for some to live at the expense of others.
Of the distress condition of humans on the planet, John Heron (1992) writes:
“This is a vast social pathology, a vast malaise. It cannot be regarded as a therapeutic problem, other than in the short-term individual case. It is an educational issue. We need concepts of child-raising and of education at all levels that foster the progressive development of emotional competence, in the same way that at present we foster the development of intellectual competence.”
Emotional competence begins with the capacity of the individual to be able to identify, take responsibility for and accept emotions of all kinds, along with the accompanying ability to switch and redirect emotional states with some elegance and awareness. At an everyday level, emotional competence means being able to spot the re-stimulation of old emotional pain and to interrupt its displacement before it is let loose into forms of distorted behaviour that is then acted out upon others or internalised upon oneself. Such ‘pattern interruption’ begins to remove old hurt-laden agendas so they are no longer ‘projected’ out onto others, nor are they ‘transferred’ onto current situations inappropriately. Such a view is based on the general insight that early traumatic experiences have a major influence on adult behaviour.
The implications of developing an emotionally competent culture would go a long way beyond the claims made for most forms of emotional management or self-control that are increasingly popularised. It would mean being able to spot institutionalised and professionalised forms of displacement, and finding ways of replacing them with more rational, flexible and adaptive behaviours.
“This is a cry-ing need in all the helping professions. So the doctor abandons the repeat prescriptions of psychotropic drugs and cultivates an ability to handle psychosocial disorders. The academic relinquishes sixty-minute lectures and develops more skill in facilitating self-directed learning. The priest stops preaching sin and acquires competence in enhancing spiritual self-esteem.
It means being able supportively to confront other people who are unawarely acting out their denied distress in negative and disruptive forms of behaviour. The confrontation does not shirk the behavioural issue: it deals with it straight and true. At the same time it does not attack, invalidate or abuse the person who is being confronted about the issue. The uncompromising feedback is fundamentally respectful.” J. Heron, 1992.
‘Emotional competence’ means many things and is, in the author’s view, a richer concept than that of ‘emotional intelligence’ which suggests that emotions have an intelligence rather than that persons have intelligent ways of managing their feeling life and that ‘emoting‘ is only one way of expressing feeling.
Emotional competence recognises that an event can give rise to either positive or distress-laden emotions for the person at the centre of that event. It also acknowledges that one person may experience positive emotions whilst another experiences distress-laded emotions from the same event. The response is not determined by the event itself but by the individual’s own internal processing.
Emotional competence also recognises the importance of catharsis and the release of distress emotion as ‘evidence of self-healing, not as evidence of breakdown’. It also differentiates the originating distress induced from the later distorted forms it acquires once it has been repressed and denied. The emotionally competent person is someone who knows the difference between ‘the catharsis of distress, which occurs when repression is dismantled, and the displacement or acting out of distress, which is the result of repression still being in place’. They can also distinguish between ‘catharsis as such and dramatisation or pseudo-catharsis, which is the last vestige of acting out as repression falls away’.
Emotional competence also means enjoying and expressing positive emotions, as well as noticing when these are clouded by distress to such an extent that we need to take time-out to release it. Along with this goes a strong enhancement of positive and affirmative forms of celebration and the promotion of positive self-esteem as a foundational element of emotional life.
In broad terms, there are four distinctive elements to any mapping of emotional competence. They are:
1. The management of emotion through creative expression.
2. The ability to suppress and manage feelings of all kinds in an aware way when appropriate,
3. The ability to discharge distress via a variety of cathartic skills at appropriate times and places,
4. The ability to transmute aspects of distress emotion rather than suppress or repress them.
