Affective Competence

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What this means…

Affective competence is about emotional intelligence or emotional competence, knowing when and how to express feelings, when and how to manage them; when and how to control them or even to sublimate them into some other form.

Affective 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 redirect emotional states with awareness.

It means enjoying and expressing positive emotions as well as noticing when these are clouded by distress to the extent that we need to take time out to release it.

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.