Daughter Detox

by Peg Streep

  ♦ Am I counting “passes” and “dribbles” in my relationship, rather than looking at patterns of connection?

  ♦ Am I able to see the bigger picture when I think about my relationships, focusing on the abilities of close others to respond to me and meet my needs, or do I tend to get stuck analyzing and reanalyzing specific quarrels or disagreements?

  ♦ Do I only think about my relationships in times of stress? If so, how does that affect my focus and ability to see clearly?

  ♦ Am I able to see myself clearly when I think about my role in relationships, or do I get bogged down by focusing on what was said and done to me?

  TROUBLESHOOTING YOUR EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

  Two important consequences of negative childhood experiences are the lack of support for the development of emotional intelligence and the presence of dynamics that actively impair it. (For a fuller discussion of emotional intelligence and its four branches, please review pages 96 –98 .) It’s not unusual, by the way, to discover that you have deficiencies in all four branches, especially if your childhood experiences required you to actively deny your feelings. Similarly, if you had to squelch your feelings in order to keep the peace or minimize fractiousness, you’re not likely to have easy access to them now, nor will you have the appropriate skill set for managing them. Children who were subjected to continuous gaslighting also have specific deficits—not believing or trusting their feelings—which have to be addressed. Self-doubt—which all unloved daughters suffer from in one degree or another—also undercuts the ability to recognize and manage negative feelings. Samantha, 47, shared her childhood experience, which will be familiar to many: “Being emotional was frowned upon by both parents. Being strong was never showing what you were feeling. My mother and father mocked me and my brother for crying, and I was picked on for feeling ‘too sad’ too often. Yes, they both told me that they’d give me a reason to be sad if I didn’t quit it. As an adult, I don’t always know what I am feeling. Sad and angry seem to blend, and both make me feel ashamed. Weird, isn’t it?”

  The good news is that studies show that emotional intelligence is a skill set—and can be built upon and improved. So take a personal inventory and ask yourself these questions:

  ♦ How adept am I at recognizing my feelings?

  Some situations in life prompt emotional responses that are relatively straightforward, and in these cases, labeling what we’re feeling isn’t very challenging. Your beloved pet dies, and waves of sadness wash over you. But more complicated events—a fight with your spouse or close friend, or a massive and very public failure in your work life—may evoke a range of different emotions, either sequentially or in simulcast, or a blend of feelings. In these situations, identifying your feelings requires the kind of dexterity that a game of pick-up sticks does; you need to label and identify your different feelings in the moment.

  ♦ Do I oversimplify when I think about emotion?

  A study conducted by Lisa Feldman Barrett and her colleagues found that people who think about their emotions on a simple continuum with good and pleasant on one end and bad and unpleasant on the other —thus differentiating among them in broad strokes without nuance—had much more trouble managing their feelings.

  Is this you ?

  ♦ Do I back off from thinking about feelings or emotional situations?

  It’s been suggested that motivation may also be tied to poor emotional differentiation. People who are made uncomfortable by their emotions and are motivated to avoid emotional situations tend not to be able to differentiate their feelings very well, as a study by Yasemin Erbas and others showed. On the other hand, people who recognize that they’re not good at labeling and identifying their emotions may actually want to approach emotional situations in the hope of improving their skills. This result led Erbas and her team to conclude that volition and motivation have a lot to do with your ability to differentiate your feelings.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF NAMING YOUR FEELINGS

  It turns out that labeling your emotions—putting your feelings into words—actually causes physiological changes to a part of the brain, the amygdala, literally tamping down reactivity, as an MRI study by Matthew D. Lieberman showed.

  So, ask yourself these key questions:

  ♦ Do I avoid talking about my feelings? Does talking about my feelings make me anxious or uncomfortable?

  ♦ How good am I at making fine distinctions such as realizing that I’m more ashamed than embarrassed, or frustrated instead of angry?

  ♦ What’s my response to emotionally complex situations? Am I able to untangle all of my various feelings and recognize their source? Or do I just shut my brain off?

  ♦ Do I see the big picture?

  ♦ When someone asks what I’m feeling, am I able to answer?

  ♦ Do I avoid being specific about what I’m feeling on purpose, or is it a question of not knowing what I’m feeling?

  ♦ How hard is it for me to say “I’m angry” or “I love you”? Is one easier than the other?

  THE QUESTION OF EMOTIONAL CLARITY

  It’s not just how skilled you are at differentiating your emotions; what matters, too, is how much emotional clarity you possess. What is emotional clarity? It’s an enhanced or greater ability to “identify, discriminate between, and understand the type of affect (e.g., anger vs. frustration) and source of affect one typically experiences.” While this sounds like emotional differentiation, it’s actually a bit different since this is a skill associated with reflection, as opposed to labeling and identifying in the moment. One research study by Matthew Tyler Boden and others found that the two skills were not just different but unrelated. While being able to distinguish your feelings with accuracy will guide your behavior (realizing you were frustrated and not angry will lead you to apologize to the unwitting target of your hissy fit), understanding what kinds of events yield different emotions and outcomes —seeing the big picture—will give you more control over your choices and actions.

  For the unloved daughter, the “big picture” is the emerging portrait of your childhood, and how your behaviors were formed in response to the way you were treated. As you become clearer about what happened, you will also be able to see triggers and echoes in your responses. Becoming conscious of outsized reactions that are reflections of the past—words that remind you of things your mother says or said, being put down in a familiar way, being told that the problem lies with you—is key to honing your ability to disarm the old patterns and begin to live differently.

  Questions to ask yourself:

  ♦ Am I a skilled emotional manager?

  If you’re pretty sure that you’re not, start practicing STOP, LOOK, LISTEN. You need to focus on whether negative emotions insinuate themselves into your life, throw you into a ruminative loop, and end up internalized. If so, the likelihood is that you’re “state-oriented” and not as good at managing your emotions as you need to be. On the other hand, if negative emotions are something you can cope with—not by brushing them off but by dealing with them in the day-to-day—the likelihood is that you’re “action-oriented.” Coping skills are key to both achievement and satisfaction, and understanding how well you cope is critical.

  If you’re prone to emotional flooding, use self-calming techniques, such as visualizing a supportive person, to stop the cascade. If you tend to wall yourself off, visualize a calming environment to stay emotionally open and permit yourself to feel your emotions.

  ♦ Do I have a bead on my moods?

  Moods affect each and every one of us; they impact how well we manage our emotions, as anyone can attest: Get to the office in a bad mood and just see how a minor irritant can escalate into major drama. Unlike emotions, which have an identifiable source or cause —I’m happy because I got a raise, or I’m sad because I messed up my presentation—moods are much more diffuse, harder to think about, and to pinpoint. Becoming conscious of your moods and their effect on your actions and reactions is another way of honing y
our emotional intelligence skills. Engage in quiet self-reflection and focus on what is causing you to feel the way you do.

  Understanding moods is also key to affective forecasting.

  RECOGNIZING YOUR (CLOUDY) CRYSTAL BALL

  One specific area of reactivity is your anticipation of future events and how you prepare for them emotionally and psychologically. This could be a discussion you’re going to have, a party or meet-up you plan on attending, or even a move you’re preparing for such as a new job or a new place to live. Not surprisingly, unconscious processes play a role in shaping these responses, too. It turns out that all humans—whether our needs were met in childhood or not—aren’t very good at predicting how we’ll act and feel in the future. Yes, once again, the securely attached have an edge over the insecurely attached, but understanding this human shortcoming will be helpful as you work on disarming triggers and move toward reclaiming your life.

  How good are you at anticipating your future reactions? How skilled are you at predicting how happy something will make you or, for that matter, how unhappy you’ll be? This skill is what the experts call “affective forecasting.” Psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert determined that affective forecasting has four distinct parts:

  1. Our ability to predict whether our feelings will be positive or negative

  2. Our ability to predict the specific emotions we’ll experience

  3. Our ability to predict how intense those feelings will b e

  4. Our ability to predict how long those feelings will last

  Not surprisingly, most of us are pretty good at the first—figuring out whether we’ll feel great or dreadful when a future event takes place. But that’s where most people’s success rate starts and stops. Again, your emotional intelligence is going to factor in for the second part—some people are better at identifying emotions with precision than others—but generally, people oversimplify when they think about what they’ll feel in the future.

  Why is that? Few things in this life ever deliver emotions that are pure with no shade of gray; even apparently joyous events such as a wedding, a graduation, or a birth may also evoke unanticipated feelings such as loss or anxiety. Some examples: You’re thrilled for your friend who’s getting married, but you worry about how your relationship with her will change. You’ve graduated and are happy, but you’re also feeling angsty about what’s next. The new baby is delicious and you’re delirious with happiness, but you’re also worried about how well you’ll parent. Our thinking about the future is both more simplified and more black-and-white than what life actually presents.

  Humans also fall prey to what experts call “the impact bias.” Basically, we overestimate how future events, both good and bad, will affect us emotionally. We honestly believe that something good—getting the dream job, finishing school, moving to a new house—will lock in happiness forever. Thanks to what’s called either the “hedonic treadmill” or the “happiness set point,” the new thing that seemed to promise eternal happiness becomes, rather quickly, something we’re used to and thus stops making us happy. The dream job becomes the job you go to five days a week; graduating gives way to what to do next; and the house is where you live. Predictably, as we get used to positive changes, the intensity of feeling diminishes and our happiness fades. That’s the bad news, but there’s good news as well.

  The impact bias operates when bad things happen, too, and as a result, we recover from setbacks that we were once sure we could never come back from. We misjudge not just the depths of the misery we’re going to experience but also how long the misery will last. That’s largely a function of what Wilson and Gilbert call our “psychological immune system,” which permits us to make sense of (or rationalize) bad things when they happen unexpectedly. This, too, happens unconsciously.

  There’s not much you can do about the impact bias except to know that it’s there and factor it in because the chances are good that whatever you’re looking forward to or dreading isn’t going to be either as good or as bad as you think. But if you want to get better at predicting your emotional state, some troubleshooting is called for. Wilson and Gilbert have pinpointed the most common sources of forecasting errors, a list from which we can all benefit:

  ♦ Your imagined anticipation of what will happen is an epic fail .

  Technically this is called “misconstrual,” and the bottom line is that we’re not likely to be anywhere close to predicting how we feel if the reality of what happens is completely different from what we imagined. You’re sure that the vacation to Corfu will make you 1,000 percent happier, but you didn’t factor in the 15-hour delay at the airport, the lousy weather, or your stolen wallet.

  ♦ Your focus is wrong .

  This is called “framing,” and it happens when we focus on a detail that we believe will influence our feelings but doesn’t. You move and you’re sure you’ll feel happier not dealing with your oh-so-nosy and invasive neighbor. But then you find your neighbors at your condo unwelcoming. You hadn’t planned on that.

  ♦ Your expectations are either too high or too low .

  The easiest example is the movie or novel everyone is touting and you’re really looking forward to loving it. Not . Obviously, this can equally apply to anything you’re anticipating.

  ♦ You’re misled by your current mood .

  This is pretty obvious once you know about it: Our mindset at the time affects our thinking about the future. The best antidote to this forecasting error is being aware of the mood you’re in and making sure that your ability to perceive your emotions—yes, that’s emotional intelligence again—is working optimally.

  LOSS AVERSION, SUNK COSTS, AND GETTING STUCK

  Culturally, we put a high premium on staying the course, persistence, and grit, and we tend to be dismissive of those who quit or give up; that’s why you’re more likely to be surrounded by people who believe that “winners never quit and quitters never win” even though you’re actually struggling with letting go. The truth? The deck—yes, the unconscious processes that drive the car that is you and everyone else—is totally stacked in favor of hanging in, even when it makes us feel lousy. We can all thank evolution for that (and, yes, I am being ironic.)

  Humans are famously conservative, preferring to avert possible loss even when considering potential gain, as the work of psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed, earning a Nobel Prize in Economics for the latter. Moreover, when we contemplate change, we’re likely to frame the discussion in terms of what we already have invested instead of the possible gains we might reap from moving on. Focusing solely on our investment—which could be time, money, energy—gets in the way whether we’re thinking about leaving a marriage, another relationship, a job, or even selling a clunker car we’ve repaired again and again. The fancy name for this habit of mind is the “sunk-cost fallacy,” and we all do it. It’s called a fallacy because the investment made is long gone and can’t be recouped by either staying or leaving, but that doesn’t stop us from thinking this way. It prevents us from looking forward.

  The only answer, again, is conscious awareness of your automatic thought processes.

  Ask yourself the following questions:

  ♦ Do I worry a lot about time wasted or spent?

  ♦ Is what’s keeping me in place my investment or my real desire?

  ♦ Am I able to see beyond where I find myself and into the future?

  ♦ How afraid of loss am I? Which possible losses worry me most?

  CUEING INTO YOUR REJECTION SENSITIVITY

  Being overly sensitive to rejection, as reviewed in detail on pages 132 -134 , can also become a destructive self-fulfilling prophesy, especially if you are very reactive or combative when you perceive either a slight or the hint of possible rejection. It’s hard to disarm that hypervigilance—especially if it’s what protected you in your family of origin—but it can be done .

  Again, the path to disarming is built on conscious awareness. Use the STO
P, LOOK, LISTEN technique if you find yourself suddenly tense with anticipation that someone is actively pushing you away or about to exclude you. Use self-calming techniques such as visualization to get yourself on more emotionally stable ground as quickly as you can. Once you’ve begun to relax a bit, ask yourself the following questions:

  ♦ Am I reading into what he or she said?

  ♦ Am I taking the words out of context?

  ♦ Am I mistaking banter for seriousness or otherwise misunderstanding the speaker’s tone?

  ♦ What exactly was the speaker’s intention? Can I tell?

  ♦ Can I stop myself from reacting and simply ask what he or she meant?

  More advanced strategies will be detailed in the next chapter .

  TACKLING SELF-CRITICISM

  Becoming aware of your habit of self-criticism—ascribing the things that go wrong in life to your innate character flaws or characteristics, rather than errors in judgment, simple mistakes, or complicated and hard-to-read circumstances—is central to the process of disarming. Most of the time this internalized voice echoes that of your mother or the other family members who derided or mocked you and made you feel inadequate and never good enough, no matter what you did. If constant criticism or derision was part of the daily fare, the reality is that you may employ this kind of thinking without even being conscious that you are. Yes, it’s part of how children normalize their experiences so as to be able to get through them.

  Self-criticism sounds like this: “I didn’t get the promotion because I’m just not smart enough.” “The relationship failed because there’s nothing lovable about me.” “I will never make anything out of my life because I’m nothing but a failure as a human being.” “No wonder everything went wrong because I’m not capable of doing anything right.” Is this you?