Emotional Competence Quotes

Our feelings are not there to be cast out or conquered. They're there to be engaged and expressed with imagination and intelligence. ~ T.K. Coleman

Emotional self-control is NOT the same as overcontrol, the stifling of all feeling and spontaneity ... when such emotional suppression is chronic, it can impair thinking, hamper intellectual performance and interfere with smooth social interaction. By contrast, emotional competence implies we have a choice as to how we express our feelings. ~ Daniel Goleman

Emotional competence requires the capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress; the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries; the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past.

What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood. If distinctions between past and present blur, we will perceive loss or the threat of loss where none exists; and the awareness of those genuine needs that do require satisfaction, rather than their repression for the sake of gaining the acceptance or approval of others. Stress occurs in the absence of these criteria, and it leads to the disruption of homeostasis. Chronic disruption results in ill health.

In each of the individual histories of illness in this book, one or more aspect of emotional competence was significantly compromised, usually in ways entirely unknown to the person involved. Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal. We need to foster emotional competence in our children, as the best preventive medicine. ~ Gabor Mate

Marriage is a linchpin in many women's lives, but many other things can create a satisfying life. I adore my career. It stretches every physical, emotional, and intellectual muscle I have. ~ Geraldine Stutz

You may never be able to keep up with someone else's steps, either you may end up being far behind or far gone. Pick your path, not someone else's ~ Patricia Dsouza

There is always an emotional element to anything that you make. ~ Oscar De La Renta

The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God. ~ Charles Williams

We create our own reality because of our inner emotional - our subconscious - reality draws us into those situations from which we learn. We experience it as strange things happening to us (and) we meet the people in our lives that we need to learn from. And so we create these circumstances at a very deep metaphysical and subconscious level. ~ Edgar Mitchell

Frequently, friendship is represented as something too steadily pleasant, or in certain of the masterpieces of the past -- Aristotle and Cicero, for example -- as pervaded by a constant mutual understanding and a gentle calm. Friendship is also an emotional relationship, with involvement that can get hot at times, like any other deep involvement with a person. ~ Stuart Miller

Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we've never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not. ~ D.H. Lawrence

What about that five-foot-four woman, who never inflicted physical or emotional violence, or even saw a punishment all the way through, terrified her husband and children to the point of unconditional surrender? Jacob ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I don't think a woman should be in any government job whatever. I mean, I really don't. The reason why I do is mainly because they are erratic. And emotional. ~ Richard M. Nixon

Each time you meet an old emotional pattern with presence, your awakening to truth can deepen. There's less identification with the self in the story and more ability to rest in the awareness that is witnessing what's happening. You become more able to abide in compassion, to remember and trust your true home. Rather than cycling repetitively through old conditioning, you are actually spiraling toward freedom. ~ Tara Brach

A great numb feeling washes over me as I let go of the past and look forward to the future. Pretend to be a vampire. I don't really need to pretend, because it's who I am, an emotional vampire. I've just come to expect it. Vampires are real. That I was born this way. That I feed off of other people's real emotions. Search for this night's prey. Who will it be? ~ Bret Easton Ellis

An emotion does not cause pain. Resistance or suppression of emotion causes pain. ~ Frederick Dodson

The actions and emotional responses of others are not your responsibility. You cannot rescue people from themselves. This is for them to do. - André Chevalier ~ Nikki Sex

True adulthood would mean no longer denying the truth. It would mean feeling the repressed suffering, consciously acknowledging the story remembered by the body at an emotional level, and integrating that story instead of repressing it. Whether contact with the parents can then in fact be maintained will depend on the given circumstances in each individual case. What is absolutely imperative is the termination of the harmful attachment to the internalized parents of childhood, an attachment that, though we call it love, certainly does not deserve the name. It is made up of different ingredients, such as gratitude, compassion, expectations, denial, illusions, obedience, fear, and the anticipation of punishment. Time ~ Alice Miller

I don't make movies about issues. This is my same litmus test for all the movies I love: Is it a great character on a great emotional quest with a great emotional need? Do they overcome great emotional obstacles? Is it a fantastic story? I didn't set out to be a political activist. I'm just a human being who's moved by certain things, and if certain things break my heart, I set out to fix them. ~ Kimberly Peirce

Charles Darwin himself had written a whole tome about the parallels between human and animal emotional expressions. ~ Frans De Waal

You are unique, special and exceptional as you have made it. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Neuroscientist David Comings drew out the larger implications of such hallucinations for the relationship between our rational and spiritual brains:
The psychedelic drugs like DMT often produce a sensation of "contact," of being in the presence of and interaction with a non-human being. Highly intelligent and sophisticated test subjects who knew these feelings were drug-induced nevertheless insisted the contact had really happened. The temporal lobe-limbic system's emotional tape recorder sometimes cannot distinguish between externally generated real events and internally generated non-real experience thus providing a system in which the rational brain and the spiritual brain are not necessarily in conflict. ~ Michael Shermer

Suicidal pain includes the feeling that one has lost all capacity to effect emotional change. The agony is excruciating and looks as if it will never end. There is the feeling of having been beaten down for a very long time. There are feelings of agitation, emptiness, and incoherence. 'Snap out of it and get on with your life,' sounds like a demand to high jump ten feet. ~ David L. Conroy

and I refuse to allow myself
to provide an emotional reaction
to those who are not worthy
of my energy ~ R.H. Sin

Every time i see a butterfly, it reminds me of how precious life can truly be. To be able to turn from a caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly and fly away so freely and gracefully wherever she may please, without no one in the world to tell her what to do. I wait for that special moment in time when I get to live freely, without no worries, pain or tears. I just want to be happy. I want the laughter in the air without all of the pain. One special day I'll get to live my life just like that beautiful butterfly. I will no longer feel blue inside. ~ Michelle Knight

If there's true emotional content in a situation between characters, all you do is reveal it. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Emotional attunement between teachers and learners is highlighted, as well as the central role of storytelling in traditional and contemporary learning. Research has also found that exploration and play, usually consigned to less important after-school activities, are central ~ Louis Cozolino

However, a good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Play, Incorporating Animistic and Magical Thinking Is Important Because It:
Fosters the healthy, creative and emotional growth of a child;
Forms the best foundation for later intellectual growth.
Provides a way in which children get to know the world and creates possibilities for different ways of responding to it.
Fosters empathy and wonder. ~ Rachel Carson

Unfortunately, our over-emphasis on the male as oppressor often obscures the fact that men too are victimized. To be an oppressor is dehumanizing and anti-human in nature, as it is to be a victim. Patriarchy forces fathers to act as monsters, encourages husbands and lovers to be rapists in disguise; it teaches our blood brothers to feel ashamed that they care for us, and denies all men the emotional life that would act as a humanizing, self-affirming force in their lives. ~ Bell Hooks

'Short Term 12' was such a marathon. It's like trying to convey the same emotional depth as 'The Gambler' but with less time and a fingernail's worth of the budget. ~ Brie Larson

I wrote a great deal of verse. In fact, every time I fell in love, which was rather often, I burst into the emotional sort of thing which is perennially salable. ~ Rheta Childe Dorr

Sometimes a miracle is a change in material conditions, such as physical healing. At other times, it is a psychological or emotional change. ~ Marianne Williamson

Her love, something he was so unused to, seemed to hasten the emotional outpouring. ~ Atticus Lish

Maybe mountaineering shouldn't be considered heroic at all, since the whole effort is 'useless' and in no way to be compared with sitting down at the wrong lunch counter in the early-sixties South, or going into battle. Nevertheless, situations arise in the useless enterprise of mountaineering that present people with choices, that make emotional and physical demands that few can meet. ~ Robert Roper

Sacred rest is not just about sleeping or taking it easy. It consists of physical, emotional, and spiritual rest. The purpose is to promote a healthier mindset, attitudes, boundaries, relationships, productivity, and wellness as a whole person; body, mind, and spirit. ~ Dana Arcuri

Marketers know - no matter how deep the emotional connection or brand loyalty - when a product does not perform, rational thought overtakes emotion, and most consumers make a new choice. ~ Mark McKinnon

Worry is a waste of emotional reserve". ~ Ayn Rand

Familiarity with the brand requires some experience of it (via advertising, word of mouth, internet publicity), Confidence comes with the perception of competence in the brand itself (which is why new brands really need to work hard for people to experience them first) and Trustworthiness refers to the sense of whether the brand is going to live up to its promise of reliability for the price paid. ~ David Amerland

Emotions bleed where love frowns and despair smiles
My home is within the core
The center of this place, it lays down my heart for love
My love's (in) the Center of War ~ Criss Jami

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal. ~ Marilyn Ferguson

Thus, the critical dimension in understanding whether a marriage will work or not, becomes the extent to which the male can accept the influence of the woman he loves and become socialized in emotional communication. ~ John M. Gottman

Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care ... -Wintergirls ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

She taught him that sometimes, when someone was in emotional denial, they needed proof of how wrong they really were. Sometimes they needed actions instead of words. Sometimes they needed someone to make the hard decision or to say the painful thing, or they would be lost and locked in their own hearts forever. ~ Amy Lane

We don't need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It's how we justify killing each other. ~ Charlie Jane Anders

When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match. ~ Bruce Beresford

Any attempt to capture the direct experience of the nature of mind in words is impossible. The best that can be said is that it is immeasurably peaceful and, once stabilized through repeated experience, virtually unshakable. It's an experience of absolute well-being that radiates through all physical, emotional and mental states-even those that might ordinarily be labeled as unpleasant. ~ Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. [ ... ] First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever. ~ Laura Miller

Mostly, we have put on a brave face with a wide grin and went on with life, as best we could. ~ Patricia Dsouza

We're celebrating our freedom. We're celebrating our ability to be kids when everything is trying to take that away from us. It's a choice, Ty. We can do whatever we want. ~ Matthew Quick

But you want a placid pond, a glassy surface to reflect your own casual desires and nothing more. You will never fathom the depths of my savage ocean. ~ Sherri Gaillard

But then acting is all about faking. We're all very good at faking things that we have no competence with. ~ John Cleese

In this world, we are surrounded by fast-paced, empty static energy. They're like the empty calories of the soul. You have empty calories for your body, like a bag of potato chips for example, then you have empty calories for your soul, which are found in the static energy that doesn't really add to our emotional, spiritual, mental experience of living our lives. We have magical moments of connection with people, with nature, with Spirit, but then we rush out of those moments all too fast, in order to go straight back into the busy lanes that are full of things not worthwhile! Empty energies! So when we do that, we forget our magical, nourishing soul moments all too fast and we start caring about things that we shouldn't care about too much, stepping outside of the moments of eternity that we encounter, and going back into the empty noise. So I think that we need to picture ourselves as rocks in the river; we can let all of that rush by us, while we stay fortified where we are, lingering in the warmness of the noontime sun, the chill of the dawn , the reflections of dusk - like a rock in a river - let it all just rush by. Be magic. ~ C. JoyBell C.