Three Factors to Fostering Emotional Awareness in Others
On a YouTube video reflecting on her role as Lady Cora Crawley on Downton Abbey, Elizabeth McGovern noted the difference in emotional between her American-born character and the character's husband. She said Robert, bound by years of aristocratic tradition, had emotions but had a more difficult time reaching them.
Rarely are we in relationships with those with the same depth and timing in their willingness to reach emotionally. Here are three factors that can help us deal graciously with the less expressive:
(1) The common humanity in the misreading or ignoring our emotions can evoke our empathy.
Jesus, weeping over Jerusalem, says in Luke 19:42 that the culture as a whole does not know what makes up its peace. The distance between Christ as Counselor and Discerner of hearts is vast. Some of that distance is increased by the choices we make. Yet, He weeps empathetically.
As we realize the difference Christ covered, as we, by grace, experience in ourselves the mind which is in Him, we can develop the same inclination. By degrees, we can focus less on the cues that others miss or the expressions they stifle. Instead, we can commiserate genuinely with people as we find them.
(2) Patience is love's handmaiden.
Robert and Cora on Downton Abbey came together in a marriage of economic interests. They fell in love years later. Perhaps our connections aren't quite so crass and mercenary, but we all have to be honest with ourselves about the way in which we prioritized our own needs and interests. As we manage and curtail that selfishness, we can prayerfully begin to fall in love with the image of Christ which is subtly and slowly apparent in others.
We want quicker results. We want others to immediately have the emotional acumen to recognize what is lovely in us and the lessons we are trying to telegraph. Remember what the righteousness of Christ displays in this respect. When Peter rebuffed His loving, foot-washing gesture in the Upper Room, Jesus abided with the confidence of John 13:7 that Peter would understand Jesus's love hereafter. He knew, likewise, that there was on so much Truth His followers could bear at one time.
(3) Activity can support emotional infrastructure.
I've had this confirmed twice in my life in recent weeks. Exchanging book titles and favorite quotes is my love language, and doing so with someone else similarly inclined apparently allowed this introvert to feel confident enough to ask me to pray for him.
A war movie we both want to watch, in turn, provided the background and common space on the calendar for a frank discussion of mutual emotional vulnerability that would not have happened we set an appointment exclusively for that purpose.
As a counselor by training and experience, reader, and a writer, I can assume a level of emotional fascination or fixation that is not universal. Even my wife can feel a bit overwhelmed trying to keep up with the intensity I can ascribe to relatively ordinary events.
I discovered, however, that if her hands are busy in comfortable routines in which she is confident kitchen mastery, she is willing to dive deeper into conversation. As I take enough interest in her specialty to ask question here and a question there, there seems to be an unconscious, and unselfconscious, exchange.
Even here, Christ goes before us as the Christian's righteousness. He knows better than we do how quickly we give our hearts to things and activities, and yet He can use both. He Who made water and the human being mostly out of it can use in efforts to satisfy His thirst in John 4 as the opening of a conversation with the woman at the well. He can use the physical hunger of those who hear Him, and likewise their readiness to use Him for a perpetual free meal, to teach His audience about the depths of their own souls.
Rarely are we in relationships with those with the same depth and timing in their willingness to reach emotionally. Here are three factors that can help us deal graciously with the less expressive:
(1) The common humanity in the misreading or ignoring our emotions can evoke our empathy.
Jesus, weeping over Jerusalem, says in Luke 19:42 that the culture as a whole does not know what makes up its peace. The distance between Christ as Counselor and Discerner of hearts is vast. Some of that distance is increased by the choices we make. Yet, He weeps empathetically.
As we realize the difference Christ covered, as we, by grace, experience in ourselves the mind which is in Him, we can develop the same inclination. By degrees, we can focus less on the cues that others miss or the expressions they stifle. Instead, we can commiserate genuinely with people as we find them.
(2) Patience is love's handmaiden.
Robert and Cora on Downton Abbey came together in a marriage of economic interests. They fell in love years later. Perhaps our connections aren't quite so crass and mercenary, but we all have to be honest with ourselves about the way in which we prioritized our own needs and interests. As we manage and curtail that selfishness, we can prayerfully begin to fall in love with the image of Christ which is subtly and slowly apparent in others.
We want quicker results. We want others to immediately have the emotional acumen to recognize what is lovely in us and the lessons we are trying to telegraph. Remember what the righteousness of Christ displays in this respect. When Peter rebuffed His loving, foot-washing gesture in the Upper Room, Jesus abided with the confidence of John 13:7 that Peter would understand Jesus's love hereafter. He knew, likewise, that there was on so much Truth His followers could bear at one time.
(3) Activity can support emotional infrastructure.
I've had this confirmed twice in my life in recent weeks. Exchanging book titles and favorite quotes is my love language, and doing so with someone else similarly inclined apparently allowed this introvert to feel confident enough to ask me to pray for him.
A war movie we both want to watch, in turn, provided the background and common space on the calendar for a frank discussion of mutual emotional vulnerability that would not have happened we set an appointment exclusively for that purpose.
As a counselor by training and experience, reader, and a writer, I can assume a level of emotional fascination or fixation that is not universal. Even my wife can feel a bit overwhelmed trying to keep up with the intensity I can ascribe to relatively ordinary events.
I discovered, however, that if her hands are busy in comfortable routines in which she is confident kitchen mastery, she is willing to dive deeper into conversation. As I take enough interest in her specialty to ask question here and a question there, there seems to be an unconscious, and unselfconscious, exchange.
Even here, Christ goes before us as the Christian's righteousness. He knows better than we do how quickly we give our hearts to things and activities, and yet He can use both. He Who made water and the human being mostly out of it can use in efforts to satisfy His thirst in John 4 as the opening of a conversation with the woman at the well. He can use the physical hunger of those who hear Him, and likewise their readiness to use Him for a perpetual free meal, to teach His audience about the depths of their own souls.
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