Connecting with the Emotion

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Connecting with others usually means connecting with their emotions. We usually do this quite instinctively. We adjust our body posture, tone of voice and what we say depending on how the other person looks to us.

We have a very sophisticated system for relating to other people. We usually aren’t aware of how sophisticated until we try to do it consciously. Try consciously deciding how loud to speak when someone is walking towards you, so that your voice will be the right volume and pitch to reach them. It is remarkably difficult – and yet we’ve probably done it thousands of times without thinking about it. If you watch a couple of people talking in the street you will be able to see how many alterations there are to body posture that go on in even a casual conversation. If you can be close enough (say in a food court) to listen to the changes in voice intonation that go on in a conversation (not to the content) you will probably be surprised at how many adjustments happen to the people’s voices in the most mundane of conversations. We are incredibly sophisticated in how we respond to others.

Part of this system of adjusting to others is responding to their emotion. When someone comes bouncing along with a smile on their face, we will usually respond differently to someone who slouches up to us with slumped shoulders speaking in a quiet monotone. This is done very quickly – often so quickly that we don’t notice we are doing it.

I want to draw attention to the emotional aspect of this process because I think it is too often ignored. Communication is often defined as information exchange, but this is only a small part of the story. Think of all those conversations about the weather. Do we really care that much about temperature, humidity and wind chill? No, we don’t. The purpose of this communication is to recognise the other person and get a sense of how they are at the moment. It isn’t to do with the exchange of data. Then there are those gestures and ritual greetings whose purpose is simply to recognise that the other person exists. The information exchanged by raising our hand is virtually nothing, and yet they are very important. (If you don’t believe this is important see what happens when you ignore these little rituals for a day. I think it will have a big effect on your relationships – and not a very positive one (unless you want to get rid of the relationships of course).)

In our day to day lives communication is mostly about connecting with others, especially emotionally. I don’t mean that it has to be a deep connection but that we do acknowledge how the other person is feeling.

Instead of connecting with the emotion there are two other options we tend to take: connecting through thinking and connecting through judgement.

Connecting only with the intellectual content of what someone says can be comic. If you comment on the weather and someone gives you the stats on temperature, humidity and wind speed from the latest weather report, this is likely to just seem funny. However, missing the emotion can have real consequences for our relationships. If we miss the emotion people are less inclined to talk to us and we may find that our relationships are less satisfying than they could be. (In our Anglo-Saxon cultures men tend to be trained to emphasise content and women to emphasise relationship. This can be a source of frustration to be both people. So we get conversations like: Him: You asked what I thought. I was just answering your question. Her: You’ve just missed it completely. I don’t want advice. Him: But you asked what I thought! And so on.)

Connecting through judgement is often called “gossip”. We voice a well known opinion in the expectation that others will agree. In this way we begin the process of building a relationship. The problem is that the other person may disagree with our opinion, and it can be hard to voice disagreement at the beginning of a relationship. These moments can be embarrassing but usually don’t affect our relationships badly. Where it does seem to affect our relationships is asking for agreement with our judgement instead of our feeling.

Here’s an example of what I mean. If I’m angry I may speak about how bad, incompetent, and stupid the person I am angry with is. I may then ask the person I am talking to what they think. Quite rightly they may respond that, yes, they agree the individual concerned is bad, incompetent or stupid; or, they may offer a different judgement. But in either case they miss the emotion. I have really asked for the wrong thing – I have asked about my judgements instead of my emotion. And it was the emotion which were fuelling the judgements. It would be better for me, and fairer to the other person, if I’d asked something like: Wouldn’t that make you angry?, or, Do you see why I’m so upset? By asking these kinds of things I’m more likely to get a satisfying response.

In our day to day lives our communication has much more to do with emotion than data. (Naturally there are times when this isn’t so – the content of an assignment for a course we are doing, solving a problem at work, or prioritising the tasks to do today – all involve dealing with data and clear thinking is what it is about.) But the emphasis in our culture on thinking and judgement mean that the importance of emotion often gets overlooked.

What can we do to connect more with the emotion of people’s communication?

• If we are puzzled about someone talking for so long about something that seems trivial to us (the weather and so forth), we can ask how they’re feeling.
• We can ask the person speaking to us about their feeling and not their judgement.
• We can ask the person we are speaking to whether they understand our feelings rather than our opinion.
• We can voice the emotion we see in the other person. This is usually best done as a question or very tentatively. Things like: are you upset about this?, or, you seem really angry about this.
• We can tell a story about an occasion when we have experienced a similar emotion; and then ask if it is like this for the other person.

These are just a few ideas. If you have others I’d love to hear them – please leave them in the comments on this post. Thanks.

If you have enjoyed this post you might also like:

this post on the difference between being with what is and judgements is .

This post is about listening.

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