Image Credit: slark @Flickr
You may wonder what the counseling process is all about. Part of that process is to help increase the quality of life for the counselee in all areas of their life: their relationships, career, school, and personal sense of who they are and what they are accomplishing. There has been a big emphasis on intelligence as measured by IQ. However, in the last 10-20 years, psychologist Dan Goleman has shed light on a very important area of intelligence, known as Emotional Intelligence.
Here is a great definition of emotional intelligence, as written about over at Pick the Brain:
Emotional intelligence: “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action.” - Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer.
“The abilities to recognize and regulate emotions in ourselves and others” – Daniel Goleman and Gary Cherniss.
In light of this definition, I work with my clients to do increase their emotional intelligence (or 'people smarts' as my younger clients would call it) in the following areas: (and I quote the following from Margaret Meloni)
Self-Awareness – A person who is self-aware understands their own moods and emotions and also how those moods and emotions may impact others.
Self-Regulation – Someone who exhibits self-regulation thinks before they act. Remember that person you worked for? The one who used to get red in the face, yell and scream and throw notebooks across the room? They were not exhibiting self-regulation at all.
Motivation – If you love to work and it is not just for money or for status; if you have a strong drive to achieve; then you know about motivation.
Empathy – The empathetic individual is able to understand the emotions of others and also learns to treat them as they wish to be treated.
Social Skill – Do you know someone who is able to meet new people and immediately develop a rapport with them? It is likely that they are very accomplished in the area of social skill.
I hope this takes some of the mystery out of that thing they call "psychotherapy."
Please comment and let me know what you think!
I was very fortunate, in some of my recent internet research, to come across a website for Michelle Garcia Winner, one of the pioneers in cutting edge solutions for helping those on the spectrum better communicate within an NT context.
This post will summarize some of the foundational concepts behind her social thinking approach.
1. Most neurotypical children are 'hard wired' since birth to engage in social thinking, much like walking.
2. Early on, neurotypical children engage in 'joint attention.' This means that they intuitively look at the other person's eyes to figure out what they are thinking, and to know how to respond. With this skill, they are able to cooperate, share their imaginations with others, and work in groups.
3. Children engage in play with their peers in preschool. Play gives kids the skill base to sit and learn in a classroom.
4. Kids on the spectrum who have average language skills do not intuitively learn social information or social thinking in the same way that neurotypical children do. However, they can be they can be cognitively taught how to think socially and understand the use of related social skills.
These children can learn a frame of reference for social decoding and learning, much in the way you and I would need to learn a language if we travelled to a foreign country to live for a long period of time.
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