Welcome back to the REJECTION PROTECTION CLUB: a monthly blog that will take a broad but focused look at issues which arise from high-functioning neurodivergence as well as considering novel ideas about a modern reconstruction of mental health and how we look at it. No matter whether you have been diagnosed with a specific condition or just feel that things work slightly differently for you, the RPC has a goal of both further destigmatizing our perceptions of mental health and also learning how to actually see differences in our lives.
REJECTION PROTECTION CLUB CHAPTER 6
“THE THERAPIST’S DILEMMA”
CHALLENGES AROUND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Have you ever been in a situation where you find yourself caught in between the decision of whether to intervene on a situation emotionally or let it continue to dysregulate? Perhaps it was a situation where two friends were bickering while the rest of the group was trying to focus on the task at hand, or maybe a scenario where someone is letting their emotions spill out to a degree which is making you feel uncomfortable even though they are not directed at you. Whether in large groups or at the most basic level of interpersonal interaction, we can sometimes be faced with great ambivalence in the decision around how much emotional labor is appropriate or manageable for any given interaction.
“The Therapist’s Dilemma” is indeed just a term which I have coined, but it describes the aforementioned situations which I have noticed come up more and more the longer I have worked the job. You certainly don’t have to be a therapist to encounter this challenge, and in fact it applies far more when someone is not acting as a paid therapist– obviously the function of our role is to, well, be a therapist. But for this chapter, we will be looking at some of the nuances which come up far more frequently than we may realize and how to best try to sort through them.
REVIEWING EMOTIONAL LABOR
Before we get further into the Therapist’s Dilemma, we must first look at what we mean by emotional labor. There are many definitions which could accurately describe the term, but in this case we are referring to the degree to which one puts others’ emotions before their own. This can be seen most clearly in situations where someone is doing the tasks of someone else, ie a mom putting her own emotions aside to attend to her upset child, but this can also be as small as something like how we respond to a friend disclosing their own struggles when we do not necessarily feel that we are in an appropriate or adequate headspace to do so, or agreeing to do something that we foremost feel will be supportive or considerate of the others around us before our own desires.
Of course the idea of helping others emotionally is something that can be, and typically is healthy, reciprocal, and perhaps most of all, supportive. Other people will most likely feel good and think positively of us when we are able to offer supportive emotional labor, and someone who solely puts their needs first of course can develop into very challenging issues on the polar opposite end of the spectrum. But much like I say about something such as exercise, or mental energy, or really any kind of energetic output– there is, whether we like it or not, a finite limit on our own emotional labor ‘gas tank’, and many people are looking at this situation as an endless wellspring without realizing the potential consequences, burnout, or exhaustion.
This may happen slowly, every human has a wide range of how much they can tolerate or how much emotional labor they have to give, but the end result of feeling too imbalanced as far as emotional labor will eventually begin to manifest in ways which we may not even connect to the frustration which underlies. And for the people-pleasers special, you can even frame this as a benefit to others– we can guarantee that eventually, the burnout from a very imbalanced give and take around emotional labor will create resentment or compassion fatigue on the end of the people pleaser, and therefore being mindful of where we are at in our emotional abilities is the way to maximize our relationships symbiotically.
Now this may seem like a situation that is hard in practice despite the value being easily understood akin to upkeep of healthy habits or going to the dentist regularly or something, but there is also another angle to consider, and this one unfortunately is even more challenging than just knowing what we should do and accepting that perfection is difficult to attain.
THE THERAPIST’S DILEMMA
The more prominent angle really comes down to the unfortunate reality that in many situations, doing the emotional labor IS going to make a situation far more manageable, regardless of the toll it takes on us.
Imagine this situation: you are at a small gathering, and there is a person who continues to monopolize the conversation about their recent breakup. Let's say you know this person’s situation, and you know that if you continue to redirect the conversation to a one-on-one between you and that person, the rest of the group will be able to change the conversation to something you find more interesting, and that will not only improve the situation for all people at the gathering, but also enhance your experience at the cost of just having to do some additional emotional labor. For clarity, we will say this is not a situation where you become disconnected from the group to talk with the monopolizer, but rather just that you will continue to put that person’s needs above your own to some degree, with the end result being a situation which is objectively operating more cohesively than it was before.
It is much more clear to see where this decision becomes even more confusing in situations like this, because the dialectical truth of the situation is that both perspectives are correct: you did improve the situation for yourself, but you also furthered the imbalance of emotional labor that you had to give in that situation. Let’s say for even more confusion that you were the only person who actually knew what to say, or even just knew that person’s situation– that also may add an added layer of perceived responsibility and requirement for you specifically to respond to this interaction.
Here is another example which I see on almost a daily basis within relationships: both partners have unmet needs, and that creates a catch-22 where one person is required to “step up” and override their own emotions in hopes that this could be regulating enough for the roles to then switch. With respect to the idea of coregulation, or essentially the healthy way to mediate this problem and probably deserving of its own chapter, this more times than not can lead to an imbalance of one partner doing far more regulation than the other, whether due to skill, ability, timing, or in more unfortunate situations, manipulation whether conscious or not. This too becomes an even more difficult version of the Therapist’s Dilemma, and for many people the quickest way to de-escalate or remove conflict is to become the person putting others’ emotions before them.
Now in both examples, we can see that the decision of which way is the “right” or even “better” way becomes much more unclear than we may assume. In the first situation, the obvious answer seems to be to just put forth the emotional labor, and the reality is that you may ultimately have more needs met which supercede the emotional toll that would be taken should you decide to do the emotional labor, while letting the person dysregulate and monopolize the conversation may ruin the experience for you. But if this keeps happening 5 social events in a row, we would surely start to notice and likely become annoyed. The second situation is far more loaded, and may seem more intuitive to have our own needs met first, but in reality it is very common to see that the partner who forgoes their own emotions to regulate a partner’s due to the benefit, or rather lack of further complication that may happen due to other underlying mental health aspects such as a fear of abandonment or confrontation.
In both situations, a very important psychological facet to consider is that when we do intervene on the regulation of others… we are also just naturally then in the position of therapist or mediator, and others may start to have the unconscious expectation that you will do the emotional labor for them in the future, and this in some ways becomes preventative to the other person understanding how they are responsible for regulating their own emotions.
THE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
The understanding of emotional intelligence is one of the largest factors in management of the Therapist’s Dilemma, but it is a little more convoluted than simply saying the more someone improves their EQ, the better they will become at discerning when to put forth emotional labor or not.
To quickly review, if I am being honest, many people don’t or misunderstand emotional intelligence. The most common takes are either that EQ is a measure of your ability to control your emotions, the knowledge of how your past was traumatic, or ability to identify emotions correctly. None of these are really correct, though it gets closer and closer from the first to the third.
Emotional Intelligence most precisely is a measure of how well you manage the uncontrollable emotions within you by means of healthy outlet and introspection. In a tangible example, a person with a high EQ is going to take accountability of their own emotions in a way which is not guilting nor baiting nor self deprecating. A person with high EQ is never going to blame others for their own emotions, however more prominently is going to confront and assert how the other person made them feel emotionally should it be a situation where the emotions did stem from another person. Someone with high EQ is not defensive, validating of others, but still puts themselves first. Someone with high EQ may be, and perhaps is actually more likely to be an emotional person– the emotions just won’t be directed at you.
Too many people think that to know about emotional intelligence is to have it. An analogy I use a lot is that too many think it means to know what a point guard does, it is the ability to play point guard. It is emotional awareness to say you had a mean older sibling and so you get particularly defensive when you get picked on, it’s emotional intelligence to realize it’s actually a you thing when you overreact to someone teasing you and determine it’s because they were a dick and intended to hurt you. Too many people think it is either justification or even more commonly can identify the former, but get very defensive or deny the psychological influence when it is connected to the latter.
But I really think that a largely overlooked reason that people don’t see the value or straight up just don’t want to improve is because THE MORE EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE THAT YOU GAIN, THE MORE NEGATIVES WILL APPEAR, AND THE MORE RESPONSIBILITY ONE MIGHT TAKE ON in regards to others’ emotions. While full manifestation of EQ is essentially always having a clear read on where we stand and how we should best react for our own emotional health, there is good reason that ignoring the actual roots of our misdirected emotions is the easiest solution, should that be possible for one to repress or suppress.
Because an inherent challenge of emotional intelligence is that it’s really hard to look at the world as a chain movement of uncontrollable emotional influences, we want answers. We want blame, we want a winner and a loser, someone to be right and wrong. We want control, we want to feel like we did something by our own hand. We hate ambiguity, and it’s truly easier to just see someone as wronging you rather than to empathize or far more healthy, to just disengage and write it off as their own shit with nothing you can do about that. Very, very few emotions in this world are 100% accurately aimed, and many may be projections of self.
So in some ways, we can look at this through the Dunning-Kruger effect, which posits that people who have a baseline understanding of something will have more (potentially false) confidence around understanding of that concept than people who have delved deepest into it. Once one starts to look at emotional regulation and intelligence, it is very apparent that the more we do emotional labor, the better a situation will likely go for us acutely, and furthermore the more we feel we have emotional intelligence over others, the more we may feel inclined or responsible to regulate those emotions. Typically, the more someone begins to understand their own emotional response, the more empathy and ability they have to relate when they see it in others. This is all true.
But to tie the pitfalls of emotional intelligence in… a fuller interpretation would suggest that many of the emotions we are having around others… are actually just our own emotions, and from this perspective, we are actually then possibly just seeking control of a situation more than trying to regulate it. As stated, someone with high emotional EQ would make clear what emotions they were feeling, but would not further engage others with them. To teach this to others, we must also see that the same rules should apply in inverse: there are many ways to validate a person’s emotions but also set a boundary that it is not our responsibility to help those be sorted.
And finally, especially when factoring how many emotions of the world are very misguided– the fullest interpretation of emotional intelligence would consider that to take any emotion as our burden is in one way or another us trying to influence a situation we don’t actually have control over– and though it may look like a small change, there is a huge difference between acknowledging others emotions with boundaries around our own emotional labor and attempting to regulate the situation via emotional labor.
ANSWERS TO THE THERAPIST’S DILEMMA
So of course we now need to see actionable ways to work around this dilemma, although I will warn that it is definitely trickier than many situations and also that much of the strategy is finding ways to accept and implicate the nuances we have referenced so far.
The most obvious answer is just to continue to improve our emotional intelligence, as the ultimate answer to the Dilemma is simply to have the highest possible EQ we can. But that is vague, difficult, and also hard to interpret, so here are a few tips that we can keep in mind while we are in that abstract process.
BECOMING MORE COMFORTABLE WITH DYSREGULATION & OUR OWN EMOTIONS WITHIN IT:
While certain scenarios become very extreme or too overwhelming to manage, and this could be harmfully interpreted as ‘just suck it up’, one thing we can do is notice how we commonly do respond to others’ dysregulation and asking how that makes us feel. The answer to this question might just be becoming more comfortable with exiting situations that have become too overwhelming, but first we must ask why we may feel so quick or pressured to re-regulate someone else, and whether that could possibly be us dysregulating ourselves in a way.
REMINDING OURSELVES THAT WE DO NOT HAVE NEARLY AS MUCH CONTROL AS WE THINK:
This one is probably more relevant to situations where a person may recognize the hurt or escalation in another, but there can be secondary feelings of responsibility or obligation or empathic factors which create alternative motives to forgo our own emotional regulation. We must first recognize that this is something which we can only fully execute should WE feel regulated and emotionally supported, but secondly recognize that even with those supports, our influence is really only marginal and we can both give our best effort and see that fail, or on the contrary and much harder perspective, the person, in the long run, would have the best chance of improvement should they come to a conclusion
ASSESSING WHAT HAPPENS WHEN DYSREGULATION IS LEFT TO ITS NATURAL PROCESS:
this is admittedly the most “shrinkish” and probably the most difficult to execute of the solutions, but sort of connecting the first 2 tips, we may be far more anxious or worried about what our brains are assuming will happen, or perhaps projecting how we would feel in these situations than actually feeling a threat that without intervention, the dysregulated person will just infinitely escalate to more and more intense states. A good example here is something I see frequently in my own and clients’ neurodivergence: the more that others intervene on dysregulated emotions, the more messages we get that it is not ok to dysregulate or that we cannot self-regulate, and ultimately that person is more likely to feel helplessness, inability to change, or dependence on others for emotional de-escalation due to how many times others intervened. While again, this cannot be taken as general advice and many situations can become truly threatening due to escalation, there is also great truth that often it is our impulse to be in control when we cannot actually control something which predominates the actual need to put forth emotional labor.
WAITING FOR PEOPLE TO ASK FOR HELP:
very flawed here, as we know that realistically many humans struggle to ask for help when needed and also that to some degree, this chapter is highlighting ways to feel like we are not always responsible for helping others’ emotionally. But the value still remains in letting the other person show autonomy, accountability, and personal responsibility for their own emotions. A good parallel here is one of the more nuanced responsibilities that an actual therapist has: the end goal is not to regulate the client, but rather to teach, model, and support the client in ways that will make it more likely that they learn to successfully regulate themselves.
CHAPTER 6 IN REVIEW
So whether or not this idea feels relevant to you or not, the Therapist’s Dilemma is at the very least a challenging and potentially hard to see facet of our daily lives and interactions. Perhaps you haven’t even fully considered how much emotional labor that you have put forth before, as that is something which commonly can be overlooked and is not often discussed.
Ideally, the goal of bringing this up is really just to get people to start considering more facets of their own emotional regulation and intelligence. While we may (or may not) want to get to a buddhist monk’s level of emotional intelligence, we may be better off just looking at how one would eventually build to that point, and that starts with challenging our own perceptions or more importantly emotions, and understanding that we have ZERO control over others but we DO have the ability to understand why or when we are more prone to overlook our own emotions in favor of others.
WHAT’S COOKING FOR NEXT MONTH
THE REJECTION PROTECTION CLUB CHAPTER 7:
“POWER VS FORCE”
For the next section, we will begin to discuss a very interesting breakdown between the concepts of POWER, or drawing respect and authority from internal and self-producing sources and FORCE, which is drawing respect and authority from fear, intimidation, or other more manipulative measures.
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