Are You an Emotional Genius?
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Sounds True: Genius is commonly defined as “a strongly marked or transcendent capacity or aptitude.” So, what is “emotional genius”?

Karla McLaren: Genius, I believe, is the ability to take a startling new look at the things most of us take for granted. Albert Einstein, for example, looked at time and space in a radical new way. Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald did so with music and voice. Emotional genius is the gift of looking at our emotional lives in new and creative ways. With this kind of genius, we see our emotions ­ all of them ­ as a powerful source of energy, wisdom, self-awareness, and direction. We learn to marshal and work with these energies, rather than categorizing or explaining them away.

ST: What are the signs of an emotional genius?

KM: An emotional genius sees all emotions as valuable messages from the inner self. He or she understands and works with the energies inside each emotion, rather than trying to hide or "transform" the emotions into something they aren’t. Emotional geniuses treat their own emotions, and the emotions of others, honorably.

ST: How have most of us learned to handle our emotions?

KM: Our culture views emotions from a simplistic good-bad framework ­ anger is bad, joy is good, and so on ­ so we usually experience them without much consciousness. We seem to have only two responses to our emotions: we either express them outwardly or repress them inwardly. But both these responses can create problems. When we express our strong emotions "at" others, we can easily hurt them and ourselves. When we repress or "stuff" our emotions, we become less aware and less capable. So, the only two things we know to do with our emotions make them unmanageable and unwelcome. Emotional genius places a new skill into the mix. We learn to develop a "peer relationship" with our emotions. We learn to ask them questions, to understand the necessity of their presence in our lives, and to use their presence to foster growth and understanding.

ST: How did you discover and develop the principles that you teach today?

KM: This has been a life-long process. As a child of trauma, I had first-hand experience of severe emotional imbalance ­ both my own, and my abuser's. My understanding of trauma led me very early in life into a healing practice where I worked on traumatized animals. I was a sort of neighborhood healer for dogs, cats, and birds. As I grew, I learned about emotionally intuitive healing and energetic skills, which I used to further my understanding of trauma. I came to understand the purpose of emotions by diving into the deepest parts of the human psyche. There, I found not horror and despair, but beauty beyond reckoning. In the emotions, I found the true basis of all healing. For the last 25 years, I've been working to find ways to bring the emotions into the forefront of healing. This has been difficult, because so much of what we know about emotions is based on our surface level understanding of them.

ST: You’ve said that the emotions carry both information and energy. Where do they come from and how do we access the messages they hold?

KM: Our emotions come from within the inner self -­ the primal, wordless self. Because the information they carry is also wordless, it's very important to have a functioning intellect at your disposal. The emotions simply transmit a feeling, but we've got to translate it properly if we're going to be able to use it. For instance, anger asks us to restore or protect ourselves or others. If we don't know that, we might express our anger in a torrent, or sit on it to be polite ­ both of which do nothing with anger's important information. If, however, we see anger as an energetic messenger, we can ask it, "What needs to be restored? What needs to be protected?" Then, we can work with our anger and make the movements asked of us. Or, let's look at sadness. Sadness asks us to stop and let go of something that no longer works ­ a relationship, a belief, or a job. Most of us don't stop when sadness appears. We run like crazy or we distract ourselves with drugs, work, television, or other activities. Then we're surprised when our lives stop working. Or when we drop into a deep depression. But if we welcome our sadness ­ if we ask it, "What needs to be released?" ­ it will help us to identify the unworkable attachments in our lives so that we can let go and move on. Each of the emotions has its own message and its own information. Emotional genius teaches us what those messages are so that we can behave properly when the emotions come forward.

ST: Many spiritual traditions talk about cultivating inner calm or joy through meditation or prayer. What is your perspective?

KM: Calm and joy are lovely states, but they’re only two states among dozens. I understand the reasons why so many traditions rely on calm and joy ­ because so few people know how to manage their emotions. But these cultivations worry me. If we see the emotions as a complete and vital realm of responses, then we want access to all of them. In Taoism, which is one of the few emotion-honoring ancient practices, joy is considered to be the most dangerous emotion ­ not in and of itself, but because of the way we behave in relation to it. We tend to repress every other emotion, and focus only on joy. I find that this focus creates stagnation in the psyche, and eventually, a complete lack of richness in the personality. In my experience, joy-only practices rely almost exclusively on repressive techniques ­ and repression is unacceptable to me.

ST: What is your understanding of grief and griefwork?

KM: Grief is an exquisite emotion that helps us become fully human and fully alive. That seems like a contradiction, but it's not. Grief asks us to drop down into the river of life and truly mourn the passing of what we love and value. If we don't make that journey, we can't move forward whole in our lives. I call grief "the utterly necessary river of the soul," because it reconnects us to life after we’ve experienced deep and profound loss. When I see people running from grief, I feel such sorrow for them, because I know that they won't be whole until they grieve. We fear that grief will break us in two, but that’s not what happens. In true grief, our hearts break open, but they don’t break apart. We aren't emptied by grief ­ we're expanded. When we come up and out of the river of grief, we have more capacity to love, and more room to breathe.

ST: You teach that to develop the skills of emotional genius, we need to create a foundation in the “quaternity” of the self. What does that mean?

KM: The quaternity is a phrase coined by Carl Jung to describe a model of the self based on the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire. Jung popularized the idea, but it actually appears throughout history and in many cultures of the world. Quaternary beliefs see the whole self as made up of four distinct parts ­ the earthy body, the airy intellect, the watery emotions, and the fiery spirit. The idea is that we should spend equal time developing skills from each of the four quadrants ­ especially if we're naturally gifted in only one or two areas.

ST: So, how would this model apply in a real world situation?

KM: Well, let's say that you're the parent of an intellectual genius. From a quaternary perspective, you would encourage her to develop not just her mental gifts, but her physical prowess, her emotional agility, and her spiritual awareness. Otherwise, she may grow up very unbalanced. And unfortunately, this happens all the time with intellectually gifted children. On Emotional Genius, we work extensively to balance all aspects of the self before moving on to the emotions. Because if you're going to delve into the turbulent waters of the emotions, you need to be strong in all four quadrants.

ST: You’ve talked about being creative in our emotional lives. What do you mean by that?

KM: Most of us suffer through our dark emotions or grab at the pleasant ones ­ like prizes at a county fair ­ but we aren’t able to maintain our focus or our equilibrium around the emotions. Being creative means experiencing the emotions with consciousness and skill. For instance, an uninspired way to handle depression is to try to shake it off with distractions or drugs. Both can help relieve depression for a while, but they don’t bring consciousness to the depression itself ­ both actually tend to cement depression into a repetitive state. Now, if we can bring skills and consciousness to depression, we can find out why our energy is gone, where it might be, and what our inner selves are trying to say to us. I call depression "ingenious stagnation," because there’s always a very good reason for energy and flow to vacate the psyche in a depression. Sometimes, depression is a reaction to an unhealing relationship. Sometimes it’s a physiological response to something in our environment. Sometimes it's a reaction to unrelieved trauma. It’s different for each of us. When we use our creativity to fully experience our depression ­ instead of running away from it ­ it becomes a valuable tool in our growth and development.

ST: What would you tell someone reading this who is feeling overwhelmed about the emotions they are currently experiencing in their lives?

KM: If you are feeling overwhelmed by your emotions, no matter how uncomfortable they may feel, that means that you're not asleep or insensible or unconscious. Remember that your emotions are not your tormentors ­ they're simply messages from your inner self. They're meant to protect you. Use your natural awareness as best you can to focus upon yourself and to let your emotional genius come forward. If you learn to listen to your emotions and to decipher the information and energy they carry, they’ll save your life. Learn to honor them, and you'll change the world.

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