During our study of writing and healing I’ve noticed that
there seems to be these imaginary constructed lines around emotional
expectations in life. The idea of using writing as a healing tool seems to stem
from the fact that we have trouble expressing and accurately dealing with our
emotions when they appear in us. This leads us to the concept of emotional
literacy, something I’m extremely interested in when addressing this entire field.
Where I think we need to dig deeper is within our expectations of those around
us when concerning emotional literacy.
For
instance, in class we have discussed a lot about the need for emotional
literacy in doctors, as they often bear news and knowledge that have critical
emotional consequences. This sets up an environment where doctors can make
people uncomfortable when bearing emotional or shocking news but not having the
emotional literacy to do it correctly. However, despite this being a common
experience for most people in class, it never seemed like we came to a
conclusion on whether doctors should be expected to share the same sensitivity
we might get from a friend or loved one in moments of high emotion. Some of us
insisted this was integral to the medical profession, while others felt that it
would be unrealistic to expect doctors and nurses to constantly bear this
burden.
The same
question came up when we first learned about emotional literacy in reference to
education. The Jerome Bump essay that introduced this concept of literacy
within human emotion argues that college professors should be held accountable
for helping students learn how to understand and react to their own emotions.
He believes that especially highly educated people become too logical and
attempt to attack their emotions the same way they would an academic or
logistical problem. In class discussion, the room was also split on this issue
for teachers. Some of us thought this would be a perfect addition to a college
education, while some thought it would be inappropriate in this classroom, and
others thought it would be a waste of time and resources in general. Once again
we had a group of people completely divided on the emotional expectations of
others.
This is why
I’m struggling with the expectations of emotional literacy we have for those
around us. Why is it that we expect certain people in certain professions to be
more emotionally literate than others? You might be having a visibly bad day
but you’re never going to expect your bank teller to be sensitive to that. When
doctors give us bad news we want them to be sensitive but do we expect the same
from lawyers? How about different people in our family? Do we expect the same
emotional literacy and competency from our fathers as we do our mothers? How
about brothers versus sisters? It starts to become clear that based on a number
of external factors, we craft varied and changing expectations of emotional
literacy for the people around us. Sometimes these factors include profession,
while other times they don’t.
What I would
like to explore is how we come to these expectations, and how we can look to
grapple with those around us by perhaps crafting new and more standardized
definitions of emotional competency for those we interact with. Furthermore, if
we have this issue of varying degrees of emotional literacy, doesn’t that say
something about how we raise and develop people as emotional beings? Do we have
a crisis of emotional literacy in our culture?
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