I am not a teams person. By this I mean that I do not take pride in things that I did not have a hand in accomplishing. I may be proud of a person or group for their accomplishments but I don’t have that personal feeling as if it were my accomplishment.
This also means that I don’t feel shame for things that other people or groups have done when I have not taken part in those things. I may feel anger directed at individuals who take those actions but I am divorced from the feeling of shame that may accompany such.
This has an odd affect in that I widely regard actions as that of the individual alone while only at an emotional distance understanding the larger societal cause of those actions.
This means that unless I pause and think through the actions, I do not understand why a person may act or think a certain way. Because at the instinctual level of emotion those baseline emotions are not present for me.
Emotionally I only feel a part of a those groups in which I am an active participant. All others exist only at an intellectual level not a visceral one.
So wide statements as to my inclusion in groups as if I were an active participant hits me in ways many might consider to be congruent with the denial that said group is wrong. However, it is that I only see individuals first on an emotional level and only after that filters through conscious thought do I see them as something other than a human taking individual actions.
The way we(humanity) react first will always be at the emotional level and the way our emotions are constructed will always effect our behavior and relationships with each other. And when emotions are not consistent across groups, we find that understanding becomes quite difficult. Because at the base level we don’t understand and only at the intellectual remove do we see.
This is one of the reasons emotional introspection is so important. Because without the understanding of the what and why we feel, we cannot understand the how another feels. Emotional intelligence is not just understanding yourself. But it must start there.
Pelgris 