I attended the Enoch Pratt's Booklovers Breakfast back in May. During Q&A, at the mic, I got to converse with the handsome, smart and accomplished Hill Harper, this year's guest author. Lucky me, right? After my comment on his suggestion that black women date men with "potential," he looked across the room at me and asked, "What do you look for in a man?" You know a part of me wanted to say sweetly, "Can I answer that over coffee?" but instead I said after a moment of thought, "Honesty, integrity and accountability." Yes, I thought, that's a good answer.
What I didn't say but would have added had I more time to think about it, "The man for me also needs to be emotionally secure and mature." I have learned from a recent experience that the emotionally unavailable man isn't just married, drug addicted, a womanizer, a workaholic; the emotionally inaccessible can also be the emotionally insecure, unstable, or immature fellow. He's what I call Emotional High Maintenance. EHM is just another way for someone, man or woman, to be unavailable for intimacy and love.
Our emotions are powerful forces indeed. Strong, unwanted emotions drive people to abuse food and drugs, overspend, strike out violently, isolate, and succumb to depression. Cherished relationships can become strained, distant, violent, empty, contentious, cold, vindictive, or just plain unbearable all because the people in them aren't adept at self-soothing, clearing, and expressing painful emotions in healthy ways, ways that sustain and preserve their relationships.
Energy+ motion = emotion. Repressed, i.e., trapped emotions surface as dis-ease in the mind, body and spirit. We honor our emotions by telling ourselves the truth about what and how we feel. When we do this without allowing our emotions to run amok, dictate our behavior, blame others for how we feel that's emotional maturity. In fact, acknowledged feelings often need nothing more than to be felt and heard. Feelings aren't facts. Just because you feel something doesn't mean it's true. Rather, feelings are information. Anger at a mate might indicate a boundary violation, perhaps a boundary you didn't even know existed. Disappointment could mean your expectations of another are unreasonable.
Emotional health and maturity are vital to success in love, career, finances. Fly off the handle at your supervisor and next week you might be filing for unemployment. Blame your lover too many times for something he isn't doing and soon you might be sleeping alone. Spend your mortgage money on clothes and shoes and the bank will help you relocate.
It's time to grow up emotionally. Here's some ways I've found to get emotionally fit and healthy:
• Forgive, begin with your parents
• Make peace with the past then leave it behind you where it belongs
• Take full responsibility for your feelings/emotions. Express them often
• Learn to self-soothe, before you speak or act
• Practice forgiveness of self and others daily
• Own your feelings and stop blaming others for them
• Pray, meditate and journal often
If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else. -Marvin Gaye
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