Emotional Intelligence 3.0 (eBook)

1. 
These Bruises

Here, feelings are good. Here, feelings are powerful. They are indicators of what is stirring inside each of us. Every feeling you have is important, serves a purpose, and should be embraced and honored, especially if you want to maximize your potential. I know these might be radical ideas for some of you, mainly if you grew up in an environment as I did, one where there was no crying in baseball and, when you did cry, the refrain was, “Keep it up, and I will give you something to really cry about.”

As you might imagine, I have been on a long, tumultuous journey to understand my feelings so that they guide and inform who I am rather than derail me. And while my childhood was emotionally harsh, I can’t imagine making the journey to this moment in any way other than working through the emotional layers of the past fifty-plus years. It has been a grand adventure, and it’s not over; in some ways, the adventure is just beginning.

Like many of you, the unconscious emotional layers that limited my ability to tap into all my potential are rooted in my childhood experiences. I don’t blame my parents; my parents were good people who were not in emotional balance. I followed in their footsteps and became a good person who was not in emotional balance, either. We do what we know. In a way, I am grateful to them, as my uniqueness is directly attributable to those layers. As the lyrics to the Train song “Bruises” suggest, “these bruises make for better conversation.” 1 Yes, my bruises do make for better conversation—and give me a unique flavor—as do yours.

It took, and continues to take, a substantial amount of work to discover the space of emotional balance, where my feelings are guides and not guards. That’s why I wrote this book—to help guide others down this path of Emotional Intelligence 3.0. Throughout my life, I have felt compelled to maximize my potential. I have come to see that every time I missed the mark, it was because I lived by an omnipresent and omnipotent unwritten rule I learned from life: It’s not safe to be who I am (so I must be something else, and the system will dictate what that is).

My emotional experiences continually reinforced this rule in a way that led me to think these two thoughts about myself: I am not lovable as I am and I am not powerful as I am. The more my emotional experiences reinforced these thoughts, the more I believed them, and the more I behaved in accordance with them. Ultimately, an I am not lovable as I am emotional imprint and an I am not powerful as I am emotional imprint formed out of the familiar ruts and grooves I created from bumping up against the rule’s limits. Encoded into each imprint was the meaning I had unknowingly assigned to the original emotional experience. It also included a habitual feeling and a rote action that honored the boundaries of the unwritten rule and maintained a comfort zone for my life.

Emotional imprints are either bruised or refined. The meaning, habitual feeling, and rote action associated with a bruised emotional imprint are imbalanced, hiding that you are a magical, creative ball of energy with infinite possibilities. If the imprint is bruised, the meaning assigned to the imprint is also hidden from view. These bruised imprints guard you, ensuring you remain within the comfort zone established by the unwritten rule. The job of this zone is to keep you from stepping outside the invisible fence created by your version of the unwritten rule. These bruised imprints are also a primary reason for low emotional intelligence and the inability to become the best version of yourself personally and professionally.

A refined imprint is one where the meaning and feeling have been processed, so the resulting action is emotionally balanced. Processing those bruises balances the imprint, so it guides you as you navigate all the possibilities that exist for your life. Once refined, you can finally see that you have always been lovable and powerful.

I will elaborate on both types of emotional imprints and the boundaries they create for our lives in later chapters. Now, though, I share the rich layers that contributed to my bruised emotional imprints, and show you how they were woven into my emotional fabric. The story begins with the emotional imprints of my parents and the bruises they each brought to their marriage.

Both of my parents had difficult childhoods in Richmond, Virginia. My father, Dr. Thomas King White, was only seven when his father passed away in 1939, leaving the family in a difficult situation. His mother, Irene, had no formal education and struggled to make ends meet.

Irene’s story is complicated. She had been “traded” to my grandfather Grover at fourteen. It was, allegedly, a fair swap: Grover’s sister, Alice, was supposed to marry my great-grandfather, Frank Walton, in exchange for Irene marrying Grover. Alice refused to marry Frank even though Irene married Grover. See Figure 1 for an abbreviated White Family Tree.

Figure 1. Abbreviated White Family Tree.

When Irene married my grandfather at age fourteen, she became a stepmother to six children. Her oldest stepchild, Annie, was fifteen. Grover and Irene had six children. One of them died in infancy, and Irene was pregnant with her seventh when Grover died. My grandmother was now a widower with five biological children in the house and one child on the way.

One way Irene provided for her family was to become a lady of the night. I make no judgment of my grandmother’s choices. I have only respect and admiration for her ability to figure out ways to maintain food and shelter for her family as best she could.

Irene subsequently gave birth to two more children by one of her longtime evening friends. Even though they were not Grover’s biological children, they were given the last name White.

With so many children and no education, Irene struggled. The White family moved every few months because Irene couldn’t consistently pay the rent. She couldn’t always provide food, either. I can only imagine how desperate my grandmother must have felt at times. These experiences left deep psychological scars on my father that followed him his whole life. They also forged an unbreakable bond between my dad and some of his siblings.

When my dad was old enough, he went to work in the meat department of Mr. Harvey’s grocery store in Richmond. Mr. Harvey was a wise, compassionate, and kind man, a much-needed father figure to young Tom White, who learned a great deal about life from him.

Still, times were tough. Irene sometimes sent one of her younger children, Charlie, to find Dad at the store when there was no food in the house. Dad would be working at the meat counter when little Charlie would peek around the corner of that counter—and Dad just knew. He silently cut a pound of bologna, wrapped it, and gave it to Charlie. Mr. Harvey took payment for that food from Dad’s wages each paycheck.

When Dad joined the military, he started boxing because each bout’s winner would get a ribeye steak dinner. He told us he loved eating that ribeye so much that he went 27–0 in military boxing matches just to get that steak.

After my dad left the military, he attended college and graduate school, ultimately graduating with a PhD in psychology. Shortly after graduation, we moved to Durham, North Carolina, so that Dad could teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The university was a short commute from our house in Durham. We included my mother, Janie; my three older siblings, Jerry, Mike, and little Janie; and me. In addition to landing a great job at a prestigious university, there were three other important reasons my father moved us to North Carolina. The first reason was that Dad needed some breathing room. As he aged, he was starting to feel suffocated by the unbreakable family bond forged in the fight for survival with his siblings. He hoped the distance between Durham, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, would provide the necessary space to breathe.

The second reason we moved was my father’s complicated relationship with his mother. My dad’s childhood experiences with his mother became his unconscious story that you can’t trust mothers because they can’t keep a roof over your head or food in your belly, and to top it off, they sleep around. Not surprisingly, their relationship was strained. Whenever we returned to Richmond to visit relatives, Dad would take fifteen minutes out of our two-day trip to see Irene. I grew up thinking fifteen-minute visits with your mother on the way out of town were a great way to have a relationship with a parent in your adult years. I know—just one of the many flavors of my bruised emotional imprints.

Those imprints, as we will see, get passed along. Because of the imprint his mother’s actions left on him, my dad never trusted my mother, Janie. He beat her occasionally when he thought she was too flirty with another guy. He was too deep in the grips of his bruised emotional imprints to see that it was laughable to think that she would cheat on him.

My mother’s childhood taught her that she wasn’t lovable or powerful, so she acquiesced to those beatings for many years. It wasn’t until I graduated from law school at the age of twenty-five that my mother finally stood up for herself—by hiding behind me. She told my father, “Touch me again, and I will tell Tomi. And she will make sure you never...