Transcript
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Daily Jimm. Today is Tuesday, January 30th 2024. Ok. Well, it's an hour after, but let's just say I'm in Chicago time zone, I'm not, but let's just say it. Ok. So today I wanted to talk about desired emotional closeness and variations on that. Um So I came across a term in academic literature the other day called desired emotional closeness and emotional closeness in general. Now, they have a, a little scale that people can fill out to determine how much do they want emotional closeness or how much do they believe they have emotional closeness with other people in their lives. And the more that I thought about this, I was thinking, so often these terms are about emotional closeness to others or emotional connection with others or emotional availability for, to others or for others. And a lot of these terms seem to be about like uh about the emotional interaction with another human. And I started to think about it and I'm like, what if it's actually less about that and more about like emotional closeness, being closeness with emotions, or emotional connection, being connection to emotions, Availability, availability to emotions.
So instead of talking about the relationship of the two humans, interacting with each other, it's talking about our uh our relationships to the emotions. And I say this because I've noticed in my life over the last goodness, how many years what I started, I feel in 2012, I think it was 2012. Yeah. So, um let's say 2012. Uh So it's been almost twe like 1112 years now, been working uh on these emotions. And as I have become more honest with myself about how I feel and more in tune with how I feel, I've also become more in tune and honest with how other people are feeling. I notice emotions much more. I remember having a conversation with this girl that I, I guess we kind of dated. That's a whole different conversation.
Ah, but uh no, this girl, I, I, you know, really loved and, and I think she really loved me. And we had this conversation once and uh we were in the kitchen, she was cooking and then she seemed all upset and huffy and puffy and, and kind of angry about something. And so I backed off and I couldn't move to the other side of the room. And eventually she said, what are you doing? I said, well, you look kind of pissed off. She said I'm not pissed off. I said, ok, fine. Then a few minutes later she sat down and she goes, you're really empathetic, aren't you? And I'm like, yep. Then she told me she was pissed off about something her ex boyfriend did and etcetera, etcetera. But for me it's that idea, like the closer that I get with emotions in general, it's not just with quote unquote my emotions, it's emotions. I recognize it in people's faces. I hear it in tones of voices. Um, and sometimes in the words or the sentence structure when people are sending text messages. I just, I can, I, I feel very connected to those emotions.
And it seems to cause a lot of conflict when the other person either is not connected to those emotions at the, at the same level or even more. So, does not want to be connected to those emotions. So a friend of mine um not wanting to connect to the emotions of what her ex boyfriend was feeling. And I'm like, but why don't you want to connect to those emotions? So it's like, aren't you? Oh, he never loved me? I'm like, how do you know he never loved you? Have you paid? I don't know. He's just like, ok, for me, it's just.
It's almost this and I'll talk about this another day. But I'll introduce the term now, this idea of like emotional curiosity. It's like, aren't people curious about emotions in general? Are, don't people want to be connected to emotions in general? How they're feeling, how other people feel? Why are we so afraid of emotions? Maybe because culturally, we have uh smashed them over the years. We say that jealousy is bad. We say that anger is bad. We say that sadness is bad. We say that fear is bad. Sometimes we say too much excitement is bad. Sometimes we say too much, um, too much hope is bad. I mean, we've, a lot of times we just say feeling is bad you're not supposed to feel just kind of disconnect from all this stuff. Escape from your emotional experience.
So I just wanted to introduce that idea that we talk about emotional closeness or we talk about emotional connection or we talk about, emotional curiosity or emotional availability or, or any of these terms. I'm wondering how often do we normally mean uh as it relates to an interaction between two people and how it would be if we flipped it and started looking at um. Our own interactions with emotions themselves, emotions that I feel emotions, that you feel emotions, that somebody else is feeling emotions, that an animal is feeling emotions, that a society is feeling emotions that are um coming through at a political level. Emotions of a group. Uh Morale is what, you know, morale can just be kind of the emotions that are uh circulating through a group. Um Just pay attention to these emotional dynamics more. And the question I'm really asking myself is what do I do when I want to have more desire to closeness with emotions than, many, many people in my life? Uh What, how do I, how do I interact with people if I'm, I have much more closeness with emotions and I'm desiring even more closeness with emotions than they are, but that can be a conversation for another day. All right. Take care.
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