Emotional Abilities in Mental Health: On the Importance of Navigating Limits of Control
Event details
In this talk, I explore the role of emotional abilities in shaping our experience of the world, ourselves, and others, with a particular focus on how we navigate different forms of diminished control in the context of mental health. By “emotional abilities”, I refer to a web of interrelated skills and capacities: to feel, identify, engage with, mitigate, modify, curate, embody, and communicate emotional experiences, as well as to empathise with those of others.
I argue that one central emotional ability concerns the navigation of our limits of control - what might be termed “the uncontrollable”. At first glance, loss or limitation of control may appear to stand in opposition to emotional ability and individual spontaneity. However, I suggest that the uncontrollable not only forms an essential part of our experience of others and the world, but is also deeply rooted in our self-experience and constitutes a central source of meaning.
Drawing on research on various mental health challenges, I illustrate how different ways of incorporating the uncontrollable into our embodied sense of self position us between vulnerability and suffering, on the one hand, and personal growth and self-determination, on the other.