Social Intelligence Growth As A Key to Recovery from Addictions

A friend told me recently that she has recommended my book on social intelligence to folks in her recovery group, and that they’ve decided to discuss it together over the next several weeks or so. This got me thinking about the many ways in which folks in recovery might get a lot from thinking about, and maybe developing new skills in social intelligence.

There are a number of ways in which addiction problems can go hand in hand with difficulties in social intelligence. Some of these include

• Problems regulating your emotions: Many people at risk for substance abuse problems have a hard time managing feelings such as depression, loneliness, or anger. They may initially turn to alcohol or drugs in an attempt to “manage” these painful feelings. But eventually, most substance abuse problems just make your emotional life harder to manage, for both physical and psychological reasons.
• Difficulties handling intimacy: People may sometimes feel that the only way to connect with others is to drink together, smoke weed together, or so on. But gradually, relationships begin to get damaged, and isolation can increase.
• Tunnel vision: A tendency to focus on a narrow set of experiences, particularly painful experiences you are having. This makes it hard to keep things in perspective, and tends to go along with a habit of making overly general statements about how bad you are based on some small difficulty or flaw. (“I can’t water ski so I’m a bad person.”) Of course, this kind of thinking both triggers more depression and/or desire to abuse chemicals, and shuts other people out.

Over time, these difficulties make it harder to do the four things that are hallmarks of well-functioning social intelligence:

1. Understand and manage your emotional life (particularly as it affects those around you)
2. Tune in to others’ feelings and needs (because you are in such pain, and so preoccupied with your own misery)
3. Connect and communicate in a genuine (not a manipulative) way with others
4. Really care about others — your own pain eclipses what others are saying or signaling about how they’re doing.

Part of recovery can often include doing things that increase your social intelligence, and that make you more able to connect with others in effective ways. The whole 12-step process, particularly the self-assessment (“inventory”) and the attempts to take responsibility and make amends, might really be seen as a kind of crash course in your own social intelligence functioning. Maybe that’s why my friends in recovery have been so enthusiastic about my book.

The social intelligence of TV shrinks

Just got around to watching part of the first season of “In Treatment,” the popular HBO series about a psychotherapist and his patients.  My initial impression is: there is no way I would ever try to get help from that guy.

It is very hard to write compelling psychotherapy fiction.  On the one hand, you would like the dialogue to be true to both the real complexity of patients and their problems, and to what real therapists might try to do to help.  On the other, you generally need the therapy scenes to advance some kind of bigger plot — find the killer, show how a woman struggles against an oppressive society, see if a Mafia don will ever give up his evil ways.  It’s not always easy to balance that out, particularly in film and TV, where producers and directors have a phobia against the “talking heads” thing.  (They assume that two people just sitting and talking will bore the audience, so they always have shrinks or patients jumping up and staring out the window, or taking bathroom breaks in the middle of sessions, or patients fondling the knickknacks on the shrink’s bookcase — or the shrink.  I can tell you that in over 20 years of doing therapy, I’ve never gotten up to stare out the window during a session, and neither did any of my clients.  I recall only a couple of “bathroom emergencies” and nobody messed with my knickknacks, in any sense of the term.)

But aside from all the inaccurate writing about what happens in the room, the biggest difficulty writers generally have with TV or movie shrinkage is the really, really low levels of responsive listening the shrinks do.  Therapists butt in before patients get a chance to say very much at all about their difficulties.  TV shrink “writers” have learned that therapists are somehow never supposed to “give advice” and to always, always, always “answer a question with a question.”  And so watching TV shrinks is generally all about people popping up and down, patients trying to be understood while the “wiser than thou” shrink asks clever questions to prove that the patient is actually wrong about, well, everything.  Finally, of course, the therapist is often such a newbie that any hint of, say, the patient having an actual feeling about them triggers a major crisis that forces the shrink back into therapy of their own.  (Where, if we’re lucky, as in “In Treatment,” we learn where they probably learned all those awful habits.)

And yes, every single one of these common therapeutic offenses happens in the very first week of the “In Treatment” show.  The therapist sort of tries to look like a really good listener, but clearly his heart isn’t in it.  By the end of an hour, he talks as much or more as the patients, who are generally realistically frustrated at his being such a pain in the head.  People bop up and down and fondle his knickknacks, and the shrink answers questions only with exasperating questions of his own.

The real problem with all that stuff is that it shows therapists as being remarkably poor in basic social intelligence.  Because a core part of SI is being able to tune in to both the words and the feelings of another person.  That takes patient listening to patients, not interrupting. (Maybe that’s why the poor people who have to put up with the shrinks are called “patients”?  It sure takes a lot of it sometimes.)

Whether you are someone’s shrink, their friend, their boss or their mother or dad, most of all, people want to finish telling you their story.  The whole story.  (Or as they say in court, “the whole truth” [though in fact, lawyers are generally pretty good at making sure you only tell the part of the "whole truth" that helps their case.  But that's a topic for a different blog.])

If you really want to “help” someone, just be quiet.  Make eye contact.  Do whatever it takes to really understand the entire story, situation, feeling, as seen through their eyes.  Don’t be super worried about what you are supposed to say.  Believe me — you will do much more for them and for your connection with them than you ever imagined, if you just give them the rare experience of listening.

In real life, a really good therapist may say three sentences, tops, in many sessions.  Sometimes even those three sentences aren’t all that necessary.  But the listening, the eye contact, the feeling it the way the other person does — priceless.

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[A related post on my other blog: Doctor Mustard, In the Consulting Room, With Words]

Surviving a tough economy: the role of social intelligence

We are in tough economic times, and many experts tell us they’ll get tougher before they get better.  Unemployment rates are soaring, and even people with jobs are afraid those jobs might vanish at any moment.  Literally millions of Americans and people around the world, who until recently thought they had secure employment, have been laid off.  Careers and lives have been shattered.  As a result, people are reacting with anger, fear, and most of all caution: holding onto jobs they don’t necessarily love, keeping their heads low, cutting back on spending, worrying constantly about how they’ll manage if their jobs disappear, or how they’ll survive after having lost one.

During times like these, it may be more important than ever to nurture any advantage  you can in the work world.  I’ve recently been thinking a lot about how the social intelligence skills I wrote about over a year ago, back when things seemed much better economically, might actually be super useful during times like these.

Three main uses for social intelligence skills come to mind:

• Keeping your job
• Getting a job if you don’t have one
• Doing your job well

Let’s consider these in turn.

Keeping your job

If you have a job, you need to maximize your chance of keeping it.  During tough times you can’t always control all the factors that might lead to your being the one retained or laid off. Life can be chaotic, random and cruel, and so can employers.  However, there are some things you can do and be that will increase your odds of keeping yourself employed (and that are just intrinsically worthwhile “ways to be” even if a job were to vanish.)  These things all involve social intelligence skills such as good communication, emotional self-control, and empathy.

Basically, the trick is to be the kind of employee that your employers want to keep around. This almost always means being someone who is effective at working with others.  Having excellent skills and rapport in dealing with customers or clients.  Being good at dealing with authority figures, whether that means the very bosses who might do the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” thing on you, or other people that your company deals with.  Good social intelligence skills go even further than that: they include understanding and being good at “organizational politics,” working well with teams, knowing how to deescalate or contain conflicts, and even showing good potential as a manager.

Think about it from your boss’s point of view: Which person do you least want to let go of, if you God forbid have to make that choice: the one who is great to work with, who “gets it” when dealing with you and others, who can always be relied on when you need someone to connect with a crabby client or customer, who you can see becoming a manager or leader some day?  Or the employee who may be smart and good at widget building or programming, but who just doesn’t cut it interpersonally, who is clueless or rude or just a pain around others?

Getting a job

Finding a job is more competitive than ever.  You may be super-qualified, well-trained and highly experienced at what you do… but so what?  There are probably fifty people (or five thousand) who also have your qualifications, who are going to compete with you for the few jobs that are around.

Under these conditions, one of the things that will help you stand out is good social intelligence.  People who can work and play well with others, and who show that either by reputation/recommendations or by the way they interact with others, have a massive advantage in tough times.  Having been many times in the position of hiring people, I can attest that applicants’ social intelligence skills have often been the main thing that made the difference.  In fact, I’ve several times hired colleagues who perhaps had many fewer “academic” qualifications than other applicants, because they seemed like someone who’d work better with me and other people in our group.  Rapport makes a huge difference.

Doing your job

Social intelligence is good for more than merely getting or holding onto a job.  You are also likely to enjoy your work more and to do it better, simply because high-SI people generally are more effective.

Most of the time, work is a social “sport.”  Even if you work alone in a cubicle, you have a variety of relationships with others.  Whether it’s talking to coworkers or clients on the phone, interviewing people for information, or firing off emails, you’ll generally interact with others much of the workday — even if your “cubicle” is a laptop in your condo overlooking the beach.  In fact, understanding others, managing your own anxieties or introversion so you can interact with folks at a distance, and having the empathy to help you understand “what was going through this person’s head” while you review files and letters, are heavily dependent on social intelligence skills.

Face it, you can hardly escape the need for social intelligence skills even during the “best of times.”  During the “worst of times,” your social intelligence may become a matter of survival.

*  *  *

In my book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Enhancing Your Social IQ there is an entire section on social intelligence in the workplace.  Covered areas include chapters on relationships with coworkers, dealing with authority figures, managing others effectively, dealing with clients and customers, dealing with organizational politics, and conflict management skills.

Social intelligence: Your superpower

One of the fun questions you sometimes get asked when you do online “personality assessment” surveys is which super power you’d pick if you could choose one.  The ability to fly?  To be invisible?  To shoot flames from your fingertips?

When I was writing the Social IQ book, I realized after delving into the research that a high level of social intelligence might very well qualify as a kind of superpower.  In fact, in practical, real-life terms, it might be one of the best to have.

Here’s a quote from the book:

Did you ever play a “role playing” game, such as Dungeons and Dragons?  In many such games, your first job is to pick the tools, talents, and helpers or allies you’ll need on your big adventure.  You might decide you’ll need a sword, the ability to see through solid walls, a wand, or a bag of magic beans that could do… oh, any number of things: blow something up, make a unicorn appear, or turn into nurturing soup if you add water and boil them.

This is also the way you start out in “real life.”  You get some skills, like learning to speak and tie your shoes.   You get some resources, like maybe a college fund, or useful words of wisdom from your dad, and maybe his old pocket knife or Zippo.  Or you may go to a far-off country with a letter of reference from a boss that will open a few doors for you.  And there’s always that magical device that can do more things than even Harry Potter’s wand: your Visa card!

But what if you could only pick one thing — one tool or talent or personal attribute — that would give you the greatest chance of long-term survival in a real-life adventure?  What would it be?

Hmm…  It would have to be something that could help you feel good when you were discouraged or hurt.  Something that could help you get the “basics” taken care of: food, shelter, safety, warmth.  Something that might open doors, protect you from enemies and help you gain friends and allies, especially when the going got rough.  Finally, it should be something that you couldn’t lose or have stolen from you, or drop overboard in a storm.

When you look at this list, you realize: magic beans can only do so much! (How many unicorns do you really need?) Same for that spectacular laser blaster — once you dispatch one or two Cylons, or use it to accidentally demolish your last can of chili while trying to open it, it’s not so useful! And even your Visa card is easy to lose… and there is that annoying credit limit!

On the other hand, consider some of the “powers” that come with social intelligence.  Running through the elements of SI that I listed above, imagine all its uses on your great adventure:

Knowing thyself:

Remember how Yoda told Luke Skywalker that it’s what you “bring into the cave with you” that can do you in?  He was right!

You have strong passions and desires and fears. In a tough spot, an “enemy” can use them against you, right?  Get you to blow up at the wrong time.  Get you to turn and run in terror.  Get you to waste your energy on trifles, to wreck your key alliances out of impatience or selfishness.  And on and on — most “great adventures” you read about (or see in the movies) hinge on whether the hero or heroine can “master their own passions”.  (Think about it — from Homer’s Odysseus through Harry Potter and his friends, self-mastery, especially of those unruly passions and fears, is one key to survival or destruction.)

Tuning in to others:

Empaths on Star Trek. Mr. Spock’s original “mind meld.” Spidey’s “spider sense.”  Need I say more?  Understanding the other person — their feelings, their needs, the things they are trying to communicate, is a key survival skill.  Want a real life example?  How about Sacagawea, the woman who guided Lewis and Clark’s expedition to safety with her translation skills and understanding of the tribes they encountered?  How about that mentor in college or on your first job, who helped you learn the ropes, who was who and what was going on with other people’s agendas?  How about that great doctor (or girlfriend or boyfriend) we all want, who knows exactly what’s wrong from the look on our faces?  Pretty powerful, right?

Making connections:

When you’re in the galaxy of Glaxxon and need permission to pass, when you are in the cubicles of Widget Corps and need permission to buy a costly new widget press, or when you’re in Target and want a refund, what’s the main skill you call on?  Right — the ability to connect with someone, to communicate, to win them to your side!  Same thing goes for your personal life — if you have that winning smile, that way of talking to someone that inspires confidence and liking, game’s over and you (both) win!

Caring:

In your role play game, it may not be so clear that compassion or caring are “key weapons.” But think about it: ever see a movie or read a book in which the least caring, or the snottiest and most insensitive person wins?  Maybe in the short run, but we all generally prefer to hang with the people who seem really to care about us and others.  Selfish, uncaring people lose allies and friends faster than a collie sheds hair in the summertime.

So, in conclusion… in the game of life, what magical power, skill, or tool should you pick? Magic beans?  Or social smarts?

The value of lessons in empathy

Today the NY Times ran an article about a school system in Scarsdale, NY, that includes mandatory lessons in “empathy.”  The article says that these seventh- and eighth-grade kids are required to do things like interviewing octogenarians and disabled people to learn about their lives and feelings, and to avoid doing things that might leave classmates feeling “excluded” from cool social events.  The hope is that this will increase not just empathy for others, but that this kind of training may be instrumental in reducing the amount of bullying, teasing, and other social ills that are common in schools.

Surprisingly, the article cites a number of critics who disagree with this training.  Reasons include the risk of “empathy training” crowding out other, more critical academic items, and kids’ complaints that the schools shouldn’t try to dictate how they live their personal lives.

These are probably misplaced fears.  In fact, there may be few things that are more useful to a child than to learn some of the critical skills, and incorporating some of the key attitudes, that go along with “empathy.”  Because empathy is actually a core component of the broader set of skills that are now called “social intelligence.”

What is “social intelligence,” then?  The concept has been around for nearly a century in psychology, though it’s only really gotten a lot of press in the past few years.  The idea of social intelligence was originally developed as one of several core parts of intelligence, or “IQ,” in general.  It was thought that there were several broad types of intellectual ability, such as memory, the ability to manipulate mechanical objects, the ability to understand written/academics, and so on.  “Social intelligence” was broadly thought of as the ability to understand and “manage” people.

In my book on the topic, I suggest that social intelligence includes four broad categories of ability: self-understanding (of your emotions/motives) and emotional self-control; the ability to have empathy for others (to understand their emotions, what they want from you, etc.); the ability to connect with/communicate with others; and genuine caring.

Unlike traditional, academic “IQ,” the evidence suggests that emotional intelligence can indeed be improved with training.  So teaching kids about empathy is probably a really good thing.  It may not automatically bring the “new age of happiness” to every child, and yes, there will still be bullies.  (There may even be a rare few who, like psychologists who helped the CIA learn to torture better, become better bullies because of their new empathy into “what would really hurt her.”)  But for the most part, creating a group of youngsters who have higher empathic quotients is likely, over time, to help them to become both more resilient, more effective (even in dealing with those new, “highly trained” bullies), and more successful in life.

Welcoming gestures

The legends that anthropologists tell each other around the campfire say that people originally would wave to greet each other as a way of showing that their hands were empty — they were unarmed, and so safe.  Come into the firelight, then.  Share some mastodon meat.  Let’s be pals.

I guess that’s a good story with which to launch this blog.  It’s overdue — I’ve wanted to follow up on my book on social intelligence with a blog for a few months now, but have been sidetracked by various things such as moving across the country.  Anyway, here we go.

The point of the blog is this: we are actually pretty amazing creatures, but particularly in the ways we have been constructed to be so good at interacting with each other, relying on each other.  Even more amazing, is the way our minds and brains literally influence each other.  When you walk into the room, you change the brain chemistry of everyone else who is there.  When you really start to think about this, it can shake your very picture of who you are.

I hope to share some reflections here that will be fun and helpful.  Hands are open, I’m unarmed.  Welcome.