When I first read Dr. Julia DiGangi’s best-selling book, Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power, I knew it was a game changer for improving our love lives, our work lives, and the most important life we have—the inner life with our emotional selves. Dr. DiGangi is a neuropsychologist who completed her residency at a consortium of Harvard Medical School, Boston University, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
I recently interviewed her and we explored her unique background and skillset, her family challenges, the surprising reason she got into the field, and how her work has impacted the world. I wrote an earlier article about her work, “The Neuroscience of Emotional Power,” and here we go deeper into the three critical “marriages” we all must address according to David Whyte, author of The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self, and Relationship.
“There is that first marriage, the one we usually mean, to another,” says Whyte, “that second marriage, which can so often seem like a burden to work or vocation and that third, and most likely hidden, marriage to a core conversation inside ourselves.”
Understanding Emotional Power
Humans are complicated and emotions can be confusing. But all of us want to know ourselves and feel good about the person we know. We call our species “Homo sapiens,” which means “the wise human.” We often think of being wise as being smart, able to think clearly and make wise decisions.
Humans, particularly those humans known as males, often put too much emphasis on our thinking abilities and not enough on our emotions. Dr. DiGangi defines emotional power simply as
“Your ability to stay strong in the midst of life’s inevitable challenges.”
Whether we want to be strong in the face of a challenging marriage or want to be able to stand strong when having to make a difficult business decision, we do best when we tap into our emotional power. We recognize the value of a passionate love life and a satisfying and successful career, but we also want to feel good with who we are inside our own bodies, minds, and souls. Yet, many of us fall short.
Emotional power is the foundation for achieving success in all areas of our lives.
“Your emotions are, in many ways, the final judge of your experiences.”
says Dr. DiGangi.
“Until you understand how to work more effectively with your emotions, it’s easy to expend tremendous energy yanking at ineffective levers of change.”
In our interview Dr. DiGangi introduces her findings on “neuroenergetic codes,” including the following:
How to Transform Your Emotional Pain into Emotional Power
All of us try and avoid pain and seek pleasure. It’s the core of our evolutionary based survival mechanism. Yet, we want to do more than survive in life. We want to thrive. To do that we need to learn to overcome our brain’s automatic pain avoidance response and turn our emotional pain into emotional power.
Dr. DiGangi reminds us that our brains create a whole lot of sensations that are both painful and pleasurable, but they all reduce to two kinds of emotional energies. She calls them: Emotional Pain and Emotional Power.
Emotional Pain includes any type of negative sensations you feel. These can include things like anxiety, fear, worry, irritation, anger, shame, etc.
Emotional Power includes any type of positive sensations that makes you feel worthy. These include positive sensations we call confidence, strength, resilience, importance, etc.
Here’s the basic fact of neurobiology: The most effective, scientifically supported forms of behavior change are based upon people transforming their relationship with the feelings they’ve been avoiding.
“Over the years,”
says Dr. DiGangi,
“I’ve worked with many people who have experienced extreme trauma—everything from soldiers who experienced of trauma of war to survivors of rape and child sexual abuse. In all cases, the healing came from helping people regain the courage to move towards the feelings and experiences they have avoided all their lives.”
She looks at some of the common ways we avoid pain in our love lives. Check the ones you recognize:
- Becoming attracted to people who are unavailable.
- Bailing out on a relationship that could be good and avoiding dealing with what is scaring you.
- Finding fault with little things a potential love interest does or doesn’t do which creates emotional distance.
- Trying to change the other persons behavior instead of dealing directly with your fears.
- Jumping into a new relationship and avoiding looking at what went wrong in the last one.
- Fill in your own example here____________________________________________.
She goes on to describe common ways we avoid pain in our work lives. Check the ones you recognize:
- You are excited about starting a new project, but you’re afraid it might fail so you avoid doing it.
- You want to tell someone at work that they said something that hurt your feelings, but you’re embarrassed so you put off telling them.
- You’re having trouble with one of your employees who keeps making mistakes, but you’re afraid they might be hurt by your criticism so you avoid telling them.
- You feel you’ve taken on too much work, but you worry that saying “no” will make you look bad, so you reluctantly say “yes.”
- You want to advance and take on more responsibility, but you have a difficult time making decisions that might upset people you care about, so you hold back.
- Fill in your own example here____________________________________________.
She examines common ways we avoid pain in our inner work with ourselves. Check the ones you recognize:
Do you spend time…
- Being worried what other people think of you?
- Iirritated by what others are doing or saying?
- Scared you did something wrong?
- Anxious that you’ve upset others?
- Terrified that if you lived your life as you desire you’d be rejected?
When she talked about the ways we try and compensate and create stability, safety, security by getting caught in the “overs,” I felt some uncomfortable feelings of recognition. How about you? Do you…
—overthink looking for the perfect solution?
—overanalyze things trying to be sure you haven’t missed something important?
—overgive to make sure that people like you and they don’t disappoint anyone?
—overreact to keep people from taking advantage of you?
–overwork so no one can accuse you of not being on top of things?
–Fill in your own example here____________________________________________.
I added overdo. I often feel that everyone depends on me—my family (Carlin and I have six grown children, seventeen grandchildren, and two great grandchildren)—plus, I have clients, and work colleagues—I tell myself I’ve got to do more or the world is going to collapse and the people I care most about will die.
I found a lot of what she said to be counter-intuitive, but right on the money, particularly when she said that one of our main problems in life is our attempts to avoid pain. Rather, than go with our desire to avoid pains, Dr. DiGangi recommends that we “Pick a more powerful pain.”
Here’s an example from my own life. I played basketball in high school but have always been short and slightly built. I would get bounced around and dominated. I decided I couldn’t do anything about being taller, but I could get stronger. I started with leg presses. At first I could only do three sets of ten with 100 pounds. As I built up my leg muscles I could eventually do three sets of ten with 200 pounds. It was painful, but the benefits were worth it. I could stronger and more able to be successful engaging a sport that I loved.
When I could lift 200 pounds, it wasn’t that 100 pounds no longer existed. Each time I did a 200-pound lift, I first had to add four 25-pound plates to get to 100, before I could add four more to get to 200. Here’s how this analogy applies to emotional pain.
Like many couples my wife and I divided up our duties. Although she worked outside the home, I was the primary “breadwinner” and she did most of the bill-paying, taxes, food preparation, and cleanup. In March she slipped and fell on a wet sidewalk. She suffered a broken hip, needed hip replacement surgery, and suffered a stroke.
Suddenly, I had to take over all the things she had been doing, in addition to taking care of her health needs when she came out of the hospital. I also had to continue carrying out my ongoing work responsibilities. At first I was overwhelmed, irritable, frustrated, resentful, and angry. I knew none of this was her fault and I desperately wanted to step up to my new duties, but I was afraid I would fail. At first I wanted to escape, to run away from the pain of increased caregiving. But as I stayed with it, I let go of my frustrations, resentments, and fears. I gradually gained confidence as I embraced the more powerful pain by confronting my fear of failure, the worry that I would screw things up or let my wife down or even make a mistake that would cause her health to worsen or even cause her to die.
I kept at it and over a period of eighteen months, I gradually took on more and more weight and gained increasing power as I felt more competent, confident, worthwhile, loved, and loving. Rather than running away from my initial pain, I picked a more power pain that I thought I couldn’t handle but surprised myself that I could become emotionally stronger.
As Dr. DiGangi says,
“When it comes to a tough circumstance in your life, you really have only two options: run from it or become more powerful in the face of it.”
Your nervous system packs 150 million years of evolutionary power. You are built to handle hard. Going after what you want in your life is powerful precisely because it is painful.”
I hope you found this article helpful. If you’d like to learn more about Dr. DiGangi’s work you can learn more here: https://drjuliadigangi.com/. If you’d like to learn more about her upcoming program, “The Age of Energy,” you can do so here: https://drjuliadigangi.com/the-age-of-energy/.
I write weekly articles to share my own wisdom to improve your personal and relational skills and to share with you the wisdom of colleagues whose work is transforming our world. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can do so here: https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/
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