A Coach's Guide to Emotional Intelligence: Strategies for Developing Successful Leaders

3. EMOTIONAL IMMERSION

“Because our minds seek one another through limbic resonance, because our physiologic rhythms answer the call of limbic regulation, because we change one another’s brains through limbic revision—what we do inside relationships matters more than any other aspect of human life” (Lewis, Amini, & Lannon, 2000, p. 192).

In the book, A General Theory of Love, from which that insight comes, the authors assert that perhaps one of the biggest errors in the early development and practice of therapy was that therapists were trained to keep their emotional distance from the patient out of the fear that the patient would become attached in unhealthy ways to the therapist. Ironically, what they discovered in the scientific research ...