On the latest Got Therapy?, I read Dr. Dan Rose a standard definition of emotional intelligence: a capacity to be aware of, control, or express one's emotions. He stopped me at one word. "The word control, I like concepts like regulation or modulation better than that."
He's right, and the point is worth arguing for.
So here is the position: emotional intelligence should be defined by what we let feelings teach us, not by how well we control them.
Dan's distinction was precise: "So regulation is a way to do something with the feelings that you have. Modulation is a way to be informed by them so that they can be woven into whatever you do next." Control treats a feeling as the problem. Modulation treats it as information about our inner or outer state, which is what feelings are.
The difference shows up clinically. An angry client who is simply told to control yourself learns to suppress. A client who is helped to find the feeling under the anger (dismissed, unheard) gets what Dan called "some emotional granularity," and with it a pattern she can actually work with.
It also matters for how we teach. "Control" invites the counselor in training to look for a technique that shuts the feeling down. Modulation asks for something slower: reflecting, joining, and letting the feeling take shape before acting on it.
It even changes how we think about anger. Under a control model, anger is the emotion to manage. Under modulation, as Dan put it, "anger is often fuel for assertion." It tells you something needs to be said. The skill is in saying it in a way the other person can hear.
Dan's summary line deserves a place in any definition: "we want to have feelings, not feelings have us." That isn't control. It's a working relationship with what we feel, being "both participant and observer" in our own inner states.
We're not born with this. It can be learned, and the definition we teach should point people toward learning it rather than toward suppression.
Got Therapy? is hosted by Michael Baltimore Ph.D. and Dan Rose Psy.D.