Dealing with people who lack emotional awareness is not easy. It may be your boss, your spouse, or childhood friend; all very important people in our lives, but challenging to deal with nonetheless. Have you ever caught yourself saying, “Geez, this person sounds like a 3-year-old!” That might be a slight exaggeration, but not by much. It’s not unusual that we know older people that function much younger emotionally. Understanding the emotional development and maturity or level of awareness can be helpful in having less frustrating interactions, and even getting to the outcome you desire.

The first way to think about emotional awareness is that we have different strands of development in our personality. For instance, we have an intellectual, physical development, social skills or even educational strand, but all of these different strands in our personality operate somewhat independently. This means that you can have a person who, in their emotional awareness, are quite young. The coping mechanisms that they use and their tolerance for frustration as well as their emotional regulation is not mature. In their other developmental strand, however, they might be very intelligent, highly educated, and highly skilled. They may have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and are a business success. Emotional unawareness can occur with these different strands of development in such a way that it feels very contradictory to claim that someone is behaving in an emotionally unaware manner because the rest of their life looks very actualized, i.e., very competent, very adult, very grown up. It’s often a surprise to people when you raise that concept with them because it can be hard to grasp how someone can be emotionally unaware when they own their own business. He or she might be so well thought of in the community and very successful financially. How can this person be emotionally unaware? However difficult to grasp, it’s certainly possible and not that uncommon. The first thing is to realize that being emotionally unaware doesn’t mean that person is not smart or not capable. It just means that they have not learned how to be emotionally as intelligent as they are mentally.

You may be asking then, what are the key signs of people who are emotionally unaware? There are certainly some cardinal signs to look for but think of it in terms of a continuum. People may be extremely emotionally unaware to the point where it affects all those other strands of development, and they may not be functioning very well in general. Or more commonly, they have some of the symptoms but it’s not so wholesale as the person who is totally emotionally unaware. There are four characteristics on this continuum.

  1. Egocentrism – Egocentrism is the inability to differentiate between self and other. More specifically, it is the inability to accurately assume or understand any perspective other than one’s own. Just for a quick shorthand think of a 3-year-old. A toddler is the most egocentric little creature on the planet because they have not yet learned how to see from another’s point of view. They must be center stage. They want it to be all about them. Everything that happens is a reference to themselves.
  2. Poor Empathy – Poor empathy means that it’s very difficult for a person to put themselves in the shoes of another. Another way of thinking about this is that they just don’t have the emotional imagination about the interior world of others. They don’t mentalize, they don’t conceptualize the subjective experiences of other people. As such, you can imagine that frees them up to say and do all kinds of things that might be very hurtful or might be embarrassing or otherwise. It just doesn’t occur to them to wonder about how that would feel to another person.
  3. Poor Self Reflection – People with poor self-reflection skills tend to be self-referential, meaning everything is about them. When it comes to self-reflection they might not think, “Gee, I wonder if I had something to do with that? I wonder if I was to blame for part of that. What can I do next time that would make that better? What do I need to watch out for?” Those thoughts are examples of self-reflection, and they don’t do that. It’s not a capability that they have at an emotional level. They can’t stand outside themselves and regard themselves as kind of an object of their own attention.
  4. Fear of Emotional Intimacy – Emotionally unaware people are disorganized by strong emotions. When somebody is showing strong emotion whether it’s being upset, expressing love, being moved, or any very intense feelings between people, they get really scared and they pull back. This is called affect phobia, meaning that they just become uneasy and scared, and unable to function when the emotional intimacy gets to a certain level in the relationship. This is what a lot of emotionally less developed people have a lot of trouble doing. It really makes them nervous, and when you try to relate to them at this deeper level, they become very uncomfortable often change the subject to a more superficial topic in order to get away from the emotional intensity.

In every single person’s life, we will recognize these characteristics because we’ve all been through them, and we all carry our past experiences. We know what it’s like to be egocentric. We know what it’s like to not think twice about how we’re affecting somebody else. We know the trouble we’ve gotten into when we haven’t self-reflected, and someone has gotten very upset with us because we know we’re sure that our viewpoint is the right one. These are human qualities. They don’t necessarily mean you’re emotionally unaware. It’s just that when you reach an adequate level of maturity, you can do something with these qualities. Because you may feel egocentric, thinking “What’s in it for me, how’s this going to affect me”, but then other things come in like your values and your empathy for others. Those things come in and you rationally consider all of it. It’s not that we get rid of all these things, it’s that we have other coping mechanisms and other values that grow on top. As we mature, if you’re emotionally aware enough, you can self-reflect and at some point, you might think well maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I better check this out. After all, what would a love story be if there wasn’t a fear of emotional intimacy, right? All these things will be very familiar, but the difference is that the emotionally unaware people are stuck in these. They don’t go to other levels when they’re engaging with people. In short, an emotionally aware person will recognize themselves in these lists of qualities whereas an emotionally unaware person will be stuck in them, sometimes in perpetuity most without tools in their reach. Now, if you’re reading this and wondering, “Am I’m emotionally unaware?” I would almost bet that you’re not, because in asking that question you’re showing self-reflection. You have run these things through. You’ve assessed it. You’ve compared it to yourself, and you’ve come up with that little worry. That is something that the emotionally unaware person doesn’t do.

It’s not easy dealing with emotionally unaware people. They are difficult for everybody to handle because these emotionally unaware people by definition are not playing by the rules. For example, you cannot expect them to listen to you and consider your point of view or self-reflect. Instead, they’re miles ahead in a different direction in their defensive reactions. So, it’s very hard for you to play catch up when you don’t understand what you’re dealing with, because an emotionally unaware person will say and do things that pull you right off your train of thought. At times, it can be so unrelated to the conversation or outrageous that it stops your mind from working. I’ve heard it called brain scramble, that is, you’re following along and then suddenly you have no idea where this is coming from, what they’re talking about or even how this relates to what you brought up in the first place. They’re all over the map, and when you try to follow and make sense of it, you are out of the game because the whole point is for you to give up. These are very difficult people to interact with and to have any kind of effectiveness. But there are ways to stay sane and even come to a healthy outcome. Here are some ideas below for how to deal with emotionally unaware people.

  1. Detach and Observe – Emotionally detach and just watch what they’re doing. It’s not easy detaching and unhooking from the eclipsing needs of the emotionally unaware person. This is where your conceptual understanding of emotional awareness comes in handy because you are not under the gun to respond right away. You do have the right to step back and observe what’s happening and look at them and their effects on you. You can think about their thoughts. You can think about your thoughts. And you can name it so that you have some consciousness of what is going on in the moment. First, become very present and of course practices like mindfulness or meditation will help. Becoming present is the process of centering yourself and staying aware of your reality and of your existence, so to speak. Then, stand back and observe or be mindful of what’s going on, which involves engaging your prefrontal cortex in labeling and naming the behaviors as you see them. When somebody is imposing their will on you and you can label behaviors that make you feel small or make you feel bad about yourself, you can master your own reactivity. That’s really the point. It’s not to master them. It’s not to get them to change. It is to work with your true responses in such a way that they begin to shift, and you start to have more confidence and more self-awareness as you go about your life. To detach and observe is your power.
  2. Focus on Outcome – You can express what you need to express and then let go. In other words, when you express something to an emotionally unaware person you are not trying to get them to change. Expressing yourself is for your benefit to express, it’s not to change them or get them to understand. You want to go into these interactions focused on the outcome that you want. Decide where are you going to go with the interaction and what your intention is. You have a goal in mind. You’re not trying to improve the relationship. You’re just trying to have a successful interaction, because if you try to improve the relationship now you’ve gone into emotionally intimate territory and that is what they cannot do. It will make them even more defensive. Remember that you’re just trying to have a successful interaction, and then your job is to maintain enough management sense that you realize it’s going to be up to you to have the interaction go the way that you want. In other words, you don’t expect them to be emotionally open or emotionally reciprocal because then you’ll just feel frustrated and invalidated. You want to set yourself a goal of communicating clearly without expecting a satisfying emotional exchange.
  3. Persistence and Repetition – Persistence and repetition is everything with this. Sometimes my clients and I will talk about the approach. Maybe they’re going home for a visit, or maybe going home that night to dinner with their husband. I tell them that you must know where you want to go and the outcome you want. That’s the being prepared part. That’s the setting of the goal part. You must know where you want to go, and then you repeat it with patient persistance. Emotionally unaware people are not prepared for repetition. They’re used to proposing something or insisting upon something until other people react, and then they protest, and then they do what they want. When a person stays calm, and they repeat persistently, an emotionally unaware person is at a lost. As you do this, show empathy to soften it but you know basically they have no recourse. It’s like what parents do with three and four-year-old’s: repeat, repeat, repeat, with patience, persistence, and consistency, and eventually the toddler comes around.
  4. Setting Boundaries – Maybe it works for you to have an optimal distance from them. Maybe you don’t live next door to them. Maybe you do, but you have boundaries, and you limit the amount of time that you spend with them. You have the ability to set boundaries and not go along with whatever they have in mind for you. You can manage the interaction in a way that allows you to stay true to yourself and not fall under the spell of emotional chaos. Sometimes it’s maintaining an optimal distance from emotionally unaware people which is not always easy to do, especially with family. You may want to preserve the family bond by visiting, but it may not work so well if you’re trying to deepen the relationship. You can keep an optimal distance by setting boundaries, limiting contact, and thereby stopping the drain that happens when emotional unaware people suck up your energy and give very little back except frustration. You can create space for yourself. You can leave the room if you need to. You can limit the length of your exposure. You can do this in a variety of styles depending on what feels right for you. Whichever way you go about it, if you end up feeling like you are being true to yourself, then mission accomplished and that is a huge success right there. It doesn’t matter what it looks like.

Emotionally unaware people can be exhausting. If you become more realistic about what you might be able to get from them and detach a little bit so you don’t have pressure behind it, you might be able to have a little more of the closeness that you would like. However, it doesn’t work when that’s what you are expecting and that’s what you’re trying to get in a big way. I recommend to people to not over-expect what they can get but to find other ways of having pleasant interactions in which they can spend time with that person, but to remain aware of your own limits and your own endurance. In these ways, you’re allowing the relationship to be as good as it possibly can be.

To learn how to spot (and effectively navigate) the emotionally unaware people in your life, contact Compass Anchor Coaching for a free initial consultation.