The in-her game(tm): Rapport redux

This weekend has been amazing. We all have the ability to heal ourselves; at a later point, I will write a simple intro on our immune system where our body can protect and heal ourselves biologically. For now, I’m going to dive right in and discuss my emotional journey this weekend that led me to this amazing insight.

First, I want to revisit two topics about emotional connection, i.e., rapport, that I didn’t explain clearly in my last post. Imagine our emotional self has both breadth and depth, a simple analogy would be like the ocean.

We can skim the surface, bouncing from point to point without diving in and exploring the depth. That is what is meant by wide rapport, where we explore many emotions without much depth, finding commonalities, not just what we do, but how we feel about certain topics. To get at this, a simple exercise I will do is to write down my list of likes and dislikes (food, music, family, work,…) and to things I start to riff off based on keywords. The goal is to go as far and wide, to visit as many emotional places as possible without depth.

The other way is to dive in and explore the depth of the ocean at a particular emotion. Different emotions have various depths; after navigating through them, deep rapport is about picking a deep emotion and dive right in where we re-live that emotional experience and to make sense of it so that it doesn’t exist like the monster underneath our bed, or like a festering wouldn’t heal. The exercise for deep rapport is to list multiple deep emotions, then think back of a time in our lives where we either first experience that emotion (which is always life changing) and/or that emotional experience has a major impact on who we are.

The sharing of emotional journeys, be they deep, wide, or preferably, both like a roller coaster, is not only therapeutic for the sharer, it also builds a connection and cements the bond between people. Remember when you were a child, how you love bed time stories? Even as adults today, we still like to hear stories. The best stories are not just facts, but they have the emotional impact, that is what we like because we get to re-live them and also we get to know about the person telling those stories.