Emotional IQ Author Shares How to Share News About Connecticut

Dec. 16, 2012 - PRLog -- This is an article by Scot Conway, author of the book Emotional IQ, discussing a lesson he taught to students at Guardian Quest Martial Arts.

         In the news in the past day or so is news of a shooting at an elementary school.  The story has evolved a bit.  In the final count, 26 people were killed, 20 of them children – all kindergarteners from what I heard – all killed by one Adam Lanza, reportedly a smart and painfully awkward 20 year old who killed his mother at home, took her guns, and went to a nearby elementary school and started killing kids, teachers and other staff, including the principal.

         Of course, any time there is a school shooting, there is a lot of emotion involved in the reaction of people all over the country and maybe even the world.  The only school shooting with a higher body count than this one is the Virginia Tech shooting that took more lives, but those were young adults – these were mostly kindergarten kids – which makes is all the more painful and shocking.

         In response to the news out of Connecticut I talked about three basic emotions someone might feel and taught the following lessons.

Sadness – Nearly anyone who hears the news will feel sadness.  The more you think about it, the more sadness you are likely to feel.  The death of children is always terrible.  The death of so many children is even sadder.  The fact that it happened by an act of evil violence makes it even worse.  With Christmas so close, with the realization that most, maybe all of these families already had presents under the tree for these children, and now rather than Christmas morning they will have funerals to attend.  Yes, anyone who thinks much about what happened is likely to feel sad.  Sad is perfectly appropriate.

Anger – A lot of people will feel angry, too.  Anger in a case like this is okay to feel and totally okay to not feel.  The only thing to remember is where to place your anger.  You get angry at who did something wrong.  That would be the bad guy.  So long as you are angry at the bad guy, anger is perfectly appropriate.  He did evil.  He hurt children.  For all sorts of reasons it is reasonable to be angry at the bad guy.

         Some people are directing their anger in other directions.  Some people think they are perfectly justified being angry at not-bad-guys.  Some are angry at the government for not passing strict gun control with the idea that if the government passed more laws, then the bad guy would not have been able to do this.  Others are angry at the government for banning guns on school campuses with the idea that if someone on campus was full trained and properly armed, then the bad guy could have been stopped.  In my personal opinion, being angry at anyone other than the bad guy probably isn’t going to be useful and may not be appropriate.

         If you’re angry, be angry at the bad guy.

Fear – This is another emotion a lot of people might feel.  We all want to believe that children are safe at school, especially little children.  When something like this happens, many parents can feel afraid that their children are not safe.  When something like this happens, many children who hear about it might be afraid.  Even though a lot of people might feel afraid, there really may not be a reason to be afraid.  Yes, it’s common.  Yes, it would be normal.  But perhaps we need not fear.

         There are over 130,000 schools nationwide.  This happened in one of them.  One.  If we were to take out children and place them randomly in a school somewhere in the country, there would be less than 1% of 1% of having a 1 in 13 chance of our child ending up in exactly the school where this took place.

         This happened in one school on one day.  On all the others days, this did not happen.  On any given day, this doesn’t happen anywhere, period.  To have it happen on any given day is a rare thing.  To have it happen at any given school is a remote thing.  Given all of this, by sheer odds, we are safe.

         Now this part is the hard part to look at.  We only do this because we are trying to see how afraid we should be.  It may be brutal, even uncomfortable, but it is another important thing to understand.  The school had about 700 students.  Of those, 20 of them were killed.  More than 97% of children went home on the worst night in their towns history physically okay.  Even if we had a child of random age in exactly the targeted school on the very worst day possible, there would be a 97% chance that our child was one of those to come home alive.

Emotions – Our emotions are designed to help us interact with reality effectively.  The fear that so many people feel is part of how our emotions are built.  This is why this happens: Normally we would only know about things near us.  

         Think about this for a moment.  A couple hundred years ago, news of a tragedy at a school would only have come to our attention on the day of the event if we had a close connection to the school.  It would be somewhere nearby.  It would be a school we had children attending or where children of families we knew attended.  The shooter might likely be at large, or there might be others like him, and chances are no one would have clear information.  We would be totally justified feeling afraid.

         Fear is an emotion that means “Something’s coming; I’m not ready.”  (Book: Emotional IQ by Scot Conway, Amazon Kindle)  It’s a default emotion engineered into us for survival.  Fear helps remind us to hide from things that can cause harm to us, or to hide those who are important to us from things that can harm them.  In many cases, we may not know quite what is coming, and fear will arise in us to prompt us to protect against the unknown.  It’s a sort of “better safe than sorry” logic that makes us afraid even when we’re not really sure there is anything to fear.

         A problem we have today is that news reaches us that has no direct connection to us.  We used to only hear news like this when it touches close to our lives and those individuals who are personally important to us.  Now we hear news like this anywhere it happens.  For me, it’s 3,000 miles away.  None of the people there were known to me before news of this event hit.  Now I have seen pictures, I have read names, and I have some knowledge of a community whose name I first heard days ago.  My emotions respond.

Perspective – I keep these things in perspective.  Yes, I’m saddened by this event.  It hurts deep inside the more I think about the families, the parents and grandparents who will struggle through Christmases for years to come.  It pains me when I think about the impossible struggle to still celebrate Christmas a parent might face who has lost a child, but still has other children.  How do you do that?  I don’t know.  All I could do for parents in that situation is sit with them in supportive silence and be there for them.  I would not know what to say, so I would say little.

        Love.  Appreciate.  Be grateful.  For all of us, this news, any news, can remind us what we have – and remind us to be deeply grateful.  Let us love one another.  Let us appreciate all that we have as we are sad for the families whose loss is beyond description.  I have my family today.  I have my friends.  I love them.  Let us all make sure that those we love know that today.