Emotional and Non-Emotional Authority and my Family
My daughter (9yo 3/6 Emo Gen) who is the youngest person in my family, is also the ONLY one with Emotional definition / Authority. Being that roughly half of the population has Emotional Authority, this is wildly statistically anomalous for sure - but imagine if she was growing up in a home where no one understood or saw her for this difference?
What would her story about herself become??
Not sure if you or someone you love has Emotional Authority or not? If your Solar Plexus centre in your Bodygraph is coloured in, that means you have Emotional Authority and experience an emotional wave. Look for the triangle pointing inwards on the right-hand side of the Bodygraph, you can see in the examples above, my Daughter’s chart is the only one to have this centred defined (or coloured in) so she has Emotional Authority.
Even though the way she experiences her emotionality is the same as around half of the population, in our house she is the minority. Before coming to HD, we honestly all were quite bewildered and overwhelmed with her emotionality - particularly as her wave is Tribal in frequency and ratchets up over days / weeks (she appears calm and neutral) until it reaches a breaking point and crashes - often times from the outside looking in, the incident that seems like it ‘caused’ the motional outburst is NOT at all in balance with the depth of emotional experience she is having. For example, a while ago, she was sitting quietly crafting when a sticker she was trying to use ripped instead of peeling off the backing paper smoothly and she had a huge melt down. If I wasn’t aware of her wave mechanics, it would seem ‘normal’ to judge her reaction to this event as completely out of balance with the seemingly minor happening of the sticker ripping - but she wasn’t reacting to the sticker ripping, that was simply the event that triggered the crash of her emotional wave - she was reacting to likely more than a week’s worth of pent-up emotional experiences, and feeling the depth of the cumulative wave break over her all at once.
As her Emotional Authority comes from her 37-40 channel, which is in Tribal circuitry, it carries with it a tactile quality. Through experimenting with this, we’ve found that for her, the best way for her to process her emotionality is through touch - she prefers to either hit it out or hug it out when she is overwhelmed with her emotions. To help her with this, we created a safe space for her to scream and hit - she has a standing punching bag and gloves and loves being able to have a healthy release of her emotional energy by hitting it out safely. Other times, she will grab her favourite teddys, or ask to cuddle with me or her Dad and simply be held while she cries or releases. Often times, it’s a combination of both. But ultimately, she’s learning that it’s OK to have a safe expression for all the facets of her emotionality - including rage - which, as someone raised with the conditioning of what it means to be a woman in our culture, rage is an emotion that is generally NOT accepted for women to have a healthy outlet for.
As a parent, THIS ONE THING has meant the world to me and to her - that she is seen, loved and accepted for ALL of her - not just the parts we’re conditioned to see as palatable.
As a non-emotional being, her emotional outbursts are overwhelming to experience for sure. But I have a completely open emotional Solar Plexus centre, and this provides me with some ‘insulation’. I have the awareness of her wave mechanics, the understanding of what’s really happening for her, the empathy to sit in that and the ability to hold her through this experience.
We talk often about her emotional wave, and I’ll never forget the look of pure relief on her face when I told her that no matter how big her emotional wave feels, that she will ALWAYS come back up to the surface, that those waves will never drown her even though they’re really big, and that through learning how to ultimately surrender to this process and develop ways to healthily express her emotions, she will become wise about the emotional potentials and depths we are here to experience in order to develop powerful empathy and help herself and others navigate their emotionality.
Imagine instead if she was told - like many of us from my generation were - to ‘stop crying’. Or - ‘it’s not that bad’. Or this fucked up favourite - ‘suck it up’. Imagine if she was sent to her room when she was emotional, ultimately learning that her emotionality wasn’t palatable to others, that she was alone in experiencing it and that it was not safe to show. Imagine if she developed an internal narrative of being ‘broken’, ‘damaged’ or ‘too much’.
I know a LOT of peeps my age that carry those stories, and for me, this is the beauty of Human Design - the awareness of how we are all different, in order to stop judging those differences and start accepting, understanding and ultimately - celebrating them.
