People carry history. So do families, communities, countries and cultures. We carry what has happened to us. We carry fear, loss, betrayal and trauma, sometimes for generations, and all of that matters.
But there is another question we don’t ask nearly enough: What happens when the person who has been hurt becomes the person with power?
Pain does not suddenly disappear when we gain power. Sometimes it becomes even more important to understand it, because unexamined pain can start making decisions. Fear can become control. Protection can become aggression. A story about what happened before can become an assumption about what will happen next, and eventually we may stop asking whether our response fits what is actually happening now.
We can see versions of this in leadership all the time. Leaders act from fear, anger, pride, loyalty, resentment, insecurity, ambition or a need to protect something they believe is under threat. Sometimes those emotions are understandable. Sometimes the threat is real. But when someone holds enormous power, their unexamined emotional responses can affect millions of people.
That is easy for us to see from the outside. It is much harder to recognize the same process in ourselves.
Most of us are not making decisions about wars, trade agreements or national policy, but we are still making decisions from emotion every day. We decide who we trust, who we blame, what we post, what we repeat, who we stop listening to and how we treat people who disagree with us. We may tell ourselves that we are simply reacting to what is happening in the world, but our reactions are shaped by our own history too.
Someone dismisses us and an old wound walks into the room. Someone disagrees with us and suddenly we aren’t responding only to this disagreement. We may also be responding to every other time we felt ignored, rejected, betrayed or powerless. Fear can make us suspicious. Anger can make us cruel. Loyalty can make us defend behaviour we would condemn in someone else. A need to feel safe can make us stop listening entirely. And this is where things get uncomfortable, because it is much easier to examine somebody else’s behaviour than our own.
We can look at a leader and say, “They are reacting from fear.” We can say, “They are trying to control the situation.” We can recognize defensiveness, blame, exaggeration or a refusal to listen. But what happens when we turn that same lens toward ourselves?
Do I exaggerate when I am angry? Do I stop listening when I feel threatened? Do I decide what someone means before they have finished speaking? Do I share something because I know it is true, or because it confirms what I already believe? Do I treat people differently when I think they belong to the “other side”? Do I become so convinced that I am right that curiosity disappears?
Those questions matter because the behaviour of leaders does not happen in isolation. Public emotion shapes politics too. Fear spreads. Anger spreads. Suspicion spreads. So does contempt. We respond to our leaders, they respond to us, media responds to all of it, and before long everyone is shouting while fewer people are actually listening.
That does not mean the public is responsible for every decision made by those in power. Leaders carry greater responsibility precisely because they hold greater power. But the rest of us still have responsibility for what we bring into the conversation. Pain deserves compassion. Power requires accountability. And accountability is not only something we demand from other people. It is something we need to practice ourselves.
That is where emotional intelligence becomes more than learning how to name a feeling. We need to be able to pause long enough to ask what we are feeling, what we are protecting, what story we are telling ourselves, what assumptions we are making, what value we want our response to reflect, and what outcome we are actually trying to create.
Maybe I am angry about what a government is doing. Fine. Anger is information. What is it telling me? What value feels threatened? Justice? Safety? Freedom? Compassion? Fairness? And once I know that, what behaviour actually reflects that value?
Because shouting about respect while treating people with contempt doesn’t make much sense. Demanding honesty while sharing information we haven’t checked doesn’t make much sense either. Criticizing leaders for refusing to listen while refusing to listen ourselves should probably give us pause.
The only person we can actually control is ourselves. That can sound small when the world feels enormous and chaotic, but it is not small at all. Every conversation, every post, every vote, every decision and every relationship is shaped by the way we respond.
Our history can help explain our reactions, but it should not be making every decision for us. The work is to notice what is driving the response, decide whether it still fits the situation we are actually in, and choose what we do next with intention.
That is where emotional intelligence matters. Not in pretending we are not hurt, afraid or angry, but in being willing to look at those emotions honestly and ask what they are doing to our behaviour.
We may not be able to control what our leaders do. But we can decide what kind of people we become while we are watching them.
pause…understand…choose
