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Article in the Japan Times

[Thursday, March 1999, by Beth Lindsay]

 

 

Emotional "intelligence" is what interests Gabriele Frohlich these days, the connection between the brain and the heart.

 

As a medical doctor, she studied physiology; as a therapist she studied the psyche, and she has now come to believe that emotional intelligence is the road not only to individual healing, but that it has the power to effect changes on a global level.

 

As a child, Gabriele wanted to be a missionary; as a teenager, a doctor working in Third world countries.

She trained at FU Medical School in Berlin but rapidly became disillusioned with the approach she was expected to adopt. "The system did not cater to the whole person", says Frohlich. "I sensed that what we had been taught and were expected to apply was inappropriate and unsatisfactory."

 

She recounts how one day, working in the emergency department of a hospital, a patient was brought in with extremely high blood pressure, already on three different types of blood pressure medication.

"When I suggested that the nature of the problem might be in the emotional arena, the patient competely broke down and began to cry. I remember the frustration of being in a set-up where I had only three more minutes to deal with the patient. A person is so much more than just a body with organs to be fixed."

 

Disillusionment propelled her into psychotherapy. She trained in a wide range of therapeutic approaches,including transactional analysis, gestalt therapy, breathwork, neurolinguistic programming and hypnosis. Frohlich found working as a therapist much more satisfactory, but she began to question the relevance of dealing with individuals from a privileged Western background. "I have come to the realisation that what happens to individuals within themselves is actually the exact equivalent, a microcosm, of what happens on a global or macroscopic level," she explains.

 

"In the West, we have created, collectively, a lifestyle and a political and economic climate that is based on fear, from the combined pool of fear-based attitudes. These attitudes result from blockages within the individual; internal conflicts, which in turn are the result of unresolved childhood issues and cultural conditioning".

 

Frohlich sees economic woes as the outcome of fear- based competitve attitudes. "Businesses and nations are constantly competing to be one step ahead of their neighbours, rather than engaging in an exchange based on trust in universal forces," she says. It is our ingrained, fear-based attitudes and lifestyles that are actually creating the disparity in wealth between nations, and the imbalances in consumption of the world's resources."

 

Frohlich says that working with emotional intelligence not only helps individuals to integrate physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels, but will ultimately assist the balancing out on a global level.

 

Frohlich often works with the archetype of the inner child that still lives within every adult. Joy, spontaneity, creativity and life-force are its hallmarks, and its shadow aspects are suppressed emotions: anger, sadness and fear.The suppression of the inner child energy is usually subconscious, from a time when it was not safe to feel those feelings," according to Frohlich.

 

"In adult life, people tend to recreate situations similar to the ones they lived through in childhood. They will repeatedly subconsciously recreate an undesirable scenario and that's the clue that there is something there they are not aware of."

 

Frohlich describes her own childhood in Germany as "complex" and says it accounts for the direction of her life so far. She lost her own mother at birth and was brought up by a part-Jewish stepmother, who had escaped the fate of so many Jews living in Germany during World War II.

 

"In my late teens and early 20s, I lived in Israel for three years. I was magically drawn to the Jewish theme, not realising then it was to do with my part-Jewish stepmother. As a German by birth, I was carrying the baggage of Nazi Germany and the" dark era". Because of the Jewish/Nazi history and the conflict between my own ancestral past and my upbringing, I find myself very drawn to conflict situations involving ethnic minorities".

 

In recent years Frohlich has been traveling on workshop and training tours across Australia as well as working in drug and alcohol counseling. She has also conducted training sessions for health professionals, including counselors involved with aboriginal health, and worked as a government consultant on stress -related issues for management and employees.

 

In one of her workshops, Frohlich helped to resolve a battle between an Aborigine and a European for the custody of a part-Aboriginal child. Applying the tools of emotional intelligence to this situation provided the resolution that months of litigation had failed to deliver.

 

The natural result of emotional intelligence is a spiritual perspective on life, an acceptance that there is something beyond the individual's own resources. " The experience of a higher power moves people out of their limited perspective through opening up to an expanded perspective that transcends the individual human experience, " she says.

 

Childhood trauma leaves people with the subconscious belief that they are victims, and unhealed emotional trauma often affects the physical body. "The expression of emotions that were blocked never killed anybody, but their continued suppression certainly can!" she exclaims.

 

With the release of suppressed emotional energy, powerful healing can occur. "According to the latest neurophysiological research, when this is achieved, there is a corresponding "rewiring" of the brain and new neural pathways are actually formed.

 

Emotional intelligence is the direction of psychological education for the future, as opposed to therapy that is often understood as "something having gone wrong" says Frohlich. "The new approach is moving toward the acceptance of one's life as it presents itself. Things no longer have gone wrong, they simply are.

 

"Emotional intelligence is communication that goes beyond communication skills. You can teach communication skills and leave the heart out of it, but you cannot practice emotional intelligence without the heart".