Emotional Capital

by Mark Gungor on November 17th, 2010

Most people understand the concept of “emotional bank accounts” where we all have a limited amount of energy or emotion to give out interacting with other people during any period of time. A person who continuously “spends” can run out of “emotional capital” and have nothing left to give. Attached to this is the idea of making “emotional deposits”. We need to fill up the account in order to be able to spend and give out again. You can make your own deposits by recuperating and doing things that emotionally energize you, or others around you can make the deposits by spending time emotionally engaging and giving to you. You may have also heard of this in terms of a “love tank” that needs to be filled in order to give to others. It is an old and very familiar notion that people are generally aware of.

Just like our checking accounts can become drained of money, our emotional accounts can be drained of emotional currency–especially when there is more going out than is coming in. You can start to run into a shortage that creates a supply and demand issue and just like with cash, it becomes a problem when you try to spend what is simply not there. We become irritated and upset especially when those emotional expenditures are not the kind we want to make.

We don’t like it when we have to “spend” our capital on things that are not essential. Put it in terms of money and it’s easy to understand. Most of us are usually not thrilled if we have to spend money on things we don’t think are necessary. Typically we like to hang onto our hard earned cash and use it for what we want. The same can be said about emotions—we don’t like it when we have to spend our “emotional capital” on people and situations that we believe are nonessential. We will all fork over the emotions for the things we think are worthy, but will resent it when someone is taking our energy if we don’t think we should have to give it….sort of like having to pay taxes, bills or extra charges when we really don’t need or want to....

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