Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman

On the day of my birthday, my cousin, who does ballet, falls and injures her leg. My father smacks my leg with a club in a fit of rage. I cry out in pain, but he doesn't care. He sneers and says, "Now, you know how it feels! Why didn't you stop to think how much pain your cousin would be in when you pushed her and made her fall down the stairs?" He hits me with all his might until I can't make any more sounds. To drive the lesson home, he shoves me into the basement, uncaring that I'm on the brink of death. "I'll let you out of there once you stop thinking these dirty thoughts, Yvonne!" But when he opens the door to the basement once more, all he sees is my decomposing corpse.

The smoothie shop was a whirlwind of activity during the lunch rush when a customer's call shattered my focus. "Is this the manager?" a sharp voice demanded. "I ordered a smoothie with just a touch of sugar. Why is it so sweet?" I checked her order and explained calmly, "Miss, Chocolate Bliss has a naturally sweet base." Not long after, she called again. "I asked for five ice cubes. Why are there only four?" Swamped and barely keeping up, I apologized and moved on. Before I could catch my breath, the phone rang once more. "I requested the guy in the black shirt to deliver my order. Why did a girl show up?" Suppressing my irritation, I clarified, "Miss, we handle the drinks; deliveries are managed by couriers." Finally, the calls stopped. But as the rush subsided, the headquarters called, telling me that a customer had lodged a complaint, accusing me of seducing her boyfriend.

I'm a love therapist. My job is to help clients experience what it's like to be in love. One day, a client comes to me, wanting me to serve him in a different manner.

Just because I ate one chicken leg more than my brother, my father kicked me out of the house in the middle of a snowstorm. Later on, my father of an archeologist dug up my body. Due to my missing head, he did not recognize me. Even when he saw that the body had the same scars as I did, he did not care. Later on, my mother dug out my heart and showed it to her students. "Today, we will study the heart of someone with congenital heart disease." She once said she would recognize me no matter what I looked like. Mom, now that the only thing left of me is my heart, do you still recognize me?

I die in the basement after being burned by acid. My family doesn't recognize me, and they don't call the cops. My mother picks up the scalpel that hasn't been used in years and debones me. My father excitedly mixes my skeleton with concrete and turns me into an exquisite statue. My sister uses the sculpture she's made out of my flesh and portrays herself as a genius sculptor whom everyone admires. Later, the sculpture is shattered, revealing half a broken finger inside. That's when everyone panics.

Studying abroad can be incredibly lonely at times. That night, I was in my room, indulging in a little treat for myself, when my best friend suddenly burst through the door. "Doing it yourself is no fun. Come on. There's a super cool cabaret show going on. Let's go see it together!" On stage, my friend was reclining in a chair behind the curtain, with two strong-looking men on top of her. "Come on. Join us for a group dance..."

Half a year after our divorce, my ex-husband became a trending topic online. His current wife, who had just given birth, jumped off a building. When she jumped, she was clutching a printed, 98-page copy of the "Cloves Family Code of Conduct." The reason for her suicide? She couldn’t buy discounted groceries online. A reporter came to interview me and asked, "Excuse me, were you also given the same family rules?"

After the school cafeteria for elementary school kids shut down, I decided to offer meals for all the kids in our building at my home. At the end of the month, when it came time to settle the bill, one of the neighbors wasn’t happy. “The new caterer downstairs only charges $2.50 per meal, but you’re charging us $5! That’s an extra $75 per kid per month. Do you have no shame?” she accused me. I calmly explained that I only used free-range meat and organic vegetables in my meals. But no matter how patiently I tried to reason with them, the parents insisted I refund the difference and demanded I charge no more than $2.50 per meal moving forward. When I lowered my costs to meet their demands, they started accusing me of mistreating their children. They went online to expose me and even reported me to the authorities. The online attacks were relentless. I was fined, and my husband lost his job because of the controversy surrounding me. The stress pushed me into depression, and in the end, I jumped off a building to end it all. When I opened my eyes again, I saw those same parents being swayed by others in the neighborhood to send their kids to the new daycare service that only charged $2.50 a day. What they didn’t know was that the lunch caterer next door did serve meat every day—but it was frozen, diseased pork that had been sitting in storage for two years.

The moment I was born, my mother implanted a chip in my brain and began shaping me into her idea of a perfect daughter. She blocked my sense of hunger so I would only have simple meals daily to maintain the "ideal" figure. She erased my ability to feel pain so she could inject me with endless chemicals to keep my skin smooth and flawless. She tampered with my senses, deleting every trace of negative emotion from my mind, all so I could remain eternally innocent. I couldn't tell right from wrong. I didn't know sadness or anger. I only knew how to smile. When the neighbor's dog died, I smiled and was scolded harshly for being heartless. When my classmates bullied me, I smiled and became the class freak. When my grandfather passed away, I smiled again, and my relatives cursed me for being soulless. Eventually, my father couldn't take it anymore. He left us. Mom, however, didn't seem to care. "They don't understand," she told me. "Everything I've done is for your own good. One day, you'll thank me." … On my 18th birthday, she planned a grand live broadcast, ready to show the world her perfect creation. She never knew that the day before her grand broadcast, I had already lost myself completely. By then, I was no longer human. I had become a machine.

Past thirty, my usually serious husband suddenly developed a fascination with pink. The dark-colored furniture that had stayed the same for ten years was replaced with pink; even the utensils he picked up casually were pink. I stared at the line of pink pajamas, pink bow ties, and pink underwear hanging out to dry on the balcony, feeling something was off. "I thought you said you hated pink—that it was a color only women liked?" He was unpacking a new pink bed set and didn't even look up. "Oh, Jack and I made a bet. If I can replace everything in the house with pink, he'll give me his seaside villa for free. Honestly, after looking at it for a while, pink isn't that bad, don't you think?" I neither agreed nor disagreed. Instead, I called Jack, who blurted out, "What seaside villa? I don't remember ever buying one!"