Podcast Musings... The Emotions in our Lives

In the latter part of this episode of This American Life, Episode #532 Magic Words, a woman develops a theory for social interaction for dementia landscape. This idea of engaging with the person at their level and acknowledging their social representations of the world is so interesting. I feel I do this with my children all the time. I indulge in their stories and let them continue the narrative. They get to talk a lot more and think about things. Sometimes they pull out these wicked gems. For a time, my daughter liked to tell me stories about how she was a Princess born on the Moon and her parents, the King and Queen, lived there. That one day she would return to the moon. At first, it was little jarring to hear that she was claiming someone else as a parent, but I just went along and she developed beautiful stories. She talked through notions of family, distance and closeness. It's interesting how in the podcast Karen, who has a prior socio-emotional connection to her mom, has difficulty adopting this new socio-emotional interaction system with her mom (one that ignores their prior connection). Whereas Mundy, who has no prior interaction with her mom, is able to construct a socio-emotional system with her quite 'easily'. Here is a great example of how emotions (even from prior lived-experience!) regulate our interactions.