Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, December 1, 2023
On December 1, 2023, was presented Vittoria Lugli’s book In volo con le emozioni (San Paolo 2023).
The meeting was moderated by Prof. Ilaria Vigorelli, professor of Systematic Theology and the speakers were Fr. Prof. Francisco Javier Insa Gomez, professor of bioethics and secretary of the Center for Priestly Formation, and Fr. Prof. Fabio Rosini, biblical scholar, writer and director of the Vocations Service of the Diocese of Rome.
The reading of emotional states in contemporary culture is, on the one hand, paradoxical (if not paroxysmal), and on the other hand, pathologized (if not hidden), or “sedated.”
Although most traumas have to do with early significant relationships, Lugli underlines the importance of internalizing them in order to overcome them, becoming “artisans of one’s own abilities”. Parents matter, according to Vittoria Lugli, but we can always learn and re-learn. To do this, it is essential training in managing the strong emotions that shake us, but also learning about today’s context, in which we are called to live. It is a context made up of unfamiliar scenarios, for which we are often all unprepared: think of what Covid has been for many disoriented parents of teenage children!
Asceticism, mortification or renunciation, but also will or voluntarism, are part of a vocabulary that tends toward moralistic solutions: Lugli’s text proposes itself as an alternative to all this, pointing to interesting ways forward.
Emotional intelligence consists of the brain and the heart, i.e., a rational part and a voluntary part. The latter says training, repetition and rehabilitation: the myth of spontaneity is false! There is no such thing as spontaneity, there are habits: in training it is repetition that gives learning.
Every person can experience a path of transformation, even when there has been major trauma and injury. It is necessary to disentangle oneself from the slavery of diagnoses, from certain lapidary conclusions that risk paralyzing the person. It is necessary to understand, by approaching the individual, what is the input to be triggered to ignite a virtuous process of change and rehabilitation. After all, as noted by Fr. Fabio Rosini precisely with regard to these passages in Lugli’s book, a good father is not the one who personally solves his children’s problems but the one who teaches how to solve them.
The educator must glimpse the beauty and potential of each person and be its “guardian”. What then is “suitability” if not potentiality? The task of the educator and the therapist is not to take a snapshot of the current condition of discomfort but to show “where one can go”. The bigger the wounds the “bigger” one can become.
