PERMISSION TO FEEL: Unlocking the power of emotions to help our kids, ourselves, and our society thrive. This remarkable book is written by Marc Brackett, Ph.D. It offers wonderful insight into our emotional world as beings and how our society could completely be transformed if we took more of an emotional look at our day to day interactions. Below are my favorite things I learned from the book:
We deny ourselves-and one another- the permission to feel. We avoid the difficult conversation with our colleague; we explode at a loved one; and we helplessly go through an entire bag of cookies and have no idea why. When we deny ourselves the permission to feel, a long list of unwanted outcomes ensues. We lose the ability to even identify what we’re feeling- it’s like, without noticing, we go a little numb inside.
When we can’t recognize, understand, or put into words what we feel, it’s impossible for us to do anything about it.
We seem to prefer spending more money and effort on dealing with the results of our emotional problems rather than trying to prevent them.
Your life didn’t have to be tragic for you to feel as though your emotional life didn’t matter to anyone but you.
“Everything’s Fine”- It’s one of the great paradoxes of the human condition- we ask some variation of the question “How are you feeling?” over and over, which would lead one to assume that we attach some importance to it. And yet we never expect or desire- or provide-an honest answer.
Our emotional state is one of the most important aspects of our lives. It rules everything else, Its influence is pervasive. Yet it is also the thing we steer around most carefully. Our inner lives are uncharted territory even to us, a risky place to explore.
Over the last two decades, there has been a 28% increase in our suicide rate.
If you are like me, you have some memories from early childhood that stand out from the fog of years, that have endured over time for no other reason that that a grown-up made space in his or her life, for a moment, for you.
(At the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)- we need to remake education so that it includes emotion skills- so that professional interventions become less necessary.
Feelings are a form of information. They’re like news reports from inside our psyches, sending messages about what’s going on inside the unique person that is each of us in response to whatever internal or external events we’re experiencing. We need to access that information and then figure out what it’s telling us. That way we can make the most informed decisions.
Anger can sometimes seem unprovoked or inexplicable, but in almost every case it’s a response to what we perceive as unfair treatment. We’ve suffered an injustice of some kind, big or small, and it makes us mad.
We adults ALL need to understand how our emotions influence us and everyone around us, not just schoolchildren. We need to develop the skills and be positive role models.
What are the qualities you most want your children to possess as they grow into adults? Is it math skills, scientific knowledge, athletic ability? Or is it confidence, kindness, a sense of purpose, the wisdom to build healthy, lasting relationships?
Research shows that having just one caring adult can make the difference between whether a child will thrive or not.
You could be brilliant, with an IQ that Einstein would envy, but if you’re unable to recognize your emotions and see how they’re affecting your behavior, all that cognitive firepower won’t do you as much good as you might imagine.
An emotion- happy, sad, angry- arises from an appraisal of an internal or external stimulus. By appraisal I mean an interpretation of what is happening in the world or my mind through the lens of my present goals or concerns. We hear, see, feel (through touch), taste, or smell something that alerts us to shift in the environment. We are provoked by a memory or sensation, or an event, something someone says or does, or something we witness or experience.
Emotions are mostly short-lived. They usually include a physiological reaction, such as a blush, chills, or an increased heart rate, and a release of neurochemicals to prepare you for action. They are often expressed automatically in our facial expressions, body language, and other nonverbal cues. Emotions also are accompanied by a subjective experience in our conscious minds.
Recent research emphasizes that emotions are fully intertwined not only with our biology but also with our individual life experiences and culture. We don’t all fear the same things, and we don’t all express joy in the same ways.
A feeling is our internal response to an emotion. I’m angry about something that’s happening between us, it’s caused me to give up hope, and I can’t keep going this way. That’s a feeling. It’s nuanced, subtle, multidimensional. When you ask someone how they’re feeling, they answer is sometimes an emotion (happy, sad, afraid, angry), but they may also say they’re feeling supported, connected, valued, respected, and appreciated.
We often have more than one emotion at the same time.
Here’s one I know all too well: The airline lost my luggage, and I’m simultaneously angry over their carelessness, worried because my medicine was in there, embarrassed because I’ll have to attend a meeting dressed in what I wore on the plane, and discouraged because I know they’ll never find my suitcase before my trip is over.
RULER:
R- Recognition
U- Understanding Emotion
L- labeling Emotion
E- Expressing Emotion
R- Regulating Emotion
The first of the RULER skills: Recognition. How to recognize emotions in ourselves and others with accuracy. But until we can recognize our own emotions, we can’t learn the skills necessary for regulating them. The fact is that we are making these automatic judgments about how people feel all day long- and we’re often wrong. Psychologists call this phenomenon “attribution bias”, meaning we observe someone’s cues or behavior and wrongly attribute them to our own emotional state.
Understanding Emotion- we adults want to believe that the emotional lives of children are less complex and messy than our own, but it’s not so. Indeed, sometimes the opposite is true. In every case, there’s one or a couple of needs or emotional states underlying our feelings, and that’s what understanding helps us to find. Typically, the need to understand an emotion increases with its intensity- the stronger the feeling, the higher the stakes. This is true for us all but especially for children, who don’t have the vocabulary, prefrontal cortical circuitry, or presence of mind to make their inner most feelings clear.
Labeling Emotion- labeling would be an effective emotion regulation strategy. Affective labeling is linked to lower activation of the amygdala, the brain region that’s activated when we feel negative emotions, and higher activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), which supports emotion regulation. One word that gets a lot of attention in psychology textbooks describes the feeling of happiness or satisfaction caused by someone else’s misfortune, or what is known in German as schadenfreude. There are supposedly words with similar meaning in Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Czech, and Finnish, but no such term in English. Maybe it just means that are more comfortable owning up to such a nasty sensation. Litost is a Czech word meaning, according to the novelist Milan Kundera, “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery. Iktsuarpok is the Inuit word that describes the anticipation you feel when you’re so impatient for a guest’s arrival at your home that you keep going outside to check. Hygge is the fabled Danish sensation experienced while sitting around a fire in winter surrounded by friends. Kwell is the Yiddish word that describes the feeling of overwhelming love and pride you get when you see what you child can do. And ya’arburnee is Arabic for “May you bury me”- meaning, the hope that you will die before a loved one because you couldn’t stand to live without him or her.
The number of English words and associations for “shame” is no match when compared with the Chinese. In Mandarin, there were more than 100 different shame related terms and phrases.
Envy, has to do with coveting something that someone else possesses. When you can understand and name your emotions, something magical happens. The mere fact of acknowledgement creates the ability to shift. When we don’t have the words for our feelings, we’re not just lacking descriptive flourish. We’re lacking authorship of our own lives. When we settle for for the 6 or 7 words that we all rely on, we’re shortchanging ourselves- it’s like taking a vow of emotional poverty when riches await. Ask yourself now: How am I feeling? And try coming up with as many words- more thoughtful and precise ones than you usually deploy. That’s how this skill improves. Without it, we remain unknown to ourselves or anyone else, which brings us to our next step: expressing emotion.
Regulating Emotion-emotion regulation is at the top of the RULER hierarchy. It’s likely the most complex of the 5 skills and the most challenging. This underscores the importance of the first 3 emotion skills we learned- we need to know what we’re feeling and why before we can anticipate which emotion regulation strategies we might require in the next 5 minutes.
The initial goal of regulation is to manage or own emotional responses, but then this skill makes a leap into even greater complexity: co-regulation. Every human interaction we’ve ever had, from infancy onward, has involved co-regulation. It’s impossible to be in the company of another being and not be influenced by her or his emotional state, or vice versa. Co-regulation is the precursor to healthy self-regulation. Emotional regulation starts with giving ourselves and others the permission to own our feelings- all of them.
Our brain responds to intense emotions by activating the sympathetic nervous system: our heart rate goes up, stress hormones and/or endorphins are released depending on the emotion, and (when pressured) we prepare to flee or freeze.
You teach your children to express their emotions by skillfully expressing yours. Conversely, if you are reluctant to express your feelings, or do so only sparingly, in as few words as possible, then that’s what your children will learn to do when they grow up. This is why we adults need to be open to learning and practicing strategies in our own emotional lives before we can support our kids.
Parents who value emotions tend to be aware of their children’s feelings and are able to act like coaches. They don’t respond with threats of discipline when their kids express anger or sadness- instead, they see strong feelings as a central part of healthy development. Parents who view emotions as harmful or disruptive are the ones who command their children to “suck it up” and see their kids’ emotional expressions as manipulative. Those are the same parents who mask their own emotions and send implicit messages that feelings are unimportant.
If mothers and fathers use many words to describe emotions rather than just a few basic ones, their children will be better able to express their feelings to others. They’ll also be more empathic.
Take a moment and think back to the home you grew up in. Consider how it felt to be in your home, your relationship with your mom, dad, or caregiver. With that in mind, what’s one word you would use to describe the emotional climate of your childhood home? Here’s a summary of thousands of responses from people across the globe. They fall into 3 categories: about 70% of the terms were negative, 20% were positive, and 10% were neutral.
Ask yourself these questions: What did you learn about emotions growing up? What did you witness? Which feelings did your parents easily express, and which were never displayed? How did your parents handle your emotions, especially the difficult ones such as anger, fear, sadness? Were they emotion scientists, trying to figure out what you were feeling and why, as a way of helping you to deal with it? Or were they judges, blaming or finding fault with you for how you felt? Did you feel free to say what you felt? Did your parents’ behavior encourage you to express, or did they send an implicit message to suppress your emotions? Once we acknowledge the power of the past in our current emotional lives, we’re ready to begin dealing with the present.
When we feel threatened by our kids, our compassion switch turns off. Just keep in mind, “How would my best self respond?”
There’s another tool we can try that usually succeeds in groups where emotion skills are valued: a charter. This is a written document or pact that details how everybody in your home wishes to feel. It also includes a list of commitments that everyone in the family will make to one another to create the best possible home environment. The charter is created by asking 3 questions. How do we want to feel as a family? This question can be asked over an evening meal, or perhaps, over the weekend when there is some downtime. The second question is, What can we do to experience these feelings as often as possible? The third question, which gets answered after the charter has been “lived’ for a while is, “What can we do when we are not living the charter?” Simply allowing everyone to help create a charter is empowering. It gives everyone in the home a sense of agency over their emotional environment.
The presence of emotionally intelligent leaders also makes a difference.
Whether it’s cyberbullying or guns, pressure to do drugs or to be thin, helicopter parents or neglectful ones, learning differences or identity struggles, our kids’ brains are overwhelmed with emotion, cutting off pathways to higher reason and learning…unless they know how to handle all of the emotions that come along with these situations. And when kids are on a hamster wheel of achievement- test scores, volunteering, tutoring, advanced placement classes- its puts social and emotional (SEL) learning at the bottom of the list.
Social and Emotional learning (SEL) is the universal life jacket, keeping students afloat and open to learning. Only when children learn in psychologically safe environments that nurture their own emotion skills can they move from helplessness to resilience, from anxiety to action, from scattered to centered, from isolated to connected.
Research shows that our emotions and moods transfer from one person to another and from one person to an entire team- both consciously and unconsciously. It’s called “emotional contagion”, and its study dates back to 1890s. Someone smiles and you smile back, or someone frowns and your expression changes, and suddenly you feel happy or sad without knowing why.
According to research, emotionally intelligent workplaces are distinguished by how people behave at work, and that behavior is heavily influenced by structure – the way people are organized, meaning hierarchies- and by culture – what people believe is appropriate. If the people in charge are not drawing on their emotional intelligence in how they convey themselves and manage others, who will?
With support from the Faas Foundation, which funds efforts to create healthy, safe, and fair workplaces, a team at our center, led by senior research scientist Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, has conducted numerous studies on the role of emotions in the workplace. In one study we surveyed 1,000 people and in another 15,000 people. Both studies had a demographically representative sample from across the US. They asked, “How are you feeling at work?” What are your experiences like at work? This is the results:
- 50% of workers used the words stressed, frustrated, or overwhelmed to describe their feelings at work.
- 1/3 of workers indicated that they felt happy or proud less than 50% of the time they are at work.
- Many of the things they shared that caused them to feel unpleasant emotions were related to other people- colleagues not taking their jobs seriously, administrators lacking good decision-making skills, co-workers slacking off, and people lacking empathy/listening skills.
We also asked subjects for 3 words to describe what they would most like to feel at work. “Happy” was the #1 choice. That came as no surprise- in all my work with various groups, whenever I ask how people would like to feel, “the first word out of everyone’s mouth is “happy”. It’s like the default choice, the one that we blurt without much thought. But it was #2 and #3 that were most revealing. After happy, respondents said they wanted to feel excited, joyful, appreciated, supported, fulfilled, respected, inspired, accomplished. The word valued was another top choice, and women were about twice as likely as men to use it. That list indicates what’s most lacking in the typical workplace.
Inspiration, respect, and happiness are about 50% higher, and frustration, anger, and stress are 30-40% lower when there is a supervisor with strong emotion skills. We also found that employee engagement, feelings of purpose and meaning in work, and creativity and innovation are significantly higher and that burnout, unethical behavior, and fear of speaking up when there’s a problem or when we think there’s a better way to do something are all significantly lower when there is a manager with strong emotion skills. Employees who are afraid to speak up or feel forced to do something unethical are significantly more likely to miss work and have greater intentions of leaving their job, not to mention the toll it takes on their mental health.
Creating an Emotion Revolution:
At the end of my seminars, I often ask people to imagine a world where all leaders, teachers, and children are taught emotion skills- where colleges and universities, teacher preparation programs, medical and law schools, sports teams, police departments, corporations, and so on are trained to value emotional intelligence. What would be different if everyone was taught to be an emotion scientist? Here’s what they said over the years:
- Everyone would listen more and judge less
- Fewer kids would be living in poverty
- There would be less stigma and racism
- Emotional intelligence would be as important to education as math, literacy, and science
- All emotions would be appreciated, especially the negative ones
- There would be less self-deception
- Feelings would be seen as strengths, not weaknesses
- More people would be their authentic, best selves
- Schools would be places were students spend time reflecting on their purpose and passion and developing the skills they need to make their dreams come true
- We’d see less self-destruction and greater self-compassion
- There would be less bullying, a greater sense of belonging, and more harmonious relationships
- Depression and anxiety rates would be dramatically reduced
With emotion skills, we will create a more inclusive, compassionate, and innovative world. The science is there to show why this is the missing link in well-being and success. Keeping emotion skills separate from our lives at home, in school, and at work harms us all.
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