Permission to Feel

For class I am reading a book called Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett, Ph.D., who is the director at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. It just so happened that I was already reading it when we were asked to choose from the list of selected books, so I knew it was relevant to my research topic of Social-Emotional Learning. I had started reading it on my own because I wanted to learn more about emotional intelligence for my own benefit.

The author begins the book with a bit of background about how he grew up learning to repress his emotions, something I and I think a lot of people could really relate to. I was raised learning to sweep negative emotions under the rug, and eventually it came to a point where the rug wasn’t big enough to contain all of them. That is what started me on my journey to learning how to navigate my thoughts and feelings in a healthier way. I didn’t exactly have a choice, they kind of started to explode out of me at a certain point and I had to figure it out.

Although I didn’t have a name for it at the time, I was working on developing emotional intelligence. I learned how to approach my feelings with curiosity. I started to treat them like the weather, realizing that they were temporary and that I could react to them accordingly the same way you dress for the day’s temperature. Dr. Brackett calls this being an “emotion scientist.” There are five skills (using the acronym RULER) that make it possible for you to excel as an emotion scientist. They are:

• Recognizing emotions in oneself and others
• Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions
• Labeling emotions with a nuanced vocabulary
• Expressing emotions in accordance with cultural norms and social context
• Regulating emotions with helpful strategies

I want to learn more about how to implement these skills in my own life, and then how I can pass them on in a classroom setting. I don’t think it’s ever something you can truly master but is an ongoing learning process you can continually improve from. It’s exciting to be living in a time where we are finally acknowledging the importance of emotions and I can’t wait to see how future generations use this knowledge to continue to move us forward.