Permission To Feel Marc Brackett Quotes

Emotion regulation is not about not feeling. Neither is it exerting tight control over what we feel. And it’s not about banishing negative emotions and feeling only positive ones. Rather, emotion regulation starts with giving ourselves and others the permission to own our feelings—all of them.

Labeling emotions accurately increases self-awareness and helps us to communicate emotions effectively, reducing misunderstanding in social interactions.

It’s possible to distract ourselves to such a degree that we avoid dealing with anything difficult—even when our lives would be improved by facing reality and doing something about it.

Most of us are unaware of how important vocabulary is to emotion skills. As we’ve seen, using many different words implies valuable distinctions—that we’re not always simply angry but are sometimes annoyed, irritated, frustrated, disgusted, aggravated, and so on. If we can’t discern the difference, it suggests that we can’t understand it either. It’s the difference between a rich emotional life and an impoverished one. Your child will inherit the one you provide.

The core skill of Understanding is the search for the underlying theme or possible cause that fuels the emotion. We’re not asking questions and listening to answers just to provide a sympathetic ear. As we listen, we’re looking for a meaning that goes deeper than the words being said.

The irony, though, is that when we ignore our feelings, or suppress them, they only become stronger. The really powerful emotions build up inside us, like a dark force that inevitably poisons everything we do, whether we like it or not. Hurt feelings don’t vanish on their own. They don’t heal themselves. If we don’t express our emotions, they pile up like a debt that will eventually come due.

Strong, negative emotions (fear, anger, anxiety, hopelessness) tend to narrow our minds—it’s as though our peripheral vision has been cut off because we’re so focused on the peril that’s front and center.

First, our emotional state determines where we direct our attention, what we remember, and what we learn. Second is decision making: when we’re in the grip of any strong emotion—such as anger or sadness, but also elation or joy—we perceive the world differently, and the choices we make at that moment are influenced,

Sometimes parents avoid dealing with their child’s feelings by turning to technology as a way of removing themselves from the stress of the moment. According to research, this only increases the child’s misery and inspires even more bad behavior … which parents then use as an excuse to isolate themselves even further.

It’s a wonder that adolescents manage to learn anything when you recall all the intoxicating daydreams that fill our heads at that age.

As we listen, we’re looking for a meaning that goes deeper than the words being said.

third-person self-talk is a way of being empathetic to ourselves.

These inventive metaphors may be descriptive on the written page, but they often create distance between our feelings and our words.

It makes you wonder: Do I even know how I’m feeling? Have I given myself permission to ask? Have I ever really asked my partner, my child, my colleague?

Joy feels energetic and contentment feels calm, and joy is caused by a sense of getting what one wants and contentment is caused by a sense of completeness (not wanting or needing anything).

Too often we look for strategies that will shift people out of negative emotion spaces, but that’s not always possible. During difficult times, sometimes we just need to be there for one another.

Society tells us that when a woman expresses her intense negative emotions publicly, she’s lost control and should be penalized. When a man does the same, it’s normal male behavior and does not merit punishment.

In every grade, students love it—being asked for their input is something of a novelty. All day long, year after year, their emotions are bottled up, and suddenly here comes a teacher wondering what they’re feeling, how they want to feel, and what they’ll do to get there.

Understanding emotions is a journey. Possibly an adventure. When it’s finished, we may find ourselves someplace new, someplace unexpected, somewhere, perhaps, we had no intention of going. And yet there we are, wiser than before—maybe wiser than we wished to be. But there’s no other way forward.

Again, the necessary skills: The first step is to recognize what we’re feeling. The second step is to understand what we’ve discovered—what we’re feeling and why. The next step is to properly label our emotions, meaning not just to call ourselves “happy” or “sad” but to dig deeper and identify the nuances and intricacies of what we feel. The fourth step is to express our feelings, to ourselves first and then, when right, to others. The final step is to regulate—as we’ve said, not to suppress or ignore our emotions but to use them wisely to achieve desired goals. In the next section, we’ll take those steps one by

strive to become emotion scientists. 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. A gifted child who doesn’t have the permission to feel, along with the vocabulary to express those feelings and the ability to understand them, won’t be able to manage complicated emotions around friendships and academics, limiting his or her potential.

When we’re acting as an emotion scientist with someone else, we can ask the other person: What might have happened to cause this feeling? What usually makes you feel this way? What’s going on that you’re feeling this way? What were you doing just before you started feeling this way? Who were you with? What do you need right now? What can I do to support you? As a teaching exercise, we’ll sometimes have children read a story, then ask them: What does this character feel? Why does he or she feel that way? What do you think might have caused this character to feel this way? What about what happened to the character helps you to understand his or her feelings? If the same thing happened to you, what do you think you would feel?

Without a proper vocabulary, we can’t label our emotions, and if we can’t label them, we can’t properly consider them or put them into perspective.

Without Labeling, our feelings remain inchoate. Once we name them, we begin to possess their power.

With Expression, we reveal ourselves. Now we’ll have to decide: Can I share this?

Before we express our emotions, we can’t help but wonder: Will I be heard? Accepted? Judged? Will I get the support I need? Will I get disowned? Am I even ready to own these feelings?

your emotions might provoke something negative in me, something I’m not prepared to deal with or control. In which case, honest expression has the potential to distance us or make both our lives significantly worse, at least in the short run. We need the sensitivity to balance one thing with another.

feelings such as shame, jealousy, anxiety, and so on are the hardest ones to express.

it’s equally important to know how to label all our positive emotions and make them known to the people who are closest to us. It’s part of what keeps us close.

During those times when we suffer in silence, we make it impossible for anyone to truly know us, understand us, empathize with us, or—the big one—help us. When we suppress those feelings, we send a message to everyone in our path: I’m fine even when I’m not. Stay back. Keep your distance. Don’t ask why, because I don’t want to tell you what’s going on.

Wordlessly, babies get their messages across loud and clear, as any parent can attest. Infant emotions are focused on the basics of survival—the need for food, sleep, physical comfort, and security. This underscores the primary purpose of emotional expression: it keeps us alive. From a Darwinian perspective, demanding attention to our feelings is a necessity, not a choice.

We know from neuroscience and brain-imaging research that there is real, tangible truth to the proposition that “if you can name it, you can tame it.” Labeling an emotion is itself a form of regulation.

In the RULER framework, the first three skills—Recognizing, Understanding, and Labeling—help us to accurately identify and decode what we and others are feeling. Then, the two remaining skills—Expressing and Regulating—tell us how we can manage those emotions to achieve desired outcomes—our ultimate goal.

We know for a fact that no matter how smart you are, your emotions will have an influence—positive or negative—on your rational thought processes. That’s important.

emotions mobilize us into action—to approach or avoid, fight or flee.

We can even have emotions about emotions. We call them meta-emotions. I could be afraid of public speaking and embarrassed about being afraid.

A mood is more diffuse and less intense than an emotion or a feeling but longer lasting.

Individuals who score higher on emotional intelligence tests tend to report better relationships with friends, parents, and romantic partners. Makes sense. They’re more likely to accurately interpret nonverbal cues, understand someone else’s feelings, and know which strategies could support another person to feel something more or less.

until we can recognize our own emotions, we can’t learn the skills necessary for regulating them.

Recognition is especially critical because most of our communication is nonverbal. This includes everything from facial expressions to body language to vocal tones—not the words but simply the way we say them. Words can lie or hide the truth. Physical gestures rarely do.

Emotional sickness is avoiding reality at any cost. emotional health is facing reality at any cost. —M. SCOTT PECK

Our emotions are linked to physiological reactions in our brains, releasing hormones and other powerful chemicals that, in turn, affect our physical health, which has an impact on our emotional state. It’s all connected.

That’s why physical sickness can be caused by a mind under emotional stress. But there’s also the opposite phenomenon: physical wellness that’s fostered by positive feelings. Both kinds underscore the importance of managing our emotional lives.

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. A gifted child who doesn’t have the permission to feel, along with the vocabulary to express those feelings and the ability to understand them, won’t be able to manage complicated emotions around friendships and academics, limiting his or her potential.

When these negative feelings are present, our brains respond by secreting cortisol, the stress hormone. This inhibits the prefrontal cortex from effectively processing information, so even at a neurocognitive level our ability to focus and learn is impaired.

be sure, moderate levels of stress—feeling challenged—can enhance our focus.

The difference between good stress and bad stress mainly has to do with duration and intensity.

The difference between good stress and bad stress mainly has to do with duration and intensity

our emotions can also prompt the release of beneficial neurochemicals and hormones. Crying is soothing because it carries stress hormones out of our bodies. Feelings of gratitude increase oxygen levels in our tissues, speed healing, and boost our immune system. Being in love was found to raise the level of nerve growth factor, a hormonelike substance that restores the nervous system and improves memory.

Feeling good, therefore, may encourage healthy behaviors, which in turn can promote greater emotional well-being and physical health.

EMOTIONS AND CREATIVITY Rational thoughts never drive people’s creativity the way emotions do. —NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

Knowing what emotions tell us is the first, necessary part of the process. For example, anxiety is a signal that we feel something important is beyond our control.

we need to understand our emotions, be aware of how they influence our actions, and have strategies to regulate them.

An emotion scientist has the ability to pause even at the most stressful moments and ask: What am I reacting to? We can learn to identify and understand all our feelings, integral and incidental, and then respond in helpful, proportionate ways—once we acquire emotion skills.

First, emotion skills must be acquired. Nobody is born with them all in place and ready to work.

Emotion skills amplify our strengths and help us through challenges. If I’m an extrovert and need to shine, then I must learn to read my environment, so I can see when I overwhelm others and tone myself down. If I’m an introvert, my tendency to be quiet and subdued might underwhelm people at home, school, or the workplace, so I will need to amp myself up at times, so the world can see my enthusiasm.

The fourth skill: Expressing, which means knowing how and when to display our emotions, depending on the setting, the people we’re with, and the larger context. People who are skilled in this area understand that unspoken rules for emotional expression, also called “display rules,” often direct the best way to express what they feel and modify their behaviors accordingly.

Emotions are mostly short-lived

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.

In addition to emotions, feelings, and moods, there are emotion-related personality traits.

feelings to mean more or less the same thing. But we’ll all better understand our emotional lives if we have the vocabulary to express every nuance of what we feel.

Recognition. That’s what we’re learning in this chapter: simply how to recognize emotions in ourselves and others with accuracy.

Negative emotions have a constructive function: they help narrow and focus our attention. It’s sadness, not happiness, that can help us work through a difficult problem. It’s excitement that stimulates lots of ideas. But too much enthusiasm won’t bring needed consensus to a group—it will disperse the energy necessary for reasoning through the problem at hand, whether mathematical or interpersonal

Behavior alone is a clue to the riddle, not an answer.

Often, instead of accurately naming our emotions, we’ll use figures of speech. I’m on top of the world. You’re burned up. He’s happy as a clam. I’m down in the dumps. She’s blue. All highly evocative, of course. But still, they allow us to evade having to confront, plainly and exactly, what we feel. These inventive metaphors may be descriptive on the written page, but they often create distance between our feelings and our words.

To put it bluntly, our emotion vocabulary is woefully insufficient.

We tend to give our positive emotions superficial attention only; we see no need to modulate them, just cross our fingers and hope they last. We don’t expend much mental energy analyzing why we feel so good.

Back in the eighteenth century, the poet Alexander Pope said it well: “All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.” If you go through life angry, you will see anger everywhere you look. The same is true of other emotions—even positive ones.

Of all the five RULER skills required to be an emotion scientist, this is one of the most challenging to acquire. In the previous chapter, we learned about the importance of being able to discern our own feelings and to read, at a glance or soon thereafter, someone else’s overall emotional state. And with that, we took the important first step toward emotional well-being. Now, the real work begins. Here is where we have to decide whether we even wish to understand what might have caused our own or the other person’s feelings.

Why? Why this feeling? Why now? Understanding emotions begins when we start to answer that question—why do you or I feel this way? What is the underlying reason for this feeling? What’s causing it? It’s rarely a simple matter.

These are some of the questions we can ask when we’re trying to understand our own feelings: What just happened? What was I doing before this happened? What might have caused my feelings or reaction? What happened this morning, or last night, that might be involved in this? What has happened before with this person that might be connected? (In the event that your emotion has to do with a relationship.) What memories do I have about this situation or place?

Contentment, however, is more a state of psychological balance, not something we actively pursue—we feel contentment when we cherish the present moment.

Entitlement and disrespect are triggers for me. So I did what any good professor would do: I didn’t respond. Better that than writing something I’d later regret.

This is how the investigation behind Understanding often goes. We’re not catching someone at their best moment. It may be a time of terrible suffering and shame. It would be hard to expect lucid, coolheaded analysis from anyone, especially from a child who doesn’t yet have a developed emotion vocabulary or the ability to articulate complex feelings while still experiencing them. Every parent has been through this and knows exactly what I’m talking about.

It’s easy to get this part wrong. We focus on behavior rather than on what might have caused it. It’s like treating the symptom and not the disease. As a result, the best we manage to do is modify behavior—by force. And this distracts us from the underlying causes.

The emotion scientist has a genuine desire to understand and acknowledges that all emotions are information. Until we understand the causes of emotion, we’ll never really be able to help ourselves, our kids, or our colleagues.

a key skill involved in Expression is listening. Not just hearing. We must be conspicuously open, patient, and sympathetic to whatever’s being said. No crossed arms. No restless moving around. No looking away.

If we don’t understand emotions and find strategies to deal with them, they will take over our lives,

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.

Emotional intelligence doesn’t allow feelings to get in the way—it does just the opposite. It restores balance to our thought processes; it prevents emotions from having undue influence over our actions; and it helps us to realize that we might be feeling a certain way for a reason.

The first skill: Recognizing the occurrence of an emotion—by noticing a change in one’s own thoughts, energy, or body or in someone else’s facial expression, body language, or voice. That’s the first clue that something important is happening.

The second skill: Understanding, which means that we know the cause of emotions and see how they influence our thoughts and decisions. This helps us make better predictions about our own and others’ behavior.

The third skill: Labeling, which refers to making connections between an emotional experience and the precise terms to describe it. People with a more mature “feelings vocabulary” can differentiate among related emotions such as pleased, happy, elated, and ecstatic. Labeling emotions accurately increases self-awareness and helps us to communicate emotions effectively, reducing misunderstanding in social interactions.

The fifth skill: Regulating, which involves monitoring, tempering, and modifying emotional reactions in helpful ways, in order to reach personal and professional goals. This doesn’t mean ignoring inconvenient emotions—rather, it’s learning to accept and deal with them. People with this skill employ strategies to manage their own emotions and help others with theirs.

An emotion—happy, sad, angry—arises from an appraisal of an internal or external stimulus.

By failing to address the most significant element of what makes us human, we are choking off the fire of passion and purpose, stunting and distorting the growth and maturity of entire generations, and burning out the adults who are there to help them grow.

The first step is to recognize what we’re feeling. The second step is to understand what we’ve discovered—what we’re feeling and why. The next step is to properly label our emotions, meaning not just to call ourselves “happy” or “sad” but to dig deeper and identify the nuances and intricacies of what we feel. The fourth step is to express our feelings, to ourselves first and then, when right, to others. The final step is to regulate—as we’ve said, not to suppress or ignore our emotions but to use them wisely to achieve desired goals. In the next section, we’ll take those steps one by one. PART TWO THE RULER SKILLS

if you can turn off your analytic mind for a moment, you will get a clear—visceral—sense of your underlying emotional state.

Next, let’s check for physical clues. Am I energized or depleted? Is my heart racing, am I clenching my fists, is there a knot in my stomach, or am I feeling balanced, cool, and at ease?

Emotion regulation is at the top of the RULER hierarchy. It’s likely the most complex of the five skills and the most challenging.

the importance of the first three 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 five minutes.

our emotions flow in a continuous stream, like a river, and to keep up with that we’re constantly regulating them. It’s how we maintain our balance and keep from being swept away by one strong feeling or another.

Originally, co-regulation was a term used to describe the back-and-forth between a caregiver and infant to support a baby’s stress regulation. Beginning in the earliest days of life, an infant’s socioemotional circuitry is molded by adults. A caregiver who reliably provides physical and verbal comfort and reassures the infant teaches it that emotional distress is manageable. A caregiver who does not provide such support teaches the infant that he or she may be at the mercy of their emotions. In this way, co-regulation is the precursor to healthy self-regulation.

human minds and emotions aren’t so neatly organized, and we don’t process information one piece at a time. Often, we regulate before we’re even fully conscious of what we’re feeling.

mindful breathing helps us to calm the body and mind so we can be fully present and less reactive or overwhelmed by what’s happening around us.

where there is an emotionally skilled parent, there are children who have a greater ability to identify and regulate their emotions.

Emotions Are Information

And the fifth has to do with creativity, effectiveness, and performance. In order to achieve big goals, get good grades, and thrive in our collaborations at work, we have to use our emotions as though they were tools. Which, of course, they are—or can be.

as though every emotion comes with a label telling us precisely what prompted it, and why, and what can be done to resolve it. Our thinking and behavior absolutely change in response to what we’re feeling. But we don’t always know why or how best to address our emotions.

All learning has an emotional base.—PLATO