What a great title! I grew up through generational and familial circumstances where feelings were foreign, like some strange invader of my interior world, not to be trusted. If anything, I was labeled too sensitive, too soft, too prone to emotion. No surprise then that this title grabbed me.
The book, I am delighted to be able to say, goes way beyond a call to simply give permission.
It is a strong introduction into the vital role our emotions play in our lives. How they can help us understand ourselves deeply and help us navigate this world. The author also provides us with some tools to make this happen.
Right up front he points out that we aren’t born with emotional skills but, the good news is, we can all learn to become, what he calls, “emotional scientists”.
Included in the author’s emotional-curriculum here is the value of negative-emotions. Too often we believe positive, more comfortable, emotional experiences are permitted whilst negative, uncomfortable, emotional experiences are to be banished or avoided. He speaks of friendship here. Befriending our negative emotions is a way of harnessing them for positive outcomes. This is not an easy invitation but one, if ignored, that can lead to mental and physical illness.
Marc offers what he calls the RULER curriculum, a tool to gather your emotional information – to begin to recognize and understand your emotions with some accuracy that can make them less scary and help manage situations that could trigger you.
Like everything in life, work begins with us. Marc encourages us to learn how to understand and regulate our own emotions and by so doing teach our children how to deal with theirs. He goes a step further in talking about the potential emotional revolution in our schools and workplaces.
This relatively new understanding of the world of emotions can be tricky to ‘get our heads around’ since it is also ‘a matter of the heart’. I really enjoyed and benefited from this book. I love it when someone takes a complex truth and writes in a way that makes it accessible to us all.