I can’t understand why human emotion is relegated to the therapy office. We send off our emotions with a sack lunch and hope someone else can help untangle the mess.
I’m actually not worried about the people who are fortunate enough to have a therapist, I am more concerned about the supermajority who don’t. How are they sorting it out? I just don’t see enough signs of emotional intelligence to feel at ease. I’m worried about how little we seem to know about emotions.
Feelings are a big part of being human. Whatever your belief about how we all became human – whether you are into intelligent design, big bang, evolution – the bottom line is that however we got here, we are sensitive beings, feeling beings.
We need to pay more attention to this fact, starting with early childhood, but not just restricting this exploration to early childhood. As children grow, they need an expanding vocabulary for what they are feeling. I wouldn’t want to be stuck with my words from nursery school to deal with my emotional experiences as an adult.
Thank goodness that by the time we become teenagers, we know everything. Well, almost everything. Young teens are stumped when they need to come up words for their feelings. No matter how bright the teenager, emotional literacy by age 13 is very rare.
For all of us, adolescence is a time of overwhelming emotional surges and this when emotional literacy could really come in handy. But as a culture we don’t really pay much heed to this emotional development. We seem to skirt the issue just when the going gets rough. We narrow our attention to things like conflict resolution or dealing with bullying.
Doesn’t that sound a bit extreme? It is like looking at the weather and saying we really need to put all of our attention on thunder.
It seems as if we are overlooking the value of learning about the landscape of feelings we all experience all through each day. It’s as if plain old ordinary feelings, as regular as rain, are just not interesting or worthy of our attention. While we are not looking and not listening, plenty of storms brew, emotional storms that could teach us important things about coping with life, making decisions and living with values.
Paying attention helps us find our way into worthwhile relationships. Imagine how useful it would be if by the time a human being reaches adulthood, they have emotional intelligence. What if emotional literacy was prized like reading and math.
Emotional intelligence, insight, would be very helpful when people reach an age of selecting a mate or having a baby.
Then there are all the unexpected situations life presents; accidents, trauma or death, for instance. A little bit of emotional literacy could go a long way.
Without emotional literacy, we are left to fumble our way through problems with a meager set of skills. We have the feelings, but we don’t know what they mean. We hear something and feel something, but we can’t interpret the message.
I think the range of human emotion is complex. How do you think we became a culture that glamorizes violence, has weapons of mass destruction and continues to use war as way to find peace?
I think we could use a bit more emotional intelligence. Not just for those who choose therapy, but for those who don’t.
Emotional literacy is so underrated, some people will come away from this column scratching their heads and wondering what exactly emotional literacy means. That’s my point. We have somehow managed to diminish the very essence of being human.
Sarri Gilman is a freelance writer living on Whidbey Island. Her column on living with meaning and purpose runs every other Tuesday in The Herald. She is a therapist, a wife and a mother, and has founded two nonprofit organizations to serve homeless children. You can e-mail her at features@heraldnet.com.
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