Kids taught to suppress emotions end up as adults who can't recognize or name what they're feeling. Learning to label emotions, in yourself and others, is how you build empathy and actually understand what's happening in any conversation.
Chapters
and they may, and the educational system makes a fundamental assumption that children are rational beings, so we should make them rational. And so the whole way that we educate kids is, is to ignore the emotionality. In fact, we're told as children, don't be emotional. You know, you can't cry, you can't be angry, you can't express emotion. That's wrong. And that's what we learn in school as well as in the family. And that is hugely abusive. Yeah. And that's why people have great difficulty later in life, learning how to become emotionally self-aware. But we're not taught the skills that I teach on how to appropriately express emotion and how to validate somebody else's emotional experience. For me, it was a, it was a huge, huge transformation that took a long time and it was very painful. And I, you know, and I got through it and I understood what I was doing.
But so what, what would you recommend for people to start being more self-awareness? And to be more caring to, you know—
Stop looking at the world through the lens of rationality. Start when you look at other people, your family, the people you work with, ordinary people, people you read about in the news, recognize that they are all emotional beings and everything they're doing is emotional. And then start learning how to recognize those emotions. And when you have the opportunity, Label the emotions. Oh, you're angry, you're frustrated, you feel excluded, whatever it might be. And, and you can do happy emotions too. Are you really happy? You're excited, you're feeling joy, you feel awestruck. So it can go either way, positive and negative, and start, start trying to frame the way you see the world in terms of emotion rather than through a lens of rationality where we're trying to say people are unemotional,
