Marc Brackett describes disclosing childhood sexual abuse at 11, his mother's breakdown, his father's violent reaction, and the abuser's arrest. A TV appearance with a psychiatrist meant to help instead brought public shaming at school. These early traumas shaped his nervous system and later drove his work on emotional intelligence.
Going through the sexual abuse that you experienced for many years as a kid, how do you feel like that shaped your nervous system as an adult? And when did you feel like you were able to start processing the shame or guilt or fear or insecurity around that, to feel like you had a healthier nervous system and a better relationship with all the parts of you?
Yeah, well, it was tough because I was a precocious kid. And at 11, when I disclosed it, like any parents, my mother, you know, had a breakdown. She could not believe that her friend was doing this to me. And my father got a bat and went to kill the man.
Oh, my gosh.
And luckily, he didn't do that. Oh, he was arrested. And it was a long case. Unfortunately, it was back, you know, in the 1980s, and unfortunately, we find that he had abused thousands of children. But. And then, stupidly, my parents had a friend who was a psychiatrist, and he was writing a book on pedophilia. And I went on television with him, which was the worst decision anybody could have made, because I became, you know, the pariah, you know, of. Of people. Meaning that my school found out about it and the teachers found out about it, and parents would say, things don't play with Mark. You know, he's kind of like damaged goods.
Oh, man.
And so more bullying happened. It was bad. But Uncle Marvin, who is the man who was my hero in life, who happened to be a teacher in the Catskill Mountains of New York State and a trumpet player by night and a curriculum writer kind of in other hours, he was writing a curriculum to teach kids about emotions. Wow. And he stayed with us one summer, and. And he was the first person who asked me questions like, hey, Mark, how you feeling? And then he'd practice his lessons with me with these feeling words. And he'd say, tell me a time when you felt elated. And I'd be like, I can't think of any of those. How about when you felt alienated? I'm like, I could talk about that all day long. And we started having all these rich conversations just about emotions. What was the cause of that feeling? Was that really the right word? And how did you deal with that emotion? Let's think together about the strategies. So I tell you that because I went to college, life got better for me. And then I'm in college, I'm graduating. I'm still like, what am I gonna do with my life? I'm in therapy, and all of a sudden, it's 1995, and this book comes out called Emotional Intelligence. And I see it on the COVID of Time magazine and I'm like, emotional intelligence. I don't know what that is, but that's exact. That's my uncle and me. That's everything I learned when I was a kid. And so I look, I read the book and I call my uncle and I'm like, he's retired now in Florida. And I'm like, uncle Marvin, I think like, this is stuff that you were doing 20 years before this book came out. Let's work together and write a curriculum. And so I pulled my uncle out of retirement. We sat in Dunkin Donuts in Fort Lauderdale drinking our decaf and muffins and starting to think about how could I translate what he was working on in his classroom into a real curriculum. Curriculum which then led me to get a PhD in psychology. Because in that book, that book was originally written by a journalist, not the scientists. And so I found the two scientists who were the real authors and theorists. And I called them both. They both agreed to meet with me. One was at Yale, one at the University of New Hampshire. Joke about that one is I got rejected from Yale, where I'm now a professor, and I went to the University of New Hampshire to study with the other professor. And I share that kind of story because that really was my healing journey. It started with my uncle, and then I started studying it and really understanding it. And then obviously other things like my martial arts training, having a fifth degree black belt and hapkido, which is a Korean martial art. Just the principles and the mindsets in the martial arts. I studied Zen meditation. So between psychology and the martial arts and Uncle Marvin, it was really my healing journey. Wow. And I, you know, it's funny, I just gave a speech last night and you know, it was a lot of people and people give you an applause. At the end, somebody came up to me and said, you know, gosh, Mark, you know, with all your story, look at you, you're like, you're the one on stage presenting. And I always say, thank you for that. And then I go back and I say, but remember I had Uncle Mormon. Remember I have a PhD in psychology. Remember I got a fifth degree black belt on the martial arts. I spent 30 years of my life researching, studying, teaching, writing books. I have a lot of time and effort put into my own emotional health and well being. And so while I appreciate that, you know, my big question is, is how many kids are going to have that journey? How many kids in our country are getting the emotion education they need to achieve their dreams in life. Yeah, and far too few. Here's the deal. 90% of us report never having had any emotion education. You can't just bury your emotions because they're what make you human. The number one thing that students said to me was that they felt manufactured, and they really weren't sure who they were because someone else prescribed burns.
