“How are you feeling?” It’s a question we’re asked (or ask) multiple times daily. If we’re going to be brutally honest, most of us lie in our response by saying we’re doing just fine.
In his book Permission to Feel, Marc Brackett, Ph.D.,Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center of Yale University, offers a carefully curated roadmap to social and emotional learning. While Dr. Brackett’s approach is found most often in Pre-K to high school, he also helps adults understand how to regulate their own emotions to better help children and in the process themselves. One of the more enlightening elements of the book are the ways to regulate emotion in the workplace or when interacting with colleagues. There’s also a fantastic color-coded mood meter that helps adults name and categorize their emotions and the energy expended with each feeling.
As chaplains, we often find ourselves in highly-charged or sometimes hazardous situations, A common denominator in all these missions is a sense of heightened emotion. We may find ourselves reacting in ways that seem unfamiliar to us in our interactions from those we serve to, our fellow chaplains, or even our family members as we try to decompress from these stressful moments. Dr. Brackett’s book helps adults understand how their emotions may be negatively impacting their relationships with others and ways to almost reset the way we react to situations, or the moods of others.