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‘I truly loved this brilliant book and will recommend it to anyone and everyone! It’s that good’ Angela Duckworth, author of Grit

Dealing with Feeling Marc Brackett

Harness Your Emotions to

Create the Life You Want

DEALING WITH FEELING

Also by Marc Brackett

Permission to Feel

DEALING WITH FEELING

Harness Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want

Marc Brackett

Founding director, yale center for emotional intelligence professor, yale child study center

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Introduction

A LIFE- CHANGING SKILL THAT MUST BE LEARNED

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.

—Viktor E. Frankl, M AN ’ S S EARCH FOR M EANING

Think of a lens. Here, take it in your hand. I want you to hold this lens up to your eye and look at your life—all of it, past and present.

Look at everything that’s ever happened to you, every experience, then look at the emotions you felt—anger or sadness or stress or insecurity or any of those other feelings we all have from time to time. Look at the pleasant emotions, too, like joy and contentment and satisfaction and love and pride and hope.

Now, focus on the things you said or did or thought in response to those emotions.

Your kids misbehaved. Your boss asked questions about a project you managed. An old friend reminded you of something embarrassing you did long ago. You suddenly felt a weird pain in your chest.

In response to those things, what did you do? How did you react?

Maybe you screamed at your kids. Or you spent the rest of the week fearing you’d be fired. Or you got mad at your friend but didn’t say a word. Or you spent a sleepless night scared you might be seriously ill.

When you experienced challenging moments, did you lose your cool or fly oﬀ the handle or freak out or melt down? Was your spirit crushed? Did you cower in fear? Were your hopes dashed? Did you give up on a dream?

Again, let’s not examine unhappy emotions only. Look through the lens at the first time you fell in love, or when you got a promotion at work and couldn’t wait to celebrate, or when you kicked your junk food habit and got healthy, or when someone praised you for being kind. How did you handle those feelings?

Keep using your lens to examine every time an emotion influenced you to act one way or another, and now ask yourself: Did those actions help me, or did they hurt me? Did I deal with my feelings, especially the dicult ones, in ways that improved my life or made it worse? And how did my responses a ect the people around me, the people I love? Was I my best possible self for them or some other version of me?

Taken all together, these moments determined the course of your life. You felt an emotion, and you reacted by saying or thinking or doing something in response.

But what about the things that were beyond my control?, you could fairly ask. It’s true, you can’t be responsible for what other people do and say. But no matter how they behaved, you were the one who felt the emotion and reacted to it.

I’m going to say something that might strike you now as an exaggeration, but I’m hoping that by the time you finish this book, you’ll agree: Virtually everything that has ever happened in your life—good, bad, happy, sad, frustrating, satisfying, joyous, discouraging, depressing—was influenced by how you responded to your emotions. How you dealt with your feelings.

I’ll go even further: Pretty much everything that has gone right in your life was the result of you having an intelligent, helpful response to an emotion you experienced. And nearly every time something went wrong—meaning whenever an outcome was not the one you wished for and did not serve your goals—it was because you had an unwise reaction

to what you felt. You did or said something you may even have regretted, something you wished you could take back and do over. Of course, there are times when illness or accidents affect us in ways beyond our control; even then, our responses to these situations make a difference. But there are no do-overs, only the future where we can do better. And so, from now on, beginning today, I want you to please keep this in mind: The degree to which you will get what you want out of life is equal to how well (or poorly) you deal with your feelings. That alone will make the difference between happiness and sadness, fulfillment and frustration, contentment and disappointment, success and failure.

You might possess extraordinary talents and valuable skills, but learning to regulate your emotions is essential to fully unlocking your potential. On the other hand, if you possess modest abilities but can deal wisely with your feelings, you will likely succeed in most aspects of your life.

Alas, many of us believe that the way we respond to our emotions is an intrinsic part of ourselves, a fixed aspect of our personalities— something at our very core, impossible to change.

Which is simply not true.

That’s the message of this book: It’s in our power to understand our emotions and decide how we’ll respond to them, and there are mindsets, skills, and strategies for doing that which can be taught and must be learned. By learning them, then using them, we’ll gain control over our lives and increase our chances of success—at home, at school, at work, and everywhere else.

This does not mean we’ll try to control our emotions. Or that we’ll suddenly be happy all the time. That’s impossible. We feel what we feel.

But we can choose how we’ll respond to those feelings—what we’ll say and do and think. How we’ll deal. And those choices will make all the diﬀerence in our lives.

The epigraph at the top of this introduction is a famous quote from Viktor E. Frankl, a psychologist who arrived at his wisdom when he was a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp. It’s impossible

to imagine a situation where a human being’s inability to control what happens to them could be more complete or more terrifying. Frankl accepted that, yet he also saw that there was one power, one form of control, that could never be taken from him: the ability to decide how he would respond to his fate, how he would deal with his feelings.

Hopefully none of us will live through what Frankl endured. But his truth is also ours: We all have the power to decide how we will respond to whatever life throws at us.

Think of the people we admire—the ones who face enormous challenges and don’t give in to the emotional upheaval they experience. We use the expression “grace under pressure” to describe it. The pressure is all the intense, triggering emotions we’ll ever face. The grace is the ability to stop ourselves from reacting in ways we later regret, and instead to deal with our feelings as we know we should—in ways that reflect our best selves.

I am the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University. As a psychologist and scientist, I’ve been researching these issues and teaching these skills for decades.

But it was the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic that opened my eyes to the profound, often unseen human truths embedded in what I had been studying. When we went into lockdown, the panic, the insecurity, the fear set in. I started receiving hundreds of emails from parents, schools, and corporations around the world trying to help children and adults who were struggling with the extreme emotions they were experiencing.

That made me want to investigate what the average person knows about how to manage their feelings—what they have been taught, how, and by whom. I surveyed thousands of people from all walks of life, and what did I find? That most of us haven’t been taught very much about regulating the way we respond to our emotions. The adults I spoke with didn’t even have vocabulary to describe their feelings with any precision.

And without that, I knew, they would be unable to identify what they felt or deal with it. Fewer than 10 percent of the people I surveyed said they had learned skills for managing their emotions while growing up at home. Even fewer said they were taught these skills in school or elsewhere.

This book is my attempt to help us all do better in this critical life skill. Based on my research and what other scientists have found, my aim here is to show how we can all learn to deal with our emotions in positive, intentional ways that serve our life goals.

There’s no magic involved in dealing with feelings. No one was born knowing how to regulate their emotions. If you can’t do it successfully, it’s likely because no one ever showed you how. Everything this book teaches is a practical skill, like so much of what you’ve learned. With practice, we can all deal with our feelings as we’ve always wished we could.

We’ll start with the first steps of the process—shifting our mindsets and cultivating emotional awareness. Next, we’ll learn how to deactivate intense, unwanted feelings and find the mental space we need to think about how to respond before we react. After that, we’ll cover all the strategies and skills that will allow us to respond calmly and wisely to our emotions, one by one.

There’s a lot to learn. But it’s worth it.

The terrible time of COVID also taught me a personal lesson I’ll never forget.

My mother-in-law, who lives in Panama, visited us in the spring of 2020. She was supposed to leave after a few weeks, but then, suddenly, the entire world shut down. Her little visit lasted . . . eight months.

Life under quarantine already had my nerves on edge, and a new housemate added to the challenge. One night, when I was particularly exhausted from a day trying to cope, she said something that set me oﬀ. We went back and forth, and not in the nicest ways. Finally, I stopped trying to hide my irritation.

“Marc,” she said, “aren’t you supposed to be the director of a center for emotional intelligence?”

“Not tonight I’m not!” I snarled and stormed oﬀ to bed.

I’ve told that story many times, just to show that even I’m still learning to deal properly with my feelings, and it usually gets a laugh. But I don’t always tell what happened next.

In bed that night, I reflected on my nasty little outburst. I realized that my mother-in-law was right—I actually am the director of a center for emotional intelligence, and if I can’t handle my emotions any better than I did, what hope is there for everybody else?

Before I fell asleep, I resolved to show up as my best self when I saw my mother-in-law in the morning. When she came into the kitchen, I apologized and made her a cup of coﬀee.

In that spirit, I oﬀer you a chance to do better, too, and a way to make it happen.

PART ONE WHERE ARE WE NOW?

1. Imagine a World

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.

— Nelson Mandela

Here’s what I’d like you to imagine: a world where every human being knows how to deal constructively with their feelings.

Go ahead, imagine it.

No rush, I’ll give you another minute.

Okay, maybe another minute won’t be enough. There’s still a pretty enormous gap between that imaginary world of excellent emotion regulation and the often unhinged one we all inhabit today.

Still, we can dream, and maybe a dream can become a destination, and then a destination can become a reality. It happens.

If it were to happen, this is what we might find.

There’s a new CEO, hired from outside the company, which is often a scary time for employees. But this is worse than usual. It’s gone straight downhill from day one.

There’s something clearly defensive about her vibe, especially when she introduces new ways of doing things. She seems to automatically suspect the team she inherited of resisting her changes. Often, what

looks like resistance is just the employees not totally understanding what she wants them to do or why. But she doesn’t seem to get that. And nobody wants to be the one to tell her.

You feel as though you’re in a challenging spot. On the one hand, you’ve always been a model employee who receives great feedback and evaluations from your bosses. You know you’re a valuable worker, and that means a great deal to you. You don’t want to jeopardize that.

But you also can tell that this new boss doesn’t see you that way. Maybe she thinks you’re not anywhere near her wavelength when it comes to how things should be done. Or maybe she believes you’re just not up to the job.

You’re not the only one who feels this way—by now you and all your colleagues have shared stories about tense exchanges with the new boss. Gradually, it’s turning into an “us against her” situation. A very unhealthy thing.

Here’s your dilemma: You feel that as a good employee, you’re responsible for trying to break down this wall that’s forming and open a line of cooperation and communication. On the other hand, you fear that broaching the subject will make you seem openly resistant and cause the boss to hold it against you, and maybe even retaliate.

You could take the path of least resistance—the route all your coworkers are choosing—and say nothing. But that wouldn’t feel right to you.

So, you decide to start the process gently by sending her a note. Something to allow her to consider the message and absorb it calmly without having to react on the spot to the bearer of uncomfortable news. Something that won’t trigger her too much. It’s risky, but if handled properly it will show your good faith.

Now, what do you say in your email? You can’t sugarcoat the situation or sound as though you’re trying to curry favor. You’re actually a little scared, but you can’t let that stop you from taking action. You need to state your case clearly. You have to assume that she, too, operates in good faith. Most of all, you need to sound cooperative and optimistic.

Maybe something like this:

Dear Janet,

It’s been six months since you’ve come on as our CEO and I know we’ve hit some rough spots. I want to ﬁgure out how to work better with you, which is why I’m sending this note. I’d like very much to sit down with you to hear what this period has been like for you, and to ﬁnd ways to make the future better than the past. I hope you realize we all want to succeed in our jobs and help the company succeed, too. We also want to do our best to help you do your best.

Sincerely, Mike

You send that note and then you wait. Maybe a little longer than you’d like. You try not to read too much into what that delay might mean. Eventually, you get an email back:

Hi Mike, I got your note and appreciate what you’ve shared. Let’s ﬁnd a time we can sit down together and talk through this. I look forward to it. Best, Janet

You’re driving home from the oﬃce. That should make you happy. It used to. Now . . . not so much. It’s a problem. But not an easy one to explain, not even to yourself. Definitely not to the person at home waiting for you. Is it boredom? Maybe. Is it minor irritations that have built up over the years? Maybe. Is it something more serious? Maybe. That’s what makes it hard to talk about: so many maybes. So you don’t say anything. You learn to live with that sense of dread

and anxiety that now comes every day while driving home from the oﬃce. Because even those emotions are preferable to what might replace them if you ever said how you honestly feel.

At work, it’s totally diﬀerent. There, the energy is positive. You know what to do to make good things happen. And you’re surrounded by other people also working toward the same goals. You’re part of a team. You’re appreciated and admired. You’re loved. It feels great.

It’s hard to leave that at the end of every day knowing what awaits you.

So sometimes you and your colleagues extend the party over cocktails. Or you stop at the gym. Same great vibe there. You know what to do to get the feedback you desire. It’s a high.

But at some point you have to head home. Where it’s a low.

Perhaps other people—perhaps most people—accept that existence as a part of being an adult human being. You can’t always get what you want. Things could always be worse. So, they abide. They settle. If necessary, they ignore their feelings and go a little numb.

Night after night, their dinner conversations are dull or nonexistent. Date night is a chore. Naturally, the sex suﬀers. It’s diﬃcult to hide your feelings there.

That’s really a hazardous condition, because at a certain point you, like others in similar situations, might begin looking elsewhere for what you once got at home.

There’s another popular alternative—half the couples you know are either divorced or on the way. Maybe they could have said or done something to avert that outcome, but they didn’t have the nerve or the desire to try.

This is not how it will go for you.

Instead, tonight at dinner, you’ll work up your courage, take a few deep breaths, look the person you love in the eye, and say what must be said, perhaps the scariest phrase in the English language, the short, simple statement that could lead to, well . . . who knows where?

To hurt feelings and tears and anger? To the admission that you both have work you need to do? That’s a possibility.

To the discovery that your partner has been feeling those same awful things, and maybe even more deeply? That’s another.

There, at the dinner table together, you will face a frightening moment of truth. You feel it in your gut. This could turn into something totally unexpected, something life-changing, and not in a pleasant way. We know all the metaphors—a snowball rolling downhill, picking up size and speed, gaining terrible momentum; or pulling a loose thread and watching the whole garment unravel.

Even knowing all this, and the awful fate you could be risking, you find the emotional courage to say the dangerous, necessary words:

“Honey, we need to talk.”

Your sixteen-year-old sidles into the kitchen to gulp down the usual four-minute breakfast before school. You notice that something is a little oﬀ today. It’s nothing obvious, just a weird energy. You’ve been observing this kid closely since birth. You can tell.

“Good morning,” you say, a little louder than normal, just to gauge the response.

“Hi.” A mumble. No eye contact. Body language signaling Do not disturb. Keep your distance. Because you’re an emotionally intelligent parent, you do just the opposite.

“Hey,” you say, “everything okay?”

A shrug. But a shrug that speaks volumes.

This is a pivot point for most interactions like this. For the parent, it can be easy to tell yourself, Hey, I asked my kid what’s the problem and they wouldn’t tell me. I assume it’s something they want to handle on their own, so I’m not going to insist and push my child further away. Better just to monitor the situation. And there are times when that is the emotionally intelligent, truly sensitive way to respond. Depending on the moment, gentle prodding can come across as parental bullying.

Or, instead of with silence, your kid responds in a snarky way, which gets you oﬀ the hook since it’s clear this child has zero intention of opening up or seeking your help. If they’re honest, lots of parents will

admit that they’re a little scared to find out what’s troubling their kids. Is it drugs? Sex? Self-harm? Maybe you’re better oﬀ not knowing, because then you’d have to do something, but what?

For the kid—well, we’ve all been there back when we were young. Parents tend to be clueless at moments like this. It can be torture explaining whatever’s going on in language that Mom or Dad can understand. Better to let it go.

Despite all that, you push on.

“Come on,” you say. “Let’s talk for a few minutes.”

“I’ll miss my bus.”

“I’ll drive you to school on my way to work. We can talk in the car.”

“Dad, it’s nothing. Everything’s fine.”

“I’m glad everything’s fine. But tell me what’s going on anyway.”

“Nothing.”

“Okay, you know that’s not a real answer. Something is always going on.”

“Just the usual stuﬀ.”

“Everything good with your friends?”

“Yeah.”

“Everything good with basketball?’

“Yeah.”

“You and your girlfriend are getting along?”

“Dad, she’s fine.”

“How are you doing with your grades?”

“Okay.”

You heard something in that okay. It sounded diﬀerent from all the other perfunctory answers.

“How’s chemistry?”

“Same.”

Same is not good. Same means there’s still a problem.

“He still giving you a hard time?”

“Dad, he’s that way with everybody.”

What your child is telling you by trying not to tell you is that the class bully is still at it. You can hear it between the lines.

“Okay, but I’m not everybody’s father; I’m yours. And your problem is my problem. So how are we going to handle this?”

Silence. But you see a tear beginning to form in the corner of your child’s eye. Devastating.

“Tell me, does the teacher know?”

“No.”

“Okay, so maybe that’s where we should start.”

“No! I’m not a baby. I’ll handle it.”

“I know you will,” you say, “but let’s discuss how. Let’s have a talk about the best way forward.”

“Can we talk about it later?”

“Let’s talk about it now,” you say.

At this point, the chances are decent that together you’ll come up with a few possible solutions for the bully problem. More important, you’ve made it clear that it’s okay to talk about diﬃcult—in this case, even embarrassing—feelings. You’ve let your child know that you care, and that it’s possible to find useful strategies for handling diﬃcult situations, and that it’s smart to get help finding them.

“Okay,” your kid says, now looking you straight in the eye, “if it were you, how do you think you would’ve handled it?”

At the start of the school day, a little boy walks into his kindergarten classroom and goes straight to the Mood Meter.

It’s a square bulletin board divided into quadrants: One is green, one yellow, one red, and one blue. Green signifies a mood that is pleasant and calm; yellow is also pleasant but more energized; red is energized but unpleasant; blue is low-key and also unpleasant.

To one side of the board, on a shelf, are small photos of each child in the class. Every morning when the children arrive, their first task is to pin their picture on the quadrant that matches how they feel.

There are pictures all over the board.

The boy takes his photo, places it in the blue quadrant, then goes to his seat.

A moment later a girl enters, puts her portrait in the green quadrant, then studies the rest of the board.

She walks over to the boy and says, “Hi.”

“Hi,” he says.

“Why are you in the blue?” she asks.

“My dog is sick.”

“How are you feeling?” the girl asks.

“Sad,” he says.

“Do you want to come with me to the strategy wheel?” she asks.

“Okay,” he says, and rises, and they walk together to a carnival-type wheel of fortune next to the Mood Meter.

Taped all around the wheel are notes of the students’ own ideas for good ways to deal with diﬃcult feelings.

“Okay,” the girl says, “spin it.”

The boy gives it a whirl. It stops on a note, which he reads aloud.

“It says, ‘Read a book you like.’ ”

“Do you want to try and read a book?” the girl asks.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe.”

“Spin it again,” the girl says.

He gives it another whirl and reads the note where it lands.

“It says, ‘Take a walk.’ ”

“Do you want to?” the girl asks him.

“Not really,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. “Spin again.”

He gives it another try.

“It says, ‘Draw a picture to make you feel calm.’ ”

“Can you do that?” the girl asks.

“I guess.”

“Can you draw a picture of you playing with your dog?” she asks.

“I’ll try.”

They return to their seats. The boy takes out crayons and paper and draws a picture of himself and his dog, with a smile on its face, at the park. He stares at it awhile, then rises, goes back to the Mood Meter, and moves his photo into the green.

This final bit of imagining is the most challenging one.

Imagine a world where we all deal with our feelings in healthy, intelligent ways. Without letting our emotions control us or push us to say or do things that harm us and the people around us.

I don’t mean that each of us would properly regulate how we respond to our feelings 100 percent of the time. What I mean is that we would always try and mostly succeed, and when we fell short, we would recognize where we went wrong and do better next time. I mean that the diﬃcult emotions like rage, envy, resentment, anxiety, despair, and all the rest would no longer have the power to damage our relationships and destroy our well-being.

In that world, even the big picture would look diﬀerent. We would choose only representatives who truly represent us—our best selves. The people we’d elect, the authorities we’d empower, the administrators who run our institutions would automatically consider how their decisions influence our ability to deal with our feelings.

Even on hot-button issues, they wouldn’t act in anger or in haste. When they detected hostilities rising, they would defuse them and seek solutions. They would craft their public statements keeping in mind how everyone—even their opponents—would receive them. They would be honest about their own emotions and deal with them before their impulses hardened into battle lines. Those leaders would set an example for all the administrators and institutions that have enormous impacts on our daily lives. Educators would acknowledge the power of emotion in schools, for teachers and for students. They would set emotional health as the top priority, knowing that otherwise teachers can’t teach, and students can’t learn.

Today, policymakers often use checklists to measure the impact of

their decisions on the environment, on corporate governance, on equity, and on other criteria. Imagine a world where public policies are judged by how they aﬀect the ability of people—children included—to handle their emotions.

How would our lives be diﬀerent in such a world? Many of the scourges of contemporary living—the violence, the mistrust, the division, the rage, the mental illnesses of depression and anxiety, and the burnout—would lose their influence over our society.

They’d be replaced with . . . what?

Something better, that’s for sure.

So—how do we get there?

2. Seven Reasons We Can’t Deal with Our Feelings

Pain is inevitable. Su ering is optional.

— Haruki Murakami

That chapter we just finished—it was a nice dream, wasn’t it?

Unfortunately, it’s not our reality, not yet at least. There are many reasons we don’t already deal with our feelings in positive, beneficial, healthy ways that produce desirable outcomes. These are the big ones.

1. WE DON’T VALUE OUR EMOTIONS

We don’t accept or pay attention to them, or understand them, so how could we value them?

Granted, we usually know in a general way what we’re feeling at any given moment. I’m furious. I’m sad. I’m joyful. I’m anxious. I’m frustrated. Sometimes (but not always) we even recognize why we feel what we feel. I’m fuming because that driver just stole my parking spot. I’m sad because my dog died. I’m joyful because I think I’m in love. I’m anxious because I found a lump on my neck. I’m frustrated because my husband or wife or partner or friend doesn’t truly get me.

But we don’t always give ourselves permission to honestly feel what we’re feeling. Meaning to own it, admit it, acknowledge it, let it in, welcome it, live with it.

Feel it.

Why might this be?

Often, emotions are diﬃcult—messy, challenging, unpleasant, embarrassing. When that’s the case, we might prefer to deny their existence altogether. That can seem convenient in the short term. But emotions don’t evaporate just because we wish they would. When we try to smother our feelings or pretend we don’t feel them, we make it harder, not easier, to deal with them eﬀectively.

Feelings can be troublemakers—they put us in awkward positions or make us face choices we’d rather not confront. They can force us to see truths—about ourselves, about other people—that we wish we hadn’t seen. Our feelings can be scary—even to ourselves.

Many times, we take emotions as signs of weakness and vulnerability. They tell us that we’re afraid, or insecure, or ashamed. Nobody wants to feel those things, even when feeling them is a way of discovering a truth about our lives.

And if we believe emotion equals weakness, we might mistake a lack of emotion for strength—although what it really might indicate is an inability to deal with feelings. It’s dangerous to think that silent means strong, when it could just mean scared and shut down.

And if we have trouble dealing with our feelings, it will be just as tough for the people around us. This is a universal human experience— often, we’d rather not know when our loved ones, friends, and colleagues have diﬃcult emotions of their own. It becomes an unspoken pact—you won’t burden me with your honest feelings, and I won’t burden you with mine.

There are even huge historical forces that come between us and our emotions—powerful cultural, racial, religious, gendered, and political influences that weigh on us, whether we realize it or not.

So—plenty of reasons we don’t give ourselves (or one another) the

permission to feel what we feel. And I’ve just scratched the surface here; we’ll uncover more throughout the book.

Because of that inability to accept our emotions, we don’t always hear what they’re trying to tell us. And they’re always trying to tell us something.

What, exactly?

Our emotions tell us how we experience our lives—nothing less. They carry important information from our deepest selves to our conscious minds. In a steady stream of messages, our emotions inform us of what’s going on in our lives, what we believe about our lives, and how those things are aﬀecting us.

You’re angry? It usually means you believe you’re being treated unfairly or unjustly. You’re anxious? Anxiety is telling you that you are worrying about something real or imagined that feels uncertain. Feeling frustrated? It’s a sign that you’re struggling with obstacles—people, your own insecurities—that are getting in the way of achieving your goals. It goes on and on that way, with an underlying reason behind every feeling. Every emotion has a cause, a “theme.” Often, we find it hard to figure out the reason on our own. We need an education that most of us never received.

So it’s no wonder that we don’t properly value our feelings—how can we value what we don’t understand?

2. WE DON’T RECOGNIZE THAT DEALING WITH FEELINGS IS A USEFUL SKILL

We all know people who are good at managing how they respond to their emotions. They’re the ones who are cool under pressure and never overreact even in stressful moments. They don’t blow their tops or crack up or stop hoping or give up trying, no matter what happens. We envy them and wish we were like them, which is understandable but not helpful. We figure they were born that way, that their self-control is totally a function of their personalities—an inherent trait that can’t be

acquired or nurtured. Either that or they got their serenity through some mysterious process that’s unknowable to the rest of us.

All of which is totally false.

Dealing with our feelings is a skill like any other. It’s a toolbox of practical strategies with specific techniques and tactics that must be taught and can be learned and then refined all our lives.

Like most skills worth having, it’s work.

It’s interesting—the expression “doing the work” is almost a cliché by now, something people say when they mean they’re sitting down in a therapist’s oﬃce once or twice a week. Therapy is an important tool for dealing with our lives. Is it the only way of doing the work? I can’t say for sure. But what I’m talking about now—this is really the work.

It begins with this fact of life: It’s not enough to merely experience our emotions. We can’t just feel them and leave it at that. We must then do something with them.

I’ll say it again, in a slightly diﬀerent way, because it’s so important: First we have to understand our feelings, and then we have to deal with them. With intention and purpose and a goal in mind. Sometimes that means sitting with a feeling or savoring what we’re feeling, and other times it means shifting to another feeling.

That part is work.

For many people, this is a shocking idea.

“What do you mean, I have to do something with my emotions?” they’ll ask. “I’ve been having feelings all my life. Since when is this something I have to take care of?”

Well, it’s always been. You just didn’t know it because nobody told you.

And what exactly is it that we must do with our emotions? That’s the subject of the rest of this book, which is why I can’t give you a complete and useful answer in just a few words here. It’s enough for now to know that feeling what we feel is a starting point, not always the destination. In many cases—perhaps most, if we’re lucky—our emotions won’t require anything in the way of regulation. If you’re feeling contented, or

relaxed, or optimistic, or even sad or afraid, sometimes you can just experience it without any further thought.

This reminds me of a first-grade class I visited. I asked the students how they were feeling, and one boy said he was frustrated. I quickly asked, “What do you need?” He responded, “Nothing, sir, I’m okay. It’ll go away.”

Of course, when we’re feeling something that challenges our composure or is sending us down a path that might lead to a poor outcome, we need to do something more.

In those cases, we need to regulate.

How has this simple truth escaped us for so long? That brings us to number three on the list.

3. NOBODY TAUGHT US AT HOME

As parents and guardians, we see our main job as instructing our kids in the skills and habits necessary for successful living. Beginning soon after birth, we start to teach them a long list of things—how to brush their teeth and wipe their behinds, how to read and write and count, how to hold a fork and a spoon and a knife, how to bathe, dress, tie their shoes, shake hands, speak to adults, ride a bike, kick a soccer ball, save money, do long division, put the laundry in the hamper, say their prayers, et cetera. The lessons are constant. Aside from showering our children with love and kindness and support, teaching them life skills is our number-one priority.

But do we teach them the most important life skill—how to deal with their feelings in positive, non-harmful, non-self-defeating ways?

Take a guess. (Mostly, no.)

Maybe, if we ourselves have these skills, we will be admirable role models who set good examples, which is of course a powerful method of instruction. An invisible one, however—dealing with feelings is mostly an internal process, not like cooking an egg or driving a car. It happens mostly inside our heads. We’re never sure when our children are paying