I hear it all the time. I'm stuck in a rut. I can't get myself out. Then comes the judgement. The thought that that rut is something we need to escape. It's not normal to be in a rut. It's not normal to feel these emotions of overwhelm, fear, pain, guilt, shame. I'm here to tell you this is simply not true. Maybe your rut is just a cycle that you need to go through. Maybe it's something your mind needs to deal with and you will find healing on the other side. Maybe you just need to rest, stop the grind and the hustle for a bit and allow yourself to heal.
Maybe you are not stuck at all. Maybe you are exactly where you need to be. We really need to stop this cycle of toxic positivity. To think that we have to hover in a yellow feeling all of our lives is just simply not true. Let me explain a bit, but more answers can be found in the book Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett.
Dr Brackett breaks feelings into 4 categories, for simplicity. Each category attaches to a color. Red is high energy, low pleasantness, blue is low energy, low pleasantness, green is low energy, high pleasantness and yellow is high energy, high pleasantness. This gives you a baseline to see how you are feeling and within each color is a full range of mood vocabulary. What's very interesting to me is that middle schoolers when identifying emotions generally stick with mad, sad and happy. Their emotion vocabulary is stunted. I imagine the people raising them have the same issue.
I love to use this mood meter because it makes it simple for the students (and adults) to gage where they are at any point in the day. I ask them to be honest and am sure to reiterate that all emotions matter. We just want them to be able to identify and label where they are at. Not judge it.
Back to toxic positivity, every human jumps around with their emotions hundreds of times a day. From hour to hour, minute to minute. Somehow along the way we decided that the less pleasant emotions don't deserve our attention, don't need to be brought to the surface and should be ignored. We stuff them down because we think that society doesn't want to hear our sorrows or stories of shame. My opinion is that this is what is leading to the epidemic of anxiety and depression diagnosis in our tweens and teens. The stuffing of emotion, the lack of understanding and teaching about emotions, is leading them to bubble over in the saddest of ways.
How do we expect our children to deal with emotions in a healthy way if they are never taught to do so? We teach them so much about every other topic, but one of the most important topics in their life is not even a blip on the radar. Emotional intelligence should not be ignored. Emotional intelligence needs to be addressed now more than ever with the advent of social media and technology. Our kids are not learning these things in their everyday interactions. They MUST BE TAUGHT or we will have a generation of emotionally inept adults. We know better. We must do better.
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