Fighting for Our Emotional Lives

Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society to Thrive by Marc Brackett
Celadon Books, September 3, 2019

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In Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society to Thrive, Marc Brackett couples personal narrative with recent worrying trends of stress in adults and children. From there, he begins to make the case that we need to explore and value our emotional lives. To stem the crisis, he argues, emotional skills should be taught and supported throughout life, beginning in early childhood and extending into the workplace. The book goes on to explain RULER, the emotional learning system developed at the Yale Child Study Center, where Brackett is the founding director. Brackett nods toward the need for social emotional learning to be more culturally responsive, but he continues to use the language of “our” without naming the community to which he is referring. Permission to Feel’s conversational tone is geared toward a non-academic audience, one that understands the power of emotions and can relate to his experience of feeling emotionally stifled by external pressures. For teachers and advisors who have explored the RULER Method, Brackett’s book is the most comprehensive explanation of the system to date.