The Importance of Emotional Literacy

You might have seen kids throwing temper tantrums in the form of whining, kicking hitting, etc. Temper tantrums are common in the second year of human life when language development is just beginning but the child doesn’t have enough words to identify or express his emotions or needs. It is said that temper tantrums usually stop by around age 4 when the child develops enough vocabulary to express his feelings.

Does it mean at age 4, we become fully competent in understanding and expressing our emotions accurately for the rest of our life?

You must be knowing that the answer for that is a clear no.

Most of us don’t become experts at understanding our emotions fully; we often overlook, amiss, or exaggerate what we feel. In William Shakespeare’s King Lear, the aging king of Britain, King Lear decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters but before he goes ahead with the task, King Lear asks his daughters to tell him how much they love him. The first two daughters exaggerated their love for their father and such flattery pleased him. However, his youngest daughter (for whom the king had a soft corner) expressed her love for him in a true unflattering manner that displeased the king. The king immediately banished the daughter and gave the kingdom to the other two daughters. As the story progresses, we see how this decision causes his downfall and ultimately leads to insanity. It was King Lear’s reaction to a particular emotion that triggered off all the tragic events that followed it.

What king Lear felt was disappointment; he didn’t hear the words he expected to hear from his favorite daughter. However, he misread the emotion and that eventually caused all the trouble. What King Lear lacked here was emotional literacy.

Franco Antonio Giovanella

What is emotional literacy?

Emotional literacy is a term coined by Claude Steiner in 1979. It refers to the ability of an individual to identify his own emotions, name them and also understand the source of those emotions.

For example, if King Lear was emotionally literate enough, he would have correctly identified the emotion that he felt. Had he got enough emotional literacy, he would have also understood that the feeling of disappointment was trigged by unmet expectations and he shouldn’t be allowing his disappointment to fog his mind.

As part of a research, the famous American social scientist Brene Brown and her team asked a group of people to write down names of emotions they can recognize in themselves and others. Shockingly, the mean number of emotions that people can identify emotions are just three; feeling bad, sad, and glad. When the range of emotions that humans experience is much more than that, It is fallacious and troublesome if we attempt to overlook the nuances and generalize them.

Why should we have emotional literacy?

The perks of having enough emotional literacy are many. Let's look at some of them.

1.Helps with quick self-analysis

High levels of emotional literacy mean you to identify what exactly you are feeling, what is causing the feeling and decide if you need to take some actions based on your feeling. For example, let’s say that you had a bad day at work; you didn’t get the promotion that was offered to you earlier and that was given to someone less deserving (in your opinion). You felt dejected, angry, and sidelined. You went home and picked a fight with your wife for unnecessary reasons and shouted at your five-year-old son for spilling food. Finally, nobody e went to bed peacefully – your son fell asleep crying, your wife got pissed off with your behavior, and you felt ashamed of your pettiness. Later that night you started to analyze the day’s events and realized that when you didn’t get the promotion that you hoped to lay your hands on, you ended up feeling sad, disappointed, and even a little bit scared about the future. However, you were not able to name those emotions back then. Whatever happened at home was just a collateral damage that was caused by those unidentified feelings.

2.Helps others deal with you effectively and vice versa

With enough emotional literacy, you can communicate your emotional state with others with much more clarity and ease. Whenever you are grumpy or angry, you could easily communicate it to others as a word of caution.(Eg. Saying to your friend, “ I am totally pissed off about something that happened on the way here and I cannot handle jokes at my expense right now” might save you from experiencing a regretful reaction later on.)

Emotional literacy will also help you to set personal boundaries that work for you. Sometimes, being vocal about what works for you and what doesn't, you will be able to create meaningful and fulfilling relationships with others around you.

3.Take actions that work for you

If you have an understanding of what situations triggers you, what immobilizes you, it should be easier to navigate through good and bad situations that comes your way. If you are someone who easily feel overwhelmed by too many tasks at hand, with adequate emotional literacy, you should be able to immediately identify it and calm your nerves. If women who experience mood swings before and during the menstrual period manage are able to monitor those changes, then it would help them deal with the situation with much ease and calm.

How can you develop emotional literacy?

As emotions are a key ingredient of human experience, we need to learn to read them accurately. Everyone needs to master the skill of identifying and processing emotions as accurately as possible. Brene Brown says that we should stay curious about our emotions and keep exploring them. She says that every time you sense an emotion, you should ask,

“What am I feeling? What’s going on here? What do I need to know more about?”

Thus, distancing ourselves a bit from the emotion, taking a good look at it and finding it's name is one of the first steps that will take you on a path of emotional literacy.

Reference

https://medium.com/@authorsrcrawford/why-you-need-to-understand-emotions-part-two-656581a55ab0

https://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/counselling/emotional-awareness.htm

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2020/04/24/bren-brown-and-marc-brackett-on-emotional-intelligence-during-a-pandemic