ALL EMOTIONS ARE INFORMATION BY MARC A. BRACKETT
W
e hear it every day, from every sector of society, and across the world. An engaged, friendly child becomes increasingly hostile. A child who was once bright and bubbly becomes lethargic and barely functional. A child who once had a sense of well-being now suffers crippling anxiety. And in the worst case scenarios, a child who was the light of someone’s life became mysteriously depressed and is now gone, by their own hands. After the fact, we look at each other and ask, “How did everybody miss the signals?” As a culture, we are blind to the information contained in the emotion system because of an at least 3000-year-old bias. The Bible, the Stoic philosophers, and almost all of western literature, philosophy, and religion, taught us that emotions are unreliable, inconvenient, idiosyncratic sources of information, that get in the way of sound decision-making and the ability to learn. 24 |
