Emotional literacy is the ability to recognize, name, and express emotion.
Less about controlling, managing, or even regulating (concepts that lend themselves to viewing emotion through a lens of pathology) literacy is about awareness and skill. Skills that can, and should, be taught and modeled just like language is. And, like language literacy, we are made for it.
Whether or not we are consciously aware of – or literate in – our emotional experience, we are having one. All the time. Emotion is as fundamental a reality as having the body that is wired for it. It is not subject to willful choice – we can’t choose to feel or not feel, nor can we choose to feel some emotions and not feel others (being unconscious of, suppressing or repressing emotion does not prove absence of emotion). What is within our power to choose is how we express what we’re feeling and how we respond to the experience of it.
Javier and I dive into the topic of emotional literacy and self-awareness in the first official episode of The Pleasure Ethic podcast.
