Permission to Feel
by Marc Brackett, PhD
Summary
Founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Marc Brackett argues that most of us were never actually taught how to identify or work with our emotions — we were taught to suppress or perform them instead. This book gives you the vocabulary and framework (RULER) that's now used in schools worldwide, adapted for adult readers who never got that education.
Who it's for
Readers who struggle to identify or articulate what they're actually feeling, and want a structured framework for building genuine emotional literacy.
Key takeaways
- The RULER framework — Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating emotions — as a complete skill set
- Why an expanded emotional vocabulary directly improves your ability to regulate what you feel
- How childhood environments shape adult patterns of suppressing versus expressing emotion
Marc Brackett founded the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and the RULER framework at the center of this book — Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating emotions — is now used in schools across the world, though this book adapts it specifically for adult readers.
Its core argument is that emotional regulation struggles often start with a much more basic gap: many adults were never taught to even accurately identify what they’re feeling, let alone work with it, and building that foundational vocabulary is where real emotional regulation begins.
Available on Amazon
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