Emotional education

The guy tells me all the ugly words I learned in the neighborhood. I don’t understand why and I just look at him firmly and calmly, without pronouncing a syllable. He is beside himself, screaming and screaming; I think if the glass in the car window didn’t separate us, he would have hit me. My brain generates all its own defense hormones, which feel like a firm tension in my muscles. My heart flutters and I seek to understand what happened. I think that the taxi driver who is taking me in his vehicle has committed some infraction that has affected that subject, and that is why he is so mad. The taxi driver laughs and drives off.

I didn’t understand anything, but I kept thinking about how illiterate we are in managing our emotions. And we are because the great educational effort has focused on the acquisition of knowledge and the development of cognitive abilities. It is becoming increasingly evident that we need to work on those social and emotional needs that are not met by current pedagogical models. It is necessary to make proposals and pedagogical models that allow the training and development of emotional skills such as awareness and emotional regulation.

Children need to be helped to generate processes that allow them to know what they are feeling and can express those emotions in the best possible way, without putting themselves at risk or harming others. I am sure that with the current ways it has not been achieved, proof of this are the great ethical conflicts, the increasing violent ways of solving problems and the determining emotional illnesses that make coexistence difficult. Emotional skills are not trained through the methods used to develop cognitive ones. They require very different ways. I know of good attempts, but I think they are insufficient and a job is required that affects all public education at all levels.

We require an emotional education that allows children and adolescents to face situations such as anxiety, stress, depression, violence, drug use and all risk behaviors in which they live. This is not possible if we continue to despise emotions and believe that everything that is raised about them belongs to self-improvement literature -despised by some-.

If we fail to be aware of our emotions, we will not be able to manage them profitably for our life project. How many relationship and work problems could be avoided with a good management of emotions? I am convinced that many of the situations that today generate so much pain and sadness in the lives of many people can be solved by being in control of themselves and not letting emotions, however intense they may be, drag them down.
in my book spirituality for humans, which I present these days, I try to show the relationship that exists between the ability to transcend that we humans have and the management of emotions. The more spiritual, the more capable we will be of managing our anger in conflicting contexts, or preventing euphoria from leading us into situations that destroy us. The connection with our own essence makes us more masters of ourselves.

In the end, I felt some compassion for the madman who threatened and insulted me in every way because of some reckless action by the taxi driver. I ended up thinking about how that emotional discharge could cause him harm.

Emotional education