Emotional Literacy
Emotional literacy refers to the ability to understand, listen, and empathise with others’ emotions, and express, manage and address them effectively. Being emotionally literate means managing your emotions in a way that enhances your personal power and improves the quality of life around you. Emotional literacy improves relationships, creates loving opportunities between people, enables cooperative work, and facilitates a sense of community (Claude Steiner, 1977).
Steiner (1977) breaks emotional literacy into 5 parts:
- Knowing your feelings,
2. Having a sense of empathy,
3. Learning to manage our emotions,
4. Repairing emotional problems,
5. Putting it all together: emotional interactivity,
Why is Emotional Literacy Important?
Emotions play an important role in the way we think and behave. That is why, we must recognize and respect our emotions as an important part of our journey. Feelings are part of being human, and learning to manage them is a lifelong process, especially considering that emotions can be both pleasant and sometimes uncomfortable or painful.
To understand emotions, both in ourselves and others, we have to explore them.
Recognizing how we feel is a crucial step in learning to manage our emotions, an underlying component of well-being (Esther, 2020).
It is worth highlighting that emotions can be better understood when they are respected and reflected rather than rejected. Therefore, we must learn to accept and validate our emotions on the road to emotional literacy. Only once we have validated our feelings can we begin to learn how to manage them. Being emotionally literate does not mean we always have to express our emotions. Accepting is different from expressing! An emotionally competent person knows that sometimes it is helpful to express a feeling, while other times it is better to keep it to oneself. However, emotions must be validated and reflected regardless of our reaction.
Emotional Literacy, Trust, and Storytelling
Feelings are very personal, and therefore safety and trust are essential if they are to be explored. The CommUnity Project has proposed and used storytelling as a valuable tool for exploring the feelings of the characters in the stories, as well as our own reactions and responses in a safe atmosphere.
Our feelings are subjective but also universal. Most people can relate to feelings of hope, sadness, nervousness, excitement, curiosity, or love. Sharing stories in a group can facilitate the process of trust-building among group members and enhance self-identification and empathy towards others. Focusing on a character’s feelings can lead to a better understanding of our own and others’ emotions.