Book Review: Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett, PhD

This book gives an overview of how our struggle to identify and communicate how we feel with each other leads to a number of negative outcomes.  While that is the foundation of the book, it provides an optimistic approach to help by starting with children in schools.  Brackett and his colleagues have created a curriculum called RULER to help Recognize, Understand, Label, Express and Regulate our emotions.  A number of heartfelt stories are shared to highlight how the RULER approach can be used and was demonstrated to be helpful at the individual level as well as in larger systems such as families, schools and work settings.  We found this book fit well with other important works and research that we have been diving into over the last year as a team about vulnerability, meaningful connection, trauma, anxiety and brain development.  We, like Brackett, would like to see the RULER curriculum in every school.  Until then, it is a good read for teachers and parents in learning some strategies to encourage the skills in themselves and their children.  As for our team, we updated our group curriculum to incorporate some of these strategies to support emotion regulation in children.