Veronica Speaks

The reality is, life sucks sometimes. There’s no point in hiding this truth. Despite our holistic advances and more people making more money, rates of depression and anxiety are higher than ever before. Why? How are people still experiencing the overwhelming sense of hopelessness and helplessness that leads to depression? In this article, we’ll have just one convo about how the book I’m reading helps us feel through our emotions as adults. 

The book I’m reading offers some insight into the pervasive issue of not knowing how to feel our emotions. 

“We can’t process what we don’t feel.”

Tiny Humans, Big Emotions: How to Navigate Tantrums, Meltdowns, and Defiance to Raise Emotionally Intelligent Children by Alyssa Blask Campbell, M.Ed., and Lauren Stauble, M.S., reveals the root of the problem: many adults were not taught to process their emotions healthily as children. The implication of not learning to navigate those emotions at an early age is that many adults become overwhelmed by their emotions. Consequently, the lack of emotional self-regulation is the foundation of the alarmingly rising mental illness and substance abuse rates we experience. 

Reading Tiny Humans, Big Emotions isn’t just about raising children; it helps us adult children navigate our emotions. Did you know that your emotional maturity can be frozen at the ages you’ve endured traumas? Stressful life events in early childhood can impact the way you’ve come to understand life and those around you. Unless your caregivers were doctors, psychologists, or creative people who were naturally in tune with their emotions, it’s safe for me to assume that they did not know how to process their emotions either. Your caregivers couldn’t teach you anything they didn’t know themselves. 

In their book, Campbell and Stauble introduce us to the method Collaborative Emotion Processing, which is “a way to teach and learn how to feel stuff with other people that builds long-term skills and emotional intelligence.” You have to have the tools to navigate the emotionally hard experiences – we all need them. Unfortunately, emotional regulation is not yet a widely taught subject in schools. Reading books such as Tiny Humans, Big Emotions invites others along the journey of healing. You need others to help you regulate your emotions, and that’s okay. 

There may be several roadblocks in the way of your expressing your emotions and feelings through them. The main roadblock I see people facing is not being able to name their emotions. If you have no idea what you’re feeling, how can you express and process it healthily? Although I’m less than 10% through the book, I love that the book is specifically for guiding caregivers of children from infancy to age eight because it starts at the elementary level.

This book gives you the foundational understanding you need to start processing your emotions and helping others to do the same. I’ll post a book review as soon as I finish. Until then, let me know if you’ve read this book before. What are your thoughts?