Emotions Are Important And Adaptive
Emotions are natural and necessary human responses
People often use phrases like “you seem angry” as a way of discrediting the point a person is making. Being intense or having emotional investment in something does not detract from the evidence or devalue a person’s perspective. Caring about the subject being debated or discussed does not invalidate one’s point of view.
Emotions are human. Emotions are necessary. Certainly there is a difference between purely emotion-based arguments and those driven by facts and logic, but the two are not mutually exclusive.
A person can be both passionate and well-informed on a subject. In fact, one’s interest and enthusiasm can lead a person to become incredibly well-educated on a particular topic.
Emotional dysregulation is not always pathological
Instead of teaching children that all feelings are normal and tell us something important about our bodies and our environment, we inadvertently teach children that some emotions are “good” and some are “bad”.
For example, when children are taught social-emotional skills in school, sometimes the curriculum used is the Zones of Regulation, or something similar, where emotions are categorized into colour-coded…
