Beyond Mad, Sad, and Glad
About this episode
The episode discusses the importance of emotional vocabulary in parenting and features Doug Johnston, who provides insights from his book on understanding emotions.
Because we lack the exact vocabulary to understand the human heart, we treat our kids' emotional distress like a behavioral problem to be suppressed rather than a critical signal to be decoded. If a child cannot accurately name what they are feeling, they cannot regulate their nervous system. They become trapped in a loop of silent isolation, and the perimeter of our home fractures from the inside out. A truly durable father knows that his highest assignment isn't just to teach his kids how to behave; it is to give them the language to survive. But what if you aren’t that durable dad, what if you don’t have that emotional language to teach your kids? Where do you start? Doug Johnston is the author of Choosing Emotions , a book born not out of abstract theory, but out of a father’s relentless, ten-year mission to find answers for his own daughter during her deep battle with depression. Refusing to parent blindly, Doug launched into a massive research project—analyzing over 8,000 historical and psychological references—to map out the human experience into 272 distinct emotional states . He is here to hand us that literal map, give us the exact vocabulary of the heart, and show us…
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