Fertile Ground for a Dream
My name is Pamela Sackett. I am the lead artist and co-founder of Emotion Literacy Advocates. Here is a little of my personal context for ELA and our learning tool programs.
In 1994, my life as a writer reached critical mass with a book I authored entitled Speak of The Ghost: In the Name of Emotion Literacy. I had finally delivered what I yearned for since childhood: witness to long-held, hidden and buried feelings: guidance to understand them and, in effect, a feeling-comprehensive way of thinking.
This was precisely the kind of thinking that freed me to understand the significance, inner-workings and value of self-knowledge—a kind of knowledge that not only embraces feelings but is enlightened by them. Exercising the freedom to know myself, at the root, gave me the authority to offer myself a very qualified form of emotional support. This act of responsibility changed my life a thousand-fold and re-directed the course of action my artistic talents would take.
My foray back into public venues—with art as a means, instead of an end, social change and education a conscious intent, and this newfound freedom to know and express myself authentically—took rapid shape. Speak of The Ghost was put on a required reading list at Seattle University which led to more writing, more producing, a series of special interest event speaking engagements here and abroad, radio and television interviews and artist residencies in public, private and detention schools where I worked, primarily, with teens.
Over time, these deeply engaging opportunities led me to formulate a dream for the human culture; a dream that pivots around something I learned while working with teens. I learned just how much children hunger for emotional support and agonize from the lack of it. Some of the teens I worked with, who were more vocal than others, made it abundantly clear that emotional support is crucial, the need for which is very difficult to articulate and the offering of which is, too often, unavailable.
My dream is to live in a world filled with adults who know how to give and receive emotional support and are free to offer it to our children so children can, in turn, become free, self-knowing and emotionally supportive adults.
Resistance Breeds Persistence
I noticed a striking characteristic amongst many of the adults I encountered while I was working with teens in diverse environments—fear of feelings and a sense of not being qualified to deal with their own feelings and the childrens'. By facilitating creative writing for emotion literacy programs for children and conducting in-service workshops for teachers and parents, I became increasingly schooled in the language of fear. When fearful adults disengage from their own feelings and their childrens', a message is sent, however inadvertently, but sent nonetheless. The message says that feelings are too big, too scary and that only certain feelings are welcome.
This fearful message dictates its own brand of punitive feedback to children, delivered by well-meaning adults; that then displaces children's fundamental need for witness to feelings and guidance in understanding them. Both witness and guidance are what children desperately need for early social-emotional development not only when in crisis, but, in the most unremarkable and mundane of circumstances. It is through this language of fear that freedom to know and understand feelings is restrained which is a tragic and reverberant loss since feelings are a central clue to who we are and how we get our needs met.
The Freedom to Know, step by step
Through continuing my work in the field and in myself, through co-founding and developing Emotion Literacy Advocates, the bell rang even louder that the kind of self-knowledge to which unrestrained freedom entitles an individual is the kind that makes room for feeling-comprehensive thinking; and that is the kind of thinking that authorizes an individual to be emotionally supportive. I recognize this kind of authority to be powerful, economically beneficial and security-producing. I recognize this kind of authority to be a missing link for translating the language of fear.
If we want humanity to become truly humane and if we want this dream to come true—in a world of social beings who are poignantly influenced by one another—then a brave authority, the insightful kind that feeling-comprehensive thinking renders, needs to be as available as table salt.
I hold this dream up for your perusal not because I want you to think of me as "right" but because I want you to imagine this dream as possible. I believe it is. I hold this dream up not because I am ambitious but because I am determined not to settle for less. I hold this dream up though I know to achieve it requires daily courage, rigor and another, less practiced, part of our brain. I hold this dream up because I want to live in a world that is profoundly safe and nurturing at its roots.
Do you share this dream of living in a world filled with adults who know how to receive and give emotional support and are free to offer it to our children? Can you picture yourself there?
A Huge Tree Grows From a Tiny Seed
Like other artists and activists, I want my creative efforts to make this dream come true—and fast. As I concluded in my memoir, Saving The World Solo, change requires baby steps and sometimes the small steps lead to deep and lasting changes with time... and within a community of others who share this dream and want to participate in its unfolding.
Become a part of our campaign and join ELA in facilitating adults—the ones who look just like the adults in this dream—to put our loving messages into the hands (and ears) of our children.
Thanks for your kind consideration.
Pamela Sackett