As a kid, I had a bit of an anger problem. I’d bottle things up until they exploded. I still remember one moment in Germany when, in a fit of frustration, I smashed my toys on the floor. My uncle, visiting from the States, watched and asked, Why are you destroying your own things? I didn’t have an answer—because I didn’t yet have the tools to understand or express what I was feeling.

Years later, as a father and adult, I see how those unprocessed emotions can echo across generations. In therapy, while learning to build emotional agility, I read Dr. Marc Brackett’s Permission to Feel. He writes, the refusal to acknowledge unhappy childhood emotion—or the inability to deal with it—gets handed down from one generation to the next.” I’m determined that this cycle ends with me.  My daughters are already light years ahead of where I was at their age, sometimes it feels like I’m just playing catch up.

So I became what Brackett calls an emotional scientist—someone who approaches emotions with curiosity instead of judgment. Emotions are data. And like any good scientist, I’ve learned to ask questions.

This morning, for example, I was brooding—my default when I don’t want to deal with something. The mood in the house shifted, and I wasn’t ready to talk about it because I hadn’t yet paused to pay attention. But when I do pause, I can start with the basics:

What just happened? What was I doing before this?

It’s a simple but powerful reset. That question helps me connect my emotional state to a real moment in time. Sometimes it’s easy to disconnect an emotion from the circumstance and lose track of how you got there.  Asking this question helps build context and tell the full story. Often, I realize I’ve carried stress from one thing into another—like snapping at my daughters over something that had nothing to do with them. Sigh.

With practice, I’ve started recognizing patterns. Sometimes reflection leads to an action I need to take. Other times, just naming the emotion is enough.

The hardest part of all this? Learning to understand my own emotions. You can’t express what you can’t identify.

Now, as a grown man, I look back at that angry little boy and empathize with him. He wasn’t just angry. He was scared. He was hurting. There was so much going on that he just didn’t know how to process at the time. I remind him even today: it’s okay to feel. We’re all reparenting ourselves in some way—and hopefully giving our kids a little more language and space to be more compassionate with ourselves.

—SDW3