The capacity to notice, name and differentiate emotional experience closely enough that feeling can inform you without becoming an undifferentiated verdict.
Emotional literacy is the capacity to recognise what you are feeling with enough precision to respond to the experience rather than only to its intensity.
“Bad” can contain disappointment, shame, anger, grief, envy, fear or exhaustion. Those experiences do not ask for exactly the same thing.
This capacity includes trigger recognition and emotional differentiation. Naming is not magic, and the correct label is not always obvious. The value is in moving from a single wall of feeling towards a more detailed field.
The glossary entries on Emotional literacy, Emotional granularity and Affect give useful language. The Feeling Was True. The Verdict May Not Be. explores how emotion and interpretation can be separated without dismissing either.
Unleash My Heart develops this capacity directly through feeling, replay, grief and response.
