Kāpiti College Library

Notes

Your emotions contain brilliant information. When you learn to welcome them as your allies, they can reveal creative solutions to any situation. For 35 years, empathic counselor and researcher Karla McLaren has developed a set of practical tools for the real-world stresses of family, career, and the quest for personal fulfillment. In The Language of Emotions, she presents her breakthrough teachings for a new and empowering relationship with your feeling states. Your emotions—especially the dark and dishonored ones—hold a tremendous amount of energy. We’ve all seen what happens when we repress or blindly express them. However, there is a powerful alternative. In The Language of Emotions, you’ll learn to meet your emotions and engage with them to safely move toward resolution and equilibrium. Through experiential exercises covering a full spectrum of feelings from anger, fear, and shame to jealousy, grief, joy, and more, you will discover how to work with your own and others’ emotions with fluency and expertise. When we relate to our emotions with respect and authenticity, we can directly access our innermost wisdom, unfold the deepest parts of ourselves, and heal our most painful wounds. The Language of Emotions gives us a much-needed resource for self-understanding and freedom:
• How to overcome addictions, distractions, and unresolved trauma—the three primary impediments to emotional ease
• Using the energy of anger to protect and restore personal boundaries
• Step-by-step guidance in the five skills of the empath (someone skilled in reading emotions)
• How to balance your “quaternity,” a metaphor for the interplay of mind, body, spirit, and emotions
• Honoring sadness as a source of release and rejuvenation

Joy, the natural response to beauty and communion    Praise   “In my graduate education in counseling psychology, I found very little information about our emotions.  Yet in my work as a therapist and educator, I’ve seen that emotions are key to healing.  Karla McLaren’s book offers an outstanding guide to the signals and messages emotions send us, along with clear instructions for intelligent and emotion-supporting actions we can take in response.  Karla has made a huge contribution to the well-being of us all; The Language of Emotions will become required reading in all of my courses.”—Nancy —Feehan, MFT, adjunct professor of counseling psychology at the University of San Francisco   “Karla McLaren’s unique, empathic view of emotions surprisingly revalues even the most ‘negative’ emotions and opens pathways to understanding the depths of the human soul.” —Michael Meade, author of The World Behind the World and The Water of Life   “This book changed the way I relate to others, and to myself, forever.” —Gavin De Becker, author of The Gift of Fear