Dealing with Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want

From Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of the bestselling book Permission to Feel, comes an essential guide for regulating how we respond to our emotions in order to transform our lives.

Success in virtually every aspect of life--career, friendship, love, and family--is determined mainly by one thing: how we deal with emotions. In your most challenging moments, how did you respond? Did you fly off the handle? Were you paralyzed by indecision? Did you engage in behaviors that undermined your best intentions? Or did you exhibit grace under pressure and flourish? How you responded likely shaped what happened next. But emotion regulation isn't a fixed trait, as many believe. It is a set of skills and strategies that must be learned, practiced, and refined over a lifetime.

Marc Brackett examines his own challenges dealing with emotions, explains the latest science of emotion regulation, and provides a set of practical, evidence-based strategies to help us use our feelings wisely to nurture healthy relationships, achieve ambitious goals, and experience greater well-being. At the heart of his message is acceptance: There are no bad emotions--only emotions we don't understand or know how to direct in positive, intentional ways.

The good news? We all have the power to decide how we will respond to what life throws at us. By honing our emotion regulation skills, we can increase our chances of achieving success in all facets of our lives. Dealing with Feeling will show you how to work with your and others' emotions--not against them--so you can become the best version of yourself and lift others up too.

Author: Marc Brackett
Publisher: Celadon Books
Published: 09/16/2025
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.20w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781250329592


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 07/01/2025 pg. 10

About the Author
Marc Brackett, PhD, is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University. He is the author of the bestselling book Permission to Feel (now translated into twenty-seven languages), which has transformed how individuals, schools, and organizations approach emotional intelligence. Marc is the lead developer of RULER, an evidence-based framework for cultivating emotional intelligence, currently adopted by over five thousand schools worldwide. He is an author on more than two hundred scholarly articles, with his research featured in The New York Times, Good Morning America, Today, and the Huberman Lab podcast. A sought-after keynote speaker, he has headlined over seven hundred conferences and advises Fortune 500 companies on integrating emotional intelligence into workplace culture. Together with Pinterest cofounder Ben Silbermann, Marc launched the award-winning How We Feel app, a powerful tool helping millions of people improve their well-being. He is also the producer of the acclaimed documentary America Unfiltered: Portraits and Voices of a Nation. Marc hosts Dealing with Feeling, a YouTube web series and podcast that brings groundbreaking insights on emotion regulation to a global audience. He lives in Connecticut and New York City.