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Learning to manage/direct intense emotions is like learning to speak another language. It's a lot of work, and many Americans haven't bothered to learn because they haven't needed to. It doesn't make them bad people, but it does limit them far more than they may realize.
The two are also similar in that there is no "I have learned this now!" You can't fully master it. We're all always going to be varying degrees of imperfect, especially if we start as adults. But just knowing the basics can give you a leg up in ways you can't even imagine.
Until you've started seriously studying a language you didn't grow up using, you don't understand how meaningless the question "How many languages do you know?" is. People who haven't studied a second language think of "knowing" a language as an on/off binary thing.
Same with emotional control. We think either someone can either manage their feelings or they can't. They're "out of control" or they're normal. And this just isn't true. Some people are fine at letting go of anger but can't stop worrying. Some are just the reverse.
Some people have a beautifully fluent emotional vocabulary and know all the tricks to derail any type of spiral there is, but if they're short one hour of sleep it all goes to hell like they never studied it a day in their lives.
I've been studying Russian off and on for four years and the other day I couldn't remember the word for "small." One of the first words you learn. I could remember "big," but not "small." For hours. Feelings stuff is also like this.
But in the 2020s I think all of us could do with picking up the basics (or reviewing) a language besides our native tongue, and I think we could all do with getting at least a little better at recognizing our emotions and exerting at least some amount of agency over them.
I don't think we're going to have the luxury of letting our external circumstances lead our emotions around with a choke collar anymore. There's nobody with half a lick of sense holding the other end of that chain.
None of us can be perfectly impervious to calamity and loss and stress, but there are things we can do to insulate ourselves, to bounce back quicker, to just... be better at making use of the [??] years we have left. May as well start learning.
