More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 27 - October 12, 2025
Collaborative Emotion Processing is a way to teach and learn how to feel stuff with other people that builds long-term skills for emotional intelligence.
CEP isn’t the absence of hard things; it’s a method for being with and moving through the hard things.
Relationships can’t be planned. The very nature of human interactions is unpredictable and dependent on the developmental landscape of all participants.
CEP is a guide to noticing our habits and patterns and choosing our responses more thoughtfully. It is the key to allowing children to experience challenges or hard emotions and to building the tools for how to navigate them while knowing they aren’t alone in the process.
It’s natural for parents to want their kids to be happy, but life isn’t designed for us to feel happy all the time. Life is complicated, and the human experience comes part and parcel with a complex variety of emotions from a very young age. You can even argue that this rich tapestry of emotions—happiness, joy, anxiety, sorrow, fear, etc.—is what gives us such a rich life experience and is essential to what makes us human.
when I really pause to consider what I want for my child, for your child, and for the children all around us, I want them to have the tools to navigate and process the inevitable hard stuff so they’re able to live a life that feels connected, compassionate, and curious. I want them to understand their emotions and develop the skills and know-how to navigate their feelings in a healthy and secure way. In other words, I want them to be emotionally intelligent.
His internal experience of frustration matched his external reaction. There was no pause between “I’m feeling something” and “I’m doing something.” His parents and teachers—even his classmates and siblings—wanted him to be able to find that pause, to have something happen and be able to make a choice about how he would respond.
The key to self-regulation, empathy, and social skills is first developing self-awareness. When we are aware of what’s happening in our bodies and minds, we can regulate and connect with the world around us. We have access to choosing our words and actions instead of operating from a place of threat and reactivity.
self-regulation and emotion processing are different.
Self-reg is important for succeeding in school and work for obvious reasons. Emotion processing is important to experiencing meaningful and intimate relationships, a personal sense of freedom, sustainability in human-centered professions, and endurance in achieving long-term goals. Self-reg and emotion processing are most valuable when we develop them in tandem, which is the goal with the CEP method.
Imagine a world where we can feel our feelings without drowning in them because we have the tools for regulation and processing.
when big emotions surface for the children in our lives, we have the power to decide how to respond, rather than react on autopilot. We can choose to respond in a way that leads to emotionally intelligent communities.
One day, they will open their mouth and our voice will come out, and damn, that’s a lot of pressure.
Legacy blessings are the experiences, phrases, and moments from our childhood that serve and support us in our lives. Legacy burdens are the challenges we are working through in order to write different stories.
Our role in our own healing is incredibly powerful for the toolbox we pass on to children.
You are changing the game for your child as you take care of yourself.
in order for a child to feel safe and secure so they can take risks, explore their environment, and separate from a caregiver, they must feel confident in the caregiver’s ability to understand and meet their needs and keep them safe.
We communicate with children not just with the words we say, but how we say them, what our bodies say, and how we react in different scenarios. In this way, we start to form attachments with the child, attachments that let them know how to act and how not to act with us in order to feel safe, even before they are ready for language.
I’ve had to learn how to ask for help and know that when I do, I’m still lovable.
part of me feels that I should be able to do it all and is afraid that if I keep asking for help, at some point I won’t be lovable. That the people around me will realize I’m too needy and will leave me. I want to give that part of me a big hug and let her know she’s allowed to have needs. That as a child, she was allowed to have needs, too.
What would it look like to ask ourselves, “Am I proud of me?” or “Am I a good parent according to me?” Getting curious about these parts of ourselves is key to exploring how we want to show up with kids—how we want to interpret the child’s behavior and how we want to respond.
What’s my long-term goal for this child? What’s my goal for our relationship? Am I modeling the values I want them to inherit?
It became clear to the group that the teachers and parents were working together with specialists to figure out how best to support this child’s development and curb the challenging behavior, but sometimes it’s not as simple as we want it to be.
Kids need our help, our intentional response, to build the self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills that will give them the ability and confidence to do something different next time.
Notice your reaction. Bring awareness to your fears. Keep an eye on who is in the driver’s seat.
the Theory of Constructed Emotion by Barrett is: “You are not at the mercy of emotions that arise unbidden to control your behavior. You are an architect of these experiences. Your river of feelings might feel like it’s flowing over you, but actually you’re the source of the river.”2 In other words, we construct our own emotions—but
A stimulus, plus interoception and sensory input, plus emotion concepts built from past experience help us make sense of our experiences of emotion in the present.
Learning the words their caregivers use for emotion concepts is how children learn to relate with their parents and other adults. Children can be best understood by their caregivers when they communicate using concepts that we’ve taught them, and in context.
Depending on how full our battery is, certain stimuli or experiences may be easier or harder to navigate. A change in routine or expectation in the morning right after a full night of sleep and breakfast may feel easier to accept than a change in expectation at dinnertime, when everyone is getting snoozy, feeling hungry, and has worked all day to process the world. The things that drain our battery are cumulative throughout the day, and that can affect our behavior.
Ellyn Satter’s work on the Division of Responsibility,8 which explains that adults are responsible for the structure of a meal (what is served, where, and when) and that children are always responsible for their bodies (if and how much they will eat). A meal schedule for children with food offered every two to three hours helps them learn to develop internal cues for being hungry and full.9
The amount of food, rest, and length of brain breaks that one body needs is different than that of another.
You can proactively give yourself and your children a chance to recharge your batteries all day long. This will help you have greater success at accessing tools in moments of dysregulation when your nervous system is overwhelmed—your battery is depleted—but it will not prevent dysregulation altogether.
Sensory (nervous system) regulation and emotional regulation are different. That out-of-control, my-body-is-calling-the-shots feeling stems from the nervous system.
Emotional regulation and processing were possible for Mara only after first regulating her nervous system. The big jumps were a tool for sensory regulation. We can often learn during proactive sensory meals and snacks what types of activities can be helpful for kiddos in the moment of dysregulation.
Once Mara had emotionally regulated and processed, then, and only then, was she able to tell me she was all done, accessing her whole brain for communication and problem solving.
