I’ve been reflecting a bit on how Nikki and I have been working at training our kids to think… and how to think about how they feel.

There are a few ‘emotional sins’ that seem to be quite toxic, if you don’t learn to avoid them when you grow up. Very hard to retrain yourself in adult life:

  1. Self-pity
  2. Blaming others for how you feel
  3. Refusing to articulate how you feel, expecting others to guess
  4. Passive aggressiveness
  5. Hanging your happiness on a particular ‘fix’
  6. Making others feel bad because you feel bad
  7. Transferring feelings rather than dealing with them: letting sadness or tiredness produce anger or hyperactive silliness
  8. Self-entitlement
  9. Feeling that other people getting good things entitles you to get something good to compensate
  10. Making others responsible for making you feel better
  11. Prayerlessness
  12. Lack of empathy – for both happy things and sad thing