Educators can be trained to identify and demonstrate healthy ways of acknowledging and expressing typically painful feelings. Enhancing emotional competence through education is a potentially powerful and low-cost school weapon against violence. Fortunately, there is a growing awareness that youngsters can learn to handle even their most troubling feelings. More trained teachers and parents are needed to guide youngsters on the path of emotional wellness using an approach that identifies the cause of common troubling feelings that disturb adolescents and lead to violence. Hidden feelings often lead to destructive behavior.
Teens are at risk of becoming emotionally confused and needlessly upset by secret feelings.
Many never act out their pain from rejection, loss, humiliation or feeling unworthy. Too often, however, teens become depressed, suicidal or incapable of healing or expressing their secret, shameful wounds except through anger, hate crimes or intolerance toward others. Schools are a potentially powerful force to help insecure teens develop emotional security. Schools provide physical education and sex education, but most lack programs to educate and strengthen adolescent awareness of, and competence in, healing emotional wounds. Schools can be teen havens for learning about and demystifying their frightening realm of feelings.