By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Emotions are one of the things that make us human. Understanding how emotions affect people and recognizomg the emotional reactions of others is an essential when trying to communicate with one another.
Showing strong emotions, particularly in public, is still considered taboo for many people. But dealing with those feelings is exactly what Pamela Sackett has been doing in her work, whether with actors preparing for an audition, with inner-city high school students, or young offenders in the King County Youth Detention Facility.
Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, Sackett has been an entertainer since she was a little girl, having trained in dance and musical theater from the age of 5. In high school she took up writing as another form of expression, first through poetry and songs, and later in theatrical pieces, including a collection of monologues for actors to perform at auditions. Her first foray into writing performance pieces came after high school, when she began writing comic vignettes, which she would perform on stage with a partner.
"Primarily, over the years I really created quite a lot of intimacy with the English language," Sackett told JTNews. "I’m very given to the verbal end of things and I developed quite a love for language, having used it in these ways for so many years."
In 1992, having spent her professional life writing and performing – including stints as a writer for a variety of publications and even for a time creating questions for a game show – she embarked on a new path, producing what her husband first called "rhythmic prose," a combination of dramatic monologues combined with a certain amount of rhyme, which is used to develop a rhythmic pattern to the spoken-word performances.
"Up until that point I knew that I could entertain people," she said. "I knew that I had a gift for humor and using language to evoke responses," but at this new stage, her work took on a new emphasis on personal exploration.
"Up until that point I had written a lot of music and ballads that were based on personal experience," she said, but these pieces, which eventually turned into the book, Speak of the Ghost: In the Name of Emotion Literacy, had a deeper connection to her emotional core and were more revealing than anything she had produced up until that point.
"I found myself moving forward," Sackett added, "even though this book had been much more exposing of my personal life."
The name of the book is, in part a play on the familiar phrase, "Speak of the devil," Sackett said, but it also has deeper meanings:
"Speak of the Ghost has to do with the nature of being haunted by the legacy of early upbringing," she explained. "As I engaged and basically kind of danced with my ghosts through the creative use of language, I was able to free myself quite a bit and develop this immense self-understanding."
The result was a book that spoke volumes, not only to herself and the path of self-discovery she was embarking on through the writing, but touched others just as deeply. Almost immediately after it was published, the book became required reading in the Psychology Department at Seattle University.
"I was really taken aback by how much my work was embraced so wholeheartedly by people," she said. "People were caused to think about their own lives and rethink their own orientation in their own lives – their own relationship to themselves. Because of that response being so prevalent with all the different audiences where I shared the work…really verified for me that the book had a lot of purpose."
Sackett has come to believe in the power of art to help people in "uncovering things and waking up to things and adding to and expanding meaning in their lives," she said. "For me self-knowledge, in the most nuanced of senses, is freedom," she said.
Due in large part to the reactions she got when performing excerpts from Speak of the Ghost, she became involved with the "emotional intelligence" movement.
"Most curricula deal with math and science and in that there are a whole set of assumptions that this is what we need to do in order to function and survive and prosper in the world. The whole emotional intelligence movement puts on the map that there are other things to look at here in terms of functioning and surviving and prospering in the world," Sackett said. "A lot of the way I use language has a lot going on between the lines that causes people to think and to feel certain things that they might not otherwise. That’s pretty much the objective that I have in the Emotion Literacy work."
This, in turn led to the founding of Emotion Literacy Advocacy, of which she calls herself the "founder and principal artist."
"We don’t just accept words as-is," Sackett stated. "A lot of words contain within them a set of collective assumptions. Questioning those assumptions is, I don’t think, necessarily built into language unless you put words together in a certain way."
Two of ELA’s driving beliefs are that emotion literacy is a need that extends across all social boundaries and that tools to understand emotion can be acquired by people of all backgrounds. ELA seeks to inspire awareness and foster curiosity in as many people as possible.
Sackett said that though her community connections are mainly through the arts,
"I was raised in a Reform Jewish temple. I went to Sabbath School and learned Hebrew. I think I grew up very much in a Jewish sensibility. I was exposed to a lot of Jewish humor and Jewish entertainment and Jewish art," she said. "I have a very deep identification with the Jewish sensibility."