4 Ways Talking About Feelings Builds Resilience
There are many components of resilience, including having a positive attitude and reframing failure. One foundational skill for building resilience is self regulation, not letting your feelings be in charge and dictate your actions. The first step to regulation is emotional literacy, or naming what you are feeling, in order to take charge of it.
When students are able to effectively identify, label and express their feelings, they are able to manage them in a healthy manner, as well as get the support they need. It’s normal for children and adults to describe their feelings with generic terms such as sad, happy, mad, okay or fine. We all know as adults that saying we are fine means we probably are not fine! By encouraging students to identify and name their feelings, not just in broad terms, but articulate with specific words they will experience the following benefits:
PUSH PAUSE and Hit the brakes
Psychiatrist Dan Siegel uses the phrase, “Name it to tame it.” In other words, by simply labelling a difficult emotion, it allows you to take the reins back. Just the process of using our thinking brain (prefrontal cortex) to think of a word to describe feelings, calms down the feelings brain (limbic brain) and shrinks the emotion down.
In the present moment, putting feelings into words is like hitting the brakes on your emotional responses. It can create a distance between the emotions and their expression, allowing a choice how to respond to challenges.
TIP: For younger students, we coach them how to express their feelings by giving them the words. For example, I can see you are feeling really angry. It must feel frustrating to have your game cut short by the bell ringing. We are giving them a hook in their brain to hang the sensation they are feeling on, a label to use in the future.
DOWNGRADE FUTURE FEELINGS
Articulating feelings has an impact on the level emotions are experienced in the future, as shown by Dr Michelle Craskes’ research at the University of California. Research participants were instructed to approach a large, live tarantula in an open container. Afterwards, the first group were instructed to label what they were feeling. For example, “I’m scared of that huge, hairy tarantula.”
The second group were instructed to say something positive to overcome their fear, such as, “The spider is in a cage and can’t hurt me, so I don’t need to be afraid.” One week later, the participants were re-exposed to the live tarantula and their level of distress measured by how much their hands sweated, which is a good measure of fear. They found that the group that labelled their feeling of fear were less afraid the second time than the group that said positive phrases to negate or overcome their fear.
TIP: Debriefing after an event allows students to put names to what they were feeling and process what has happened. An example of this is telling our story until it doesn’t need to be told is childbirth. The days and weeks after a woman has given birth, her story is repeated to other women until it has been told enough, and she has processed the pain.
NETWORK OF SUPPORT
By being able to articulate and express specific emotions, it helps us to know how we can support our students with what they need.
TIP: A student may be raising their voice to be aggressive or combative. When we help them to articulate and identify if they are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated, humiliated or disappointed, then the support you can offer will be very different. Anger is a “secondary emotion.” What we see on the surface might be masking underlying feelings like fear, frustration, hurt, disappointment, etc. Anger can numb these feelings and help the child feel in control.
SELF AWARENESS
When you ask someone how they are feeling, and dig deeper than fine, happy, sad or mad, it provides a challenge. Just like if you go to a specialty Asian store instead of just the supermarket to buy your soya sauce. You are venturing into a whole new world, with a myriad of choices. Dark or light, Japanese or Chinese, for chicken or beef, salty or sweet? You have to think harder about what you want. instead of instantly grabbing the familiar. Self-awareness is like a muscle that grows the more we use it. It becomes much easier to identify and express specific feelings rather than familiar or easy answers.
TIP: When a child replies that they feel “sad,” we can ask, “What sort of Sad?” Then, we can provide them with prompts or suggestions such as lonely, tired, rejected to get them thinking a bit more before they grab “sad” off the shelf as the answer to your question.
DE-ESCALATION PATHWAY
Not many people can transition directly from enraged to calm. However self regulation comes in smaller steps, for instance from infuriated, irate, to frustrated to aggravated.
TIP: Have a list of feelings in a similar category, such as mad, frustrated, enraged, irritated, overwhelmed, stressed, annoyed, confused and impatient. Get students to discuss in groups the feelings and then:
- group them in different categories.
- sort in order of the biggest feelings, down to milder feelings.
- sort feelings that pass quickly and feelings that stay around for a long time.
- discuss the difference between two similar feelings, eg the difference between lonely and rejected, or irritated and frustrated.
FREE GIFT
Included in this magazine is a free sample of my Mood Cube, a fun tool for use by teachers and families to develop emotional literacy and empathy.
I love receiving emails from parents and teachers about how it is being used by children to start up conversations about how they are feeling. One six-year old at Auckland school picked up the Mood Cube from the Deputy Principals Desk. He pointed to emojis on the red side, saying, “I am feeling like this and this (frustrated and annoyed) but when I am with my girlfriends, I feel like this (pointing to the yellow side at the loving emoji with hearts floating around).”
A parent emailed me from South Waikato saying, “My eight-year old daughter brought the Mood Cube to me, pointing to an emoji, saying, “This is how I feel (frustrated) and I was able to share how I felt (overwhelmed).” We talked about how we were both feeling and afterwards, both pointed to emojis on the yellow side saying that we now felt calm and happy.”
