Life is a little bit different from the norm and whatever our age, our minds and bodies need to recalibrate.
Kids finish up at school, and even those last couple of weeks of school will have been filled with the run up to holidays and the festive season.Most adults will have some sort of holidays across the festive season and hopefully families will have time to spend together.Recent weekends that may normally have been down time have been action packed with trees, decoration, Santa visits, organisation, shopping, family visits, Christmas jumpers, pantomimes, and so much more.
All of this brings lots of BIG EMOTIONS!
From my experience big emotions often get a bit of a bad reputation. Big emotions often get coupled with big an unhelpful behaviours. Often big emotions do leak and spill out in ways that are unhelpful and unhealthy, and this can be a challenge for those with the big emotion and for those around them.
I do lots of emotions work all year with children young people, and those the care for, raise, and educate them. At this time of year I hear from parents, families, children and young people that I work with believing that they will be ‘too busy’ at Christmas to work on building this emotional learning and emotional regulation and resign themselves to this.
Well here is the scoop!
The festive season is the absolute best time. There is such an array of big emotions around during the festive season, for all sorts of reason, and this makes it the perfect time to build self-awareness, be curious, and re-frame some of this big emotions bad reputation. Using the time wisely to build emotional learning and emotional regulation skills!!!
For children and young people they can become emotions detectives, and be curious and interested in all the emotions that show up, seeing what they can do with the detective information the collect.
As parents, carers, and educators we can work alongside our children and help build that emotional vocabulary through our modelling, narrating, and re-framing.
Together as a family and society we can re-brand and re-frame some of those big emotions in the moment and hopefully longer term.
Emotional happenings can become positive emotions memories as we work together as families to narrate what is going on for us emotionally, bringing the vocabulary and the body/mind connection together with these real life emotional happenings.
Open the doors to emotional conversation across the festive season. Let everyone explore what is going for themselves and also those around them.
As many key emotions can occur during the festive period and this gives us a chance to re-brand and re-frame any emotion, and these skills can really make an impact on the behaviour that follows. Often children (and adults) couple emotions and behaviours up in our heads, and when we think, believe, and say we feel a certain way our bodies then kick in to action with a familiar behaviour, and sometimes not a helpful and healthy behaviour! If we just head upstream and work better with our emotional thoughts and what we say then a different behaviour may follow.
lf a child says they hate Brussels sprouts then the facial expressions and the vomit noises may follow, which is pretty annoying for all sitting next to this child. If we choose more of a ‘dislike’ or even ‘those are not for me’ type words then the thoughts and then subsequently the behaviours are lessened.
Similarly with boredom, with a lack of routine and structure our minds are restless, desperately seeking something to do. Again bored comes with its own behaviours of huffing, puffing, etc. All of this is particularly annoying for parents that know their kids have just been given amazing Christmas presents!! So again a reframe this to having restless mind is much less emotive.
I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with your own re-frames by heading for a less emotive word, helping our children and ourselves, both in the moment and to build emotional skills for life.
All of this allows us to show respect for the feeling and emotion that may be showing up. We are just being curious and interested and getting it right in our heads. There is no telling it to go away or just telling ourselves or other to be calm, at peace, grateful , happy, or to suddenly love Brussels sprouts - as all this could be a bit of stretch at Christmas time for some people.
It really can take a bit of mind training to get from to big emotion to something very different, and asking a person to do this can cause a bit of an emotional battle.
Give this re-branding and re-framing a try and bring just the right amount of emotion (and education) to your home and life this festive season.
Wishing everyone a fantastic & EmotionALL festive season! xxx
fear - excitement/anticipation
bored - restlessness/lonely/tired
angry - disappointed/annoyed
upset - disappointedfrustration - anticipation
hate - dislike
mad - sad
overwhelmed - excited
anxious - anticipation/restless