BLOG POST
Magic Are we too focused on labelling feelings?
Let me share a little story with you today...
My child has a love affair with fermented apple juice. But I explained that the house would get too cold while we were away for the weekend and we couldn’t leave it fermenting. I suggested that if he wanted to ferment a batch that he work it out with the neighbour and I left it up to him...
Politely and excitedly he planned the whole thing with our dear elderly neighbour, including carefully carrying the huge glass jar with a very unstable lid and litres of apple juice through the fence, over the garden and into her warm home where it could ferment.
And when we returned home, with such excitement he announced he was going over to get the now deliciously bubbly apple juice. Again, he carefully carried the huge glass jar through the fence, over the garden and into our home…
At the very last minute my son tripped on the final step, he fell forward and the apple juice spilt everywhere all across the lounge room floor...
He walked toward me and just sat on my lap. His head was down and his lip out. Silence. I didn’t need to say anything. He didn’t need to say anything. He was just feeling the futility of what had happened.
And after a few minutes of sitting with the feeling, he got up and started to move forward.
His capacity to be with the disappointment transformed the sensation in his nervous system.
I didn’t need to say or do anything; I simply needed to be the comfort that allowed him to sit with his own discomfort.
One of the things I’m noticing in my work is that there is a hyper focus on labelling emotions these days.
But the truth is, you don’t need to label emotions very often for your child to understand them.
And in fact, if you over do it, you might just be taking your child out of their capacity to FEEL that emotion and get stuck in their head.
One of our wonderful members shared recently with me that her child was great with his feelings because he could label so many different states but when I asked her if he was FEELING them, she paused and was not so sure; Actually, now that you say that, probably not.
Many of the clever kids I work with have a wonderful capacity to use the right words, but their capacity to be with the discomfort in any given moment is harder.
In this story, I could tell my son was sitting with the futility. The apple juice was gone, there was no saving it. And he was just quietly feeling it all.
After a few minutes of FEELING, he was able to move forward.
Because that’s what our emotions need, to be felt.
And when we feel them, they transform.
Sometimes in situations like this the tears will flow. But as your child gets older, you might notice that they’re just WITH that sensation (without the tears) and that’s enough to transform it.
It’s always the feeling of the sensation that matters.
So feel free to let go of the constant labelling of emotions in your home, it’s not the secret sauce to managing big emotions; feeling them is.
Like all of us, the art of living is our capacity to be with what is in any given moment.
And the more we talk, the more we can prevent our kids from feeling.