It’s a bit of a harsh reality when you bring home your bundle of joy from the hospital only to discover that instructions were not included. You can read books, ask ‘Dr Google’ (with caution) or go to your trusty Emergency Department to help you navigate your way around managing their ‘physical bodies’, but it’s not so cut and dried when they start speaking and you realise that there is also this whole ‘emotional body’ that no one ever briefed you on the management of!
Where do you find solutions to such things as recurring
nightmares (that put an end to your long awaited undisturbed sleep) or
separation anxiety? There is more information
out there now than ever before, but it’s hard to sift through and find simple strategies that will work for
that little person whose anxiety on any
level has the ability to rip your heart open.
I experienced my first severe panic attack as a small child,
and whilst my mother used her natural instinct to make sure I was physically OK,
she knew nothing about (what we later learnt was) ‘Agoraphobia’ and how to live
with it. My subsequent panic attacks made
me insatiably curious about the mind/body connection and the effect that
emotions can physically have on us.
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| Original Illustration by Olga Minima (10 Years old ONLY!) |
When I was woken by the screams of my daughter from her
first recurring nightmare, managing that situation then actually came very
naturally to me from my own experience and learnings. I am certainly no expert but knew what had
worked for me so I used similar techniques on her. I listened to and acknowledged the details of
her nightmare (because it is very real
to them), and then I started retelling her nightmare back to her but with some
key changes to the original story…
She dreamt that she was walking through a forest and a monkey
jumped on her back. The monkey was big
and terrifying to her. In my new story,
she was walking through the forest and still felt the impact on her back of
something that seemed scary but she easily managed to brush it off. When she turned to look at it on the ground, she
was amazed to discover a teeny weeny cute monkey with big wide frightened eyes
looking back up at her. The monkey told
her that it was just lonely and wanted a friend to play with. She picked it up and put it in her pocket so
that it would never feel lonely again.
Not only did this story work in settling her back to
sleep, she liked it so much that she wanted me to tell it to her every night
before bed. That nightmare never
occurred again and was the catalyst for me creating www.feelbrave.com (Characters and Stories to help kids manage
tough emotions and Feel Brave!)
What I had used was a simple Cognitive Behavioural
Therapy (CBT) technique called ‘Reframing’.
CBT is a form of talking therapy
that focuses on how you think about the things going on in your life – your
thoughts, images, beliefs and attitudes (your cognitive processes) and how this
impacts on the way you behave and deal with emotional problems. It then looks
at how you can change any negative patterns of thinking or behavior that may be
causing you difficulties. In turn, this can change the way you feel. Reframing simply involves seeing things from
a different perspective. Much like the
way we change our response to a work of art by placing it in a frame, we can
change our response to emotions by putting them in a different frame.
Humour is a great natural way of reframing a situation like
most jokes which involve an unexpected twist of perspective (a ‘reframe’). Children love nothing more than a funny story
(especially if they feature in it), or a story about when you were a
child. If you can change their scary story
into something that involves any of these elements, it becomes relevant to them
and can break the spell of a nightmare or things that scare them.
Another great example I have seen work was
with a child who was getting increasingly anxious about her father being away
from home a lot due to his work. She was
told a story about a great chief of a village.
This chief had a big responsibility to make sure everyone had food in
their tummies so he would go off on wonderful adventures to gather the food and
was a much loved and respected hero.
This warming story was relevant to her own situation and helped her
create parallels with her anxiety by reframing the feelings that she originally
had.
Something else that children find curiously
delightful is when you role play and act out a scenario that scares them but
you play the part of your child and they play the part of another person (e.g.
they play mummy leaving them at Kindergarten or a person that is not being very
nice to them). This gives them a safe
and enjoyable way to try out various scenarios and choose one that feels right
for them to use in the future.
Storytelling and role play doesn’t always
come easily or obviously to us but with just a little prior planning and
practice, you can conjure up some delightful enchanting tales and magically break
some nasty spells in the process.
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