Playing with emotions! For the next few weeks, I’m going to explore playing with frustration, sadness, fear, separation, happiness, love and more. But why play with emotions, you might ask?
I was walking along a path from a beach in PEI this summer. Ahead of me were a family with young children. The youngest, a little girl about 3 years old, was trailing her mom and sobbing. The mom, without turning back, declared, “I don’t want to hear your crying. I didn’t come on holidays to hear you crying all the time.” Now, it would be easy to place all sorts of judgment on the mom, or to make all sorts of assumptions about what was going on for the little girl….but let’s look at this instead from the viewpoint of emotion.
First of all, emotions are meant to move. They are, after all, e-motions. The feelings we have inside of us are meant to be expressed, to move from churning inside to having an outward expression. Little children have lots and lots of emotions to be expressed. As little people in a big, big world, a world of which they have no control, there will be lots of tears, frustrations and fear that need to be expressed. The good news is that if these emotions are expressed, then the child will be able to adapt to new situations and develop resilience for moving through the challenges of life.
I imagine that this little girl was tired and hungry at this point late in the afternoon. She may have had a little too much sun, or a little too much stimulation playing at the beach in the ocean waves. She probably had had a great day and may have been laughing not long before but, on that walk back to the car, suddenly it all hit and she was in tears, expressing all the emotions, loudly.
Second of all, emotions will be expressed one way or another. Emotions cannot be contained forever. If the sadness or frustration or fear is not expressed in little bits and pieces along the way, if it is stuffed inside and held back, it will eventually erupt, usually in a bigger explosion. A little frustration expressed along the way means that it is less likely that a volcanic eruption will happen later (though if there is a lot of frustration in a particular situation, it still could.)
I know what it feels like for the mom – most parents do. The mom is tired as well and maybe hungry and has a whole family wanting her to get them fed and taken care of. She’d love a holiday from the organizing, managing, and dealing with the family’s emotions. But, sorry Mom, it doesn’t work that way. You are not going to get a holiday from your daughter’s tears. The more you tell your daughter to not cry, the more she is going to cry. Or if she holds it back for your sake, then you are creating bigger problems in your relationship – like having a teenager who doesn’t come to you with her problems or emotions. So, holiday or not, tired or not, you are the parent, and in choosing to be a parent, you’ve accepted the responsibility of being there for your children. So, Mom, pick the little girl up and give her a big hug.
Which leads to the third thing – if you give space for the emotions, rather than trying to make them stop, the whole situation will usually take less time. The more this mom tells this little one not to cry, the more the little one will cry. This scene will likely end it one of two ways. Either the mom will pick the girl up and give her a hug and reassure her that everything is okay, or the mom will get more frustrated & end up erupting at the child, hitting the child either with angry words or a physical slap.
While we, as parents, may not like to hear our children’s tears or fears or frustration, it is what we signed on for as parents. Listening to our children’s emotions can make us feel helpless or overwhelmed. It can stir up our own emotions. That’s why we want to shut down our child’s emotions. But the emotions are there, and the fastest way to reach a calm and move forward is to acknowledge and welcome the emotions. “Oh dear! You must be so tired. You must be hungry. It is all too much for you. Here I’ll pick you up and we’ll get to the car and get home for supper.” What the child needs, when they are expressing their emotions, is for us to come along side and to understand what they are going through. They need to feel a connection with us that anchors them in the midst of their emotions. They don’t need our frustration.
So the fourth thing is that parents need a safe place to express their own emotions – so that they are not expressing them at their children. It is interesting that adults may feel free to express emotions at children even as adults are telling children not to express their emotions. The truth is that adults have many, many emotions to express as well. We too live in a big, big world where many things are beyond our control. The difference between us and our children is that we, as adults, should know how to temper our emotions. We should be able to say to ourselves, “I’m so frustrated and tired and hungry, but I know that if I express that to my child, my spouse, my boss, that will hurt the relationship, so I’m going to find another way to deal with my emotions.” Now when we are really tired, or feeling sick, or extremely hungry, we may find it hard to temper our emotions (think how much harder it is then for our children when they are tired or hungry). That’s why we need to make a choice as adults to find safe places, away from our children, to express our emotions. Even if it is our children that we are frustrated at, we shouldn’t be expressing that frustration to them. Our children must never believe that they are too much for us – too emotional for us, too hard for us to handle, too busy for us to keep up with, too afraid for us to cope with. They must always have our unconditional love, just as they are – emotional, expressive little beings who grow into emotional, expressive bigger beings who ware still our children, needing unconditional love.
That mom at the beach probably had a lot of emotion just waiting inside of her to be expressed, emotion that unfortunately came out at her daughter. Mom was probably hungry and tired, too. She probably wished that someone would have supper waiting for her, and give her a big hug. She needed a place to express her emotion – just not at her little girl. And probably, later that day, Mom felt guilty about what happened at the end of a lovely day at the beach.
And that brings me to my final point today. Emotions don’t have to be expressed around the very thing that created them. If I’m feeling sad, I may not even know why I’m sad. That will be very true for children. If I’m super frustrated, a whole bunch of things may have led to that frustration. So when I’m expressing sadness or frustration or fear, I don’t have to know why or about what I’m feeling those emotions. As parents, we might find ourselves asking our child, “Why are you so sad right now?” but the child probably doesn’t know, even if they make up an answer to satisfy us.
The good news is that we can just express our emotions, without having to logically figure out why we have them. If I’m feeling sad, I can watch a sad movie and have a good cry and feel better. If I’m frustrated, I can punch my pillow a thousand times ….. and that leads to playing with emotions as a way of expressing them. So next week…..Playing with frustration!
Thanks to Dr. Gordon Neufeld for his work on play and emotion. See www.neufeldinstitute.org for more information about the Neufeld Paradigm and the insight approach to emotions and to parenting.
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