In my clinical work as a holistic-creative Psychotherapist, it is common for me to work with children and families (and young adults) who do not yet have the knowledge about emotions. They often do not know how to label emotions, let alone describe what their emotions feel like. And so I often find myself going down the rabbit hole of exploring emotions with them for awhile in order to try and help them with their issue. Along the way, I find there are a multitude of reasons for their emotional illiteracy. I will touch on two for now in our first blog so as to get us to start thinking about emotions and how we can help our children to learn them like they learn about their fruits, vegetables, and numbers.
The two reasons are:
1) emotions are often difficult to understand, even when we (try to) talk about them to someone we trust;
and 2) children are often not taught to talk about their feelings, and openly—be it at home, in school, or other places—where feelings often surface for cultural and personal reasons.
To tackle the first reason, l would like to ask you the following question: What is an emotion? Can you for a second stop and think if you felt a certain emotion today? Did you label it in your head? Say it out loud? Maybe reading this is causing an emotion in you. Like curiosity. Or anger.
Whatever you thought or felt, you can bet that we don't understand our feelings, let alone our emotions. In fact, we hardly pay our emotions any attention. That's not to say that we don't feel emotions, in fact, we ARE emotional creatures-men, women, children, everyone. We are feely people as much as we don't like to admit it!
And emotions do get the best of us everyday, hour, minute, and second. Even when we are doing nothing there is an emotion.
But to answer my initial question: 'an emotion is a strong feeling/sensation deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.'
That's quite a lot of space that emotions take up if you ask me, and quite powerful too! Emotions affect us personally and the people around us.
Like some of us adults can notice our emotions, children can as well. But they need us to help them learn the vocabulary. That is they need us to label their emotions, just like we label their fruits and vegetables, or teach them their numbers from a very early age. In fact, some emotions are too big for a child to understand alone. Like anger. Oh boy, did you know that there are more than 4 different types of anger? Yes, emotions are complicated!
With regards to the second reason: there are a plethora of reasons parents don't talk about their emotions openly, including cultural and personal reasons. In the former, far too many cultures still have this idea that showing emotions is a sign of a weak character and that only a specific gender-namely the female- is supposed to show emotions. Think of how many times you've heard the following: 'women are so emotional', or 'stop being a pussy' (referring an emotion to the female genitals). As if only women and girls are created to feel emotions, and not men, or boys. So for anyone to appear 'strong', he or she has to suppress their emotions.
But surprise (or not)! Emotions affect boys and men, too. And it's never a good idea to suppress one's emotions if we want be well, not in the short or longterm of our health. Infact, research shows that suppressed emotion makes an emotion stronger, otherwise known as 'amplification' in psychological jargon.
Also, in many semi-traditional societies in Africa, it is often frowned upon to talk about how one feels, although progress has and continues to be made to talk about feelings openly. In fact, in many African languages there is no ‘I’ in saying ‘I feel upset’, or ‘I was disappointed when you said this' because what one person feels the entire community also feels. In post Apartheid South Africa for example, we see this ideology enshrined in 'Ubuntu', or society giving individuals their humanity with the phrase:'I am because we are'. So children (and adults) learn to keep their feelings bottled up or tiptoe/dance around them to make the other person 'understand', a rather diplomatic and respectful way of doing things, but it can be problematic if the person really needs to express what is truly in one's mind and heart in order to be properly understood.
Sometimes feelings just need to be expressed, especially for our children who have no sense of control over their emotions and who are learning the ways of their minds, bodies and our societal rules.
Expression of emotions also allows for good communication in the family, a very important tool for relationship development, especially in the workplace later on.
And sometimes parent's personal choices will cross with the cultural because they cannot un-program themselves overnight from what their parents, schools, and/or friends have taught and showed them how to behave for so long. Emotions such as anger often get dismissed or mishandled as a result. For instance, mothers who were raised to not express anger often end up raising daughters who also don't express anger. Not expressing anger is equated to being a good girl, obedient, docile and people pleasing. But this can be counterproductive in situations that require anger to be expressed and acknowledged.
Think for a minute: a girl child who has been molested or raped by her uncle and who has been told to not say anything or show her anger because she will bring shame to herself and her family. As a result, the girl ends up internalising what happened to her as her own fault and later grows up with low self esteem, depression, anxiety and distrusting of authority and anyone who tells her she can't do something. What a deleterious way to be in the world.
The underlying reason behind all of this though is that parents are taught to believe that emotions are not essential to our survival but a defunct mechanism that makes us vulnerable to others. While emotions do make us vulnerable, including given someone power to bully us (a topic that sadly almost every child (and adult) will experience at some point in their lives), every emotion actually serves a survival purpose!
Emotions are important signals from our body and brains (yes, we have more than one brain) that give us information about our sense of safety (i.e. whether we are safe or not regarding who we are with and what is going on in our environment), and what we need in order to escape or fight a bad situation.
Although we have evolved evolutionarily, instinctively we are all still animals trying to behave civilised! Being emotional is neither a strength nor a weakness. And there is no such thing as a bad or good emotion. Emotions are what makes us human and we should embrace them by understanding and managing them.
While it may not be completely unhealthy for EVERY emotion to be expressed and remedied on the spot, as a professional, I always ask parents to make and leave room for our children to share their feelings, even if the feelings are convoluted, too direct/strong, or for whatever reason, and to help them label them because they have a right to feel their emotions and feelings, and their emotions and feelings will help guide them later in life to make sense of who they are, the people around them, and better longterm decisions.
Raising 'strong' or healthy children and future adults capable of managing their emotions is actually a good thing, but it requires that they learn early about their emotions.
Until then, have a wonderful, feely-emotional rest of your day!
