3 Simple Steps to Help Children Cope With Meltdowns.
A regulating technique from ‘The Inner Hum Project’ workshop to support children’s mental health.
He was scared and alone. He could hardly breathe.
The sea was scary. The seagulls were screeching above.
The journey in the boat felt like a slow, dark abyss.
The boy kept blowing bubbles.
He blew another as soon as one pops.
Until he felt his breathing slowed.
(An abridged text from the children book ‘Goo’.)
The Workshop Process
This workshop taught us the importance of naming our emotions; regardless if it is anxiety or fear. The regulating techniques allows us to cope with the fear inside us.
The ‘Inner Hum’ workshop for Facilitators was designed to be an immersive experience.
The story book ‘Goo’ provided the anchor for this learning journey.
As participants, we dived into the story with our feelings of loss, anxiety, and sadness when we read about Pod, a little boy who had arrived in a boat.
We followed his journey to belonging, while tracing the feelings and emotions of the strangers around him in what Pod called his new home- Towerland
Dealing With Emotions.
Like Pod’s migration to Towerland, the unknown can be a little intimidating to us too. Dark and gloomy at times. Dreadful for some of us, despair for others.
As we submerge into the story, we could feel our bodies tighten. Our hearts would beat a little faster. Some of us felt our shoulders stiffen, our bellies tighten.
We could feel the fear inside us emerging like a thick slime as we shared our personal experiences.
We took a journey through the many emotions — anger, sadness, the sense of loss, worry, anxiety, and even exhaustion.
Like the ‘Goo’ in the story, our emotions felt intense and sometimes uncomfortable.
“I feel scared and exhausted”, “I feel sad for Pod” or, “I feel anxious about what to expect next.”
As we listened to each other, we identified and connected to our fear.
We recognised the ‘sticky Goo’ in us and unconsciously gave it a name.
As our Trainer, Sudha Kudva, summed up for us — Big angry outsides, Big scary insides.
(Sudha Kudva, Counsellor, EMDR Certified Therapist, Certified Play Therapist & Accredited Clinical Supervisor for Play and Creative Art Therapies)
Why Naming Our Feelings is Important
We named our feelings and shared them with the team.
Naming and recognizing our emotions is an essential first step in self-love or self-management.
It is about giving ourselves a chance to breathe and space to return to equilibrium when facing chaos.
We give our brains a minute to reset so that we can then make better decisions.
We take back control and ownership of how we feel. We get to fix a situation before it becomes destructive.
We step back and restart.
Dr. Matthew D Lieberma indicated in a study; when our fight or flight responses are triggered, the amygdala part of our brain will increase in activities. We would often know this when our body starts to clench or stiffen as if ready to protect.
But naming/labeling the emotion, the amygdala would subsequently show a decrease in activities. This suggests that the effect of naming tends to dampen affective responses in general rather than alleviating adverse effects.
(For more information : Subjective Responses to Emotional Stimuli During Labeling, Reappraisal, and Distraction. Matthew D. Lieberman, Tristen K. Inagaki, Golnaz Tabibnia, and Molly J. Crockett. Emotion 2011;11(3):468–480.)
The workshop allowed us to explore different ways of regulating as it was personal to all — how do we regulate to stay within our personal window of tolerance.
For Little Pod, he dealt with these big emotions by blowing big bubbles — his personal coping mechanism.
We would blow our bubbles too.
One BIG bubble at a time. And watched it float away.
My heartbeat and my breathing slowed as I watched the bubble float towards the blue gray sky.
As we trudged on, we would ask ourselves, how the children would feel, what they would say, how would they react, what scenarios could turn up, and what can we do to help them manage their meltdowns?
We know we cannot alter their situation there and then. But we can listen and help children convey their emotions.
While there are many regulating techniques to share, one of the children’s favorites was to use bubbles.
You can try these 3 simple techniques to help your children regulate their emotional meltdowns.
- Ask them how are they feeling? Ask them to describe their feelings. (It’s important not to suggest or guess their feelings: give them time to describe them to you).
- If possible, have a picture of a gingerbread person ready. Ask your child to point or color the image of where the sensations are in their body. Can they name those sensations — fizzy, itchy, cold, hot, stuck, pain, stiff, etc. (The idea is to support them to transfer some of this emotion externally).
- When they finish, pass them a bottle of bubbles and ask them to blow one single big bubble. They can do it as many times as they wish or until they feel more at ease. But only one big bubble each time.
The exercise aims to get them to exhale the energy inside them. Emotions are a form of energy. That is why breathing is a useful technique to help children dissipate these nervous or fearful energies.
Afterwards, perhaps you could help them in finding the cause of their emotional trigger. Last but not least, do be patient. There is always a story behind meltdowns.
Background information for readers:
The Inner Hum Project, Malaysia is created by powerofplay.net for all children to support articulation and regulation of emotions. The project is born out of the Covid 19 Lockdown. It consists of 10 sessions of 1 — hour workshops that journeys with children through a book of 10 chapters on different feelings.
