30/09/2020
*REPOST now with printable poem*
What do I mean when I say “all feelings are welcome, not all behaviours are welcome”?
One key skill for building emotional resilience is learning to get comfortable with emotions.
ALL of them.
But being comfortable with negative emotions doesn’t mean foregoing emotion regulation. Not all behaviour is appropriate, and sometimes, we need to sit in an emotion without “fixing” or taking it away. A part of allowing a negative emotion means not needing to change a boundary in order to contain it. But we can still have behavioural expectations.
On the weekend, we had a birthday party for my son (turning six). He was given a stack of coloured cups to hand out. At first, he sat and tried to work out which person would like which colour. Then he stopped, shuffled them, and walked around the table handing them out in their random order. He got to his brother and paused. He KNOWS that this brother’s favourite colour is blue. He looked at the pile of cups, and the top one was orange. He took it, passed it to his brother and said…
“You get what you get
and you don’t get upset.
If you scream and you shout
then you’ll just miss out.”
Curious, I asked where he had learned that rhyme. He told me they say it as school when handing out items, in order to stop whining over favoured colours, and prevent the chaos of haggling and swapping.
“That’s interesting,” I said, “but sometimes, if I don’t get what I want, I AM disappointed. I DO get upset. Don’t you?”
“Yes, but you’re not MEANT to!” my son replied.
“Hmmmm… actually, I think when something is upsetting, you’re allowed to be upset. Being disappointed when you miss out on something isn’t the WRONG feeling. Is it?”
I had all of their attention now.
The eldest chipped in, “Yeah, but if you whine about it, you’ll get in trouble and just miss out.”
“But you’re not in trouble for being disappointed – you’re in trouble for the whining, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
We talked about calm down strategies we can use when we are feeling upset, like deep breaths, and reminding ourselves about small problems vs big problems.
Then my three boys set about writing a better rhyme. It’s longer than the original, but I think they did a great job. (Note: they use “brave” as a simplification of dialectical thinking – the idea they can be both upset AND okay.)
“You get what you get
And you might get upset.
If you don’t get your fave
You can practice being brave.
Breathe in and breathe out
You don’t need to shout.
If you don’t get your way
You can still be okay.”
