Let’s talk about kids’ emotions and behaviours
Feelings are difficult. If you ask an adult how they “feel”, they may find it hard to answer. They may give you the surface feeling and not the underlying emotion. For example; Are you experiencing anger, or are you masking feelings of hurt, sadness or grief? For kids it’s even harder, sometimes they really just don’t know how they feel, and they may not know how to deal with those feelings, so instead they act out in some form. Big feelings are confusing and scary. If you don’t know how you feel or you haven’t had adults around you who model how to talk about your feelings, it can be even harder. Speaking out your emotions gives you some power over them, so it’s good to be able to name and verbalise your feelings. If your emotions get stuck inside and you don’t talk about them, that’s when behaviours can arise.
Freeze is the response when we become overwhelmed or embarrassed
Flight is the response when we become sad or scared
Fight is the response when we are angry
Kinesiology can help by giving feelings some space, bringing them out into the light, uncovering the underlying emotions and allowing kids to speak them. This can take the potency out of the emotion. Kids feel a lot better when they do this, they feel seen and heard. Emotions are processed through the amygdala, which played a major role in the survival of early humans, due to physical threats. Emotions emerged because they assist us in adapting to our constantly changing environments. In our current lives, the amygdala triggers fight-or-flight due to psychological threats such as stress, fear, anxiety, aggression and anger. These primary emotions, as well the emotions of joy, sadness, disgust and surprise are innate and are expressed in the first 6 months of life. We process emotions in the body, and in the primitive part of our brains, the amygdala, and all we are really trying to work out is; Am I safe? Anxiety arises when we don’t know what to do with any given emotion.
Children’s brains haven’t fully developed, and when their amygdala fires up due to stress and big emotions, they can find themselves trapped in the “downstairs”/primitive part of their brain unable to access the logic and consideration of their “uptairs”/higher order thinking brain.
The upstairs brain provides a fuller perspective of the world and enables us to emotionally regulate and to have control over our body. When this part of the brain is working well, we are able to utilise self-understanding, empathy and morality, as well as consider consequences and think before we act. If we are in the downstairs part of our brain, children can act out, displaying “behaviours”.
What they are looking for is purely, safety. How we can help them, is to discover the feeling, name it, and therefore connect with the child. By allowing them to speak emotions out loud, we are reassuring them and their amygdala/primitive part of the brain, that they are safe. They can learn to keep themselves safe by understanding the name of their emotion and speaking it out loud, and feeling connection with their caregiver.
The behaviour is no longer needed.
References
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2555254/
https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/amygdala-hijack#prevention
https://kidsthatgo.com/upstairs-and-downstairs-brain-part-one/
https://newhoperanch.com/blog/understanding-anger-as-a-secondary-emotion/
