The week of 3rd to 9th February marks the 11th annual Children’s Mental Health week organised by mental health charity Place2Be. The aim of the initiative is to raise awareness of the mental health issues and challenges that young people face, helping children, teenagers and their families deal with those issues and access appropriate support.
This year’s theme of CMH Week is ‘Know Yourself, Grow Yourself’, focusing on how young people can build resilience, develop a greater level of self-awareness and understand themselves and their emotions better. To support this, Place2Be are using the characters from the popular animation Inside Out 2, a film that resonated with many children and young people in its exploration of the varied and powerful emotions that young people have to deal with during adolescence.
An expanding range of emotions
The Inside Out 2 characters include the originals from the first Inside Out film of Joy, Anger, Disgust, Sadness and Fear, but with the additions of Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, Ennui and Nostalgia, acknowledging the range of emotions that teenagers tend to experience more frequently and intensely as they head towards adulthood.
In the counselling room, we often look at the emotions that are affecting the young person as part of our work together. It’s not unusual for children or young adults to find it hard to name and understand their emotions – which can lead to emotional dysregulation (when the emotions become overwhelming). The first steps towards improving emotional regulation is to identify and acknowledge those emotions. We talk about how it feels on the inside as well as how these emotions can look on the outside. We look at what might trigger strong emotions and what thoughts are creating these feelings – as well as the behaviours that they cause. And then ultimately, we look at strategies for managing those strong emotions to reduce mood swings and achieve a calmer, happier state of mind.
The emotions that feature in both the Inside Out films come up regularly, but perhaps the most common emotions that we work on in counselling sessions are anger and anxiety.
Managing anxiety
One of the ways that we work on reducing anxiety is to look at situations that trigger anxiety, then identify the thoughts that the young person is having in that scenario. This is important because it is the thoughts that create the emotions: anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, resentment, distress etc. These emotions and thoughts then combine to trigger certain behaviours such as avoidance, fighting and shutdown, as well as creating physical symptoms in the body such as irregular breathing, shaking and headaches. These thoughts, emotions, behaviours and physical symptoms all go round in a cycle. So to manage anxiety, we have to learn to break the cycle – which often starts with challenging the thoughts that the young person is having.
Managing anger
Anger is another very common emotion which can cause children and young people problems at home and school as well as in their relationships. It is worth pointing out that both anxiety and anger can be useful emotions in life: anxiety can help keep us safe and anger can help motivate us, but when these emotions become overwhelming and dysregulated, problems can occur.
Anger can be a complex emotion, often made up of a range of different feelings. When working with anger, we often start by identifying and exploring the situations (and possibly people) that trigger the anger. We also look at different kinds of anger, for example, rage is a very different emotion to resentment or irritation – often with very different causes. I often use the Anger Iceberg in counselling sessions to help the young person identify the range of emotions that feed into their anger – and then we look at ways of managing those emotions.
Help is at hand
If your child is struggling with dysregulated emotions, take a look at the Children’s Mental Health Week website to access free resources for families and schools. Alternatively, call Archway Health and Wellbeing to arrange a free 20-minute consultation to decide if your child could benefit from counselling. Call 01858 410 820 or email admin@archwayhealth.co.uk to find out more.