One of the hardest things is being with someone when they are sad or angry. For some of us even being around happy people might be difficult. The older I get the more I am seeing just how hard people find this – to just be with someone else’s emotions and not try and change them. You will know if you’ve been bereaved that this most happens at these times. I have spoken about this before I know, as having lost both my parents now, this phenomenon has been present many times for me. People either don’t mention the person you’ve lost, or they try and tell you that it will all be ok and time will change things. Of course, that may be true, but it doesn’t really help in that moment.

Why am I talking about this today you might wonder? I am facilitating a parenting course at the moment, mainly through schools, called Circle of Security. It is a brilliant course based on attachment theory and relationship connection. It is about being able to stay present with our children as they explore the world and come back to us for lots of things, one of which is to help organise their feelings. They call it ‘being with’ our children in their intense emotions and helping them to organise by riding the wave of those emotions with them. This is something I’ve often referred to as co-regulation, as many of the experts on attachment and trauma talk about. We might comfort them when they are upset, validate their anger and frustration, or simply enjoy their moments of curiosity and joy at the world.

When someone, not just a child or young person, expresses a strong emotion, whether that be joy or anger, it can be difficult to stay with their emotions and help them to process it. Our natural reaction or tendency may be to try and make them feel better or even sometimes to be less happy (“calm down” or be “less emotional”). I think we are often frightened of the intensity in others, and this can be due to our own experiences of how feelings were expressed in our home growing up.

Much of how we react around children and other adults too comes from our own upbringing. In the Circle of Security course this is looked at well. It talks about a threatening soundtrack playing in our minds when, the thing in front of us might not be threatening, but it reminds us of another time or person. If emotions weren’t ok in your birth home, or your parents struggled to understand their own emotions, then often intense emotions in children can feel overwhelming for us as adults.

I remember when my children were young and they showed intense emotions it was hard not to react and to just be with them as they worked through those emotions. When I could do this though, it helped them to feel validated and not overwhelmed, as they had a safe adult with them in those feelings. When we don’t acknowledge strong feelings, we can give the message that feelings are bad, and we need to repress them. This, I think, leads to lots more problems later when someone hasn’t learnt to self-regulate through being co-regulated by safe adults.

The Circle of Security talks about only being attuned to our children 30% of the time for it to be good enough. It isn’t about being perfect parents, but good enough. I have heard this figure many times and it always surprises me how low it is. It was inspired by the work of Dr Edward Tronick many years ago. The Circle of Security blog says this about it,

The comfort in the “30%” idea isn’t the number itself.

It’s in the message behind it: You don’t have to be perfect.

You’ll miss things.

You’ll lose patience.

You’ll juggle more than feels possible.

But what matters is that you notice when you’ve missed,

That you come back,

That you keep trying.

This is what builds trust and security – not perfect parenting, but Good Enough.

The same can be said of those who work with children and young people in an educational setting.  Being with your students 30% of the time in their emotions can be so powerful for them. Instead of trying to reassure them, minimising the feeling, or trying to help them solve a problem – just be with them in it, acknowledge how tough it is and ride the emotion with them. When we push against the emotion it can feel more overwhelming for the person feeling it. “No-one understands me, I must be really bad”, might be the message they receive.

Of course, it’s hard to just be with someone in those high emotions, but when they can experience true acceptance from others it helps them to be able to process the emotion better and move into a different emotion. In coaching we used to talk about taking people deeper into their emotions so that they can then fully feel them and then they naturally find their own way out. I have experienced this many times myself and seen it demonstrated in many practice sessions. It feels counterintuitive as we don’t want to take people deeper into sadness, for example, but as was evidenced in the animated film Inside Out, when we don’t fully acknowledge sadness, we can’t move into joy completely. We need all our emotions to function properly.

I know these things are much easier to talk about then to do in practice. So, maybe this week just notice how you feel when a child or young person in your care has a strong emotion. Do you want to push against that and convince them that they don’t really feel that or that they shouldn’t, or can you experience it with them? Stay with them and help them feel not so overwhelmed, so that they don’t become frightened of feeling those things. As we grow, we need to be able to self-regulate and that happens when we can recognise our true feelings, validate them and then move into a different state ourselves.