From anxiety to happiness: how to help children understand and validate their emotions

Being in touch with our emotions is not easy. For some people it is easier than for others, but it will depend on their family and social context, and on how much adaptive capacity they have.

If it is often difficult for adults to identify their feelings, we must imagine that For some children this can be even more complicated.whether due to internal or external factors that have not been identified.

In this sense, the psychotherapist and teacher, Iván Hernández Anaya, explains that to help children work on their emotional intelligence There is the possibility of asking parents or teachers for supportand “if psychotherapeutic help is necessary, it will always be a positive alternative.”

In addition to this, Talking to children about emotions in general will help them identify and validate their emotions.and starting by resolving their simplest doubts will help them understand each other better.

How to explain to children the importance of emotions?

This is a very complex question, however, we can simplify it by thinking that from the moment we are born, We come into the world prefabricated with different systems to interact with our environment.

All those sensations such as cold, heat, hunger, sleep, pain, among others are centralized and They are interpreted in our brain to make us react depending on how satisfying, uncomfortable, pleasurable or painful the stimulus is.

However, we are not limited to those reactions that we can call primitive or instinctive, all of them are covered by a veil that gives an experience to our live, we call that veil emotions and feelings.

Those emotions and feelings, They give us a particular vision of the things that happen to us And as we grow up, even that veil can make us act or react with things that do not happen to us, but that are part of our imagination, dreams or fantasies that They are created from the mental images we have through our experience.

Because of this, we may act self-assured or insecure when faced with new events, without being clear about whether things will happen in one way or another.

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A means of expression that helps with emotional health

A classic example is when we have an exam at school, each of us has a handful of stored experiences that will trigger a particular and unique reaction, another example could be knowing that we are going to get an injection, the simple word injection can produce an emotional reaction in us.

On the other hand, we can locate another type of emotions when we are playing our favorite game, when it is vacation and at grandma’s house we are playing with all our cousins ​​feeling that summer is an eternally rewarding experience.

These pleasant emotions that we find in everyday life, can define the path of our lifecould help us discover what we want to be when we grow up, for example, a teacher, singer, doctor, architect, psychologist or like now that we aspire to be gamers or YouTubers.

Emotions are important because they are the road on which our experience travels.

Are there emotions more important than others?

Not at all! The whole range of emotions that we manage to experience, They give different nuances to our life. It has happened to all of us that we find a song or a movie that we love, that we want to play over and over again because of how rewarding it is, but that over time it wears out and does not awaken those same emotions, or it awakens them at a minimal level.

Something similar happens to crops: if you plant the same fruit over and over again in the same field, the soil tends to become poor in nutrients. Having so many emotions helps us keep the ground fertile, receptive and ready to experience new things.

On the other hand, every emotion brings with it invaluable learnings what They help us learn how to interact with our family, with our friends and in general with the whole society, but the most important thing is that emotions help us learn about ourselves and decide how we want to live our lives.

How can we recognize the emotions we feel?

Usually, when we are aware that we have emotions, it is because there was another or others, who, like explorers, found different continents in us that marked out, like on a map, the different emotions that manifest in our reactions. What I am getting at with this is that Those names we give to emotions have a social and an individual tone.

To know what we are feeling, and although it may seem simplistic, we can close our eyes and ask ourselves what I’m feeling and where I’m feeling it.

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Measures for self-care

There is an activity that is used in psychotherapy with children in which They draw a silhouette of your person and so, closing your eyes you try to visualize experiences where you have felt, for example angry. Then, you choose a color that represents anger for you, (usually red is chosen), and you paint on the silhouette the body parts where you can locate that emotion, Some paint their fists, others their heads, others their stomachs, etc.

And so with each of the emotions, if we identify in which part of the body we are feeling the emotion, following that direction, we can find on our map what we are feeling, give it a name and, immediately afterwards, we could regulate it.

How can anxiety be explained to children?

As I mentioned, as we grow up we realize that not only “real” experiences awaken emotions and sensations, but also Fantasy, imagination and in general our thoughts can make us react as if what happens in our minds is one hundred percent real.

And just as you can spend hours of fun playing with your cars or with your dolls creating stories, you can also Your mind can create scenarios in which you may feel threatened. and being imaginary, we can infer that in most cases they are not “real” even though they are perceived as such.

Anxiety has this quality, because It has an intention to protect us and find dangers physical, social and emotional, but when it gets out of control, because something is not working well, far from being an ally (like all emotions) It can become a torture, as can happen with any emotion.even with happiness.

Anxiety, when magnified, can distort our reality, paralyze us, cloud our direction, and seem to leave us trapped in a hurricane with no way out.

What would be good for children to know about their emotions?

That the emotions They are neither good nor badthat all They are necessary and that all They bring us experiencesThese can be a source of inspiration and greatness.

But above all, that emotions are made to interactbut not only between them in our minds, but they must interact with the emotions of other people, that is why they must always be expressed, from sport, from art, but the fundamental thing is the expression through words.

Making our emotions interact with the emotions of others is not an easy task, as there is always the possibility that an event will be felt differently by each person, which can generate different interpretations that lead us to disagreements. But only in this interaction can we find something that is important to human beings: empathy.