My son had been seeing a therapist for a few weeks and after one of his sessions the therapist indicated that she was having a difficult time making a connection with him. After the session he and I got in the car and I asked him why he thought we were going to see the therapist. His said, “so I can fix my anger.” This sentiment seemed to go along with what the therapist described to me about her objective. His response really shook me up. I do believe that therapy can be very helpful, and I desperately wanted my son to have some peace. I agree that he was having some pretty significant issues with anger, but something about focusing on the anger felt wrong to me.
After a couple of days of pondering the situation, it hit me. You can’t deal with a negative by focusing on it. What would happen if we stopped focusing on his anger all together. I don’t mean ignore an outburst and allow the behavior. I mean what if it isn’t an anger problem at all? What if he is really being challenged to express calmness and peace under certain circumstances? By focusing on the anger as the issue, it felt very hopeless. It seemed like he couldn’t get it right. The feeling would over power him and then that would be the focus of conversation. He never was able to see success or hope for improvement. The outcome was that my son was confidently expecting to fail. And guess what? During that time, he had a lot of anger outbursts.
I decided to change how we talked about things. I asked him to tell me what he thought is the opposite of anger. His response was the word “calm”. From there we decided to identify moments of calmness in his life. When there was a situation that led to feelings of anger or frustration, we simply rated that situation on a calmness scale where 1 was “not at all calm” and 10 was the “most calm”. Then we would talk about ideas of how to move up the scale. The neat part was that he was able to see incremental movement on the scale. He began to identify simple strategies that helped him move up the scale. He also realized that his feelings didn’t have to be absolute. He didn’t always need to be a 10 to do the things he needed to do. And feeling angry wasn’t always at a 1.
The other strategy we implemented was some daily reflection. Each evening we would reflect on at least 3 things that he was grateful for that day. Then I would ask him to tell me one time that he felt calm that day, even just a little bit. The benefit to this strategy was that he could start identifying positives in his life and some ideas of strategies to feel calm. No longer did I have a son who felt hopelessly controlled by negative emotions. He started to build a confident expectation of self control.
I am not going to say that these strategies mean that he is no longer challenged by calmness in the midst of undesirable feelings or circumstances, but I will say that the number of outbursts have decreased. He is also able to calm down much quicker when he does experience strong emotions. I have noticed a more confident and positive child.
I know that my son is just a child, but this was a powerful lesson for me in perspective. I think so often we focus on negatives in our lives – feelings, circumstances and people. What if we just asked ourselves to identify the opposite or the positive and worked on increasing that? I don’t know about you, but that makes it a lot easier to confidently expect good in life when that is what I am focusing on.