I wrote this post last weekend but I haven’t really been in the right head-space to post it.

It kind of feels like it has turned into the elephant in the room that I would rather just ignore and not post.

(I am not quite sure why)

In previous posts, I have written and divulged far more vulnerability than this. Maybe it’s just that at the moment my heart feels a little shut down and the last thing it wants to be is vulnerable.

However,

that being said,

since my 40-day- challenge I made a commitment to myself that I would post everything that I write.

Writing and storytelling are what give my life meaning.

After many years of writing various stories and never having the courage to share them I made a promise to myself that I would not allow myself to go down that road again. So I’m going to post my elephant and hope this funk that I have been struggling with this last week will dissipate a little bit. If not…then I will just keep writing…

*************

I had a weird day on Saturday. I have begun to notice a pattern in my life. It seems that no sooner than I write about something or share an insight with someone than BAM💣💥! …I’m hit with the exact situation in my own life. It’s funny that….kind of like the universe actually wants me to practice what I preach.

Saturday was such a day.

On Wednesday I had a conversation with one of the students’ parents who feels her child is struggling with a lot of anger and she isn’t quite sure how to handle it. She knows her family have been through a particularly tough time and her son is finding it difficult to come to terms with things. On top of that her son also has significant learning difficulties which no doubt make him even more frustrated.

(Especially since he was bullied quite a lot for this at his previous school.)

Learning disabilities, whatever they may be, can have a huge effect on a child’s individual self-concept. It not only affects their self-esteem and their belief in themselves but it can also impact how they relate to and communicate with other people. We spoke about the usual options of providing support and therapy for him to help him to help him learn to deal with all these emotions – but what really got me thinking was how hard this poor mother was being on herself.

She was aware of the problem; she was open to talking about it and she has continued to take steps to address it. Sadly as is so often the case the general feeling seems to be:

“If my child is angry I must be doing the job wrong!”

 I think what many parents don’t get is that these are tiny little beings just fumbling through life like the rest of us. They are bombarded every day with their overwhelming ‘childlike’ issues. You only have to spend some time in a playground to see how horrible kids can sometimes be towards each other. I don’t believe kids are innately ‘mean’ but they are still learning the right and wrong ways to respond and behave.

They are grappling with the unfairness of life.

(Not quite getting that it will never be fair. 😟)

They often don’t even understand what they are feeling,

let alone know how to verbally express it….so they blow up.😤

 They yell they scream and sometimes they behave atrociously.

Fact:

Nice children sometimes say mean things.

(I don’t have kids but I can only imagine how painful this must be for a parent to watch.)

One of the most practical things I have learnt in therapy is the idea of emotional containment and how important it is for children growing up.

Containment is a very simple but powerful concept in child development,

which enables parents to support their children when they are emotionally distressed.

In healthy parenting, the adult is viewed as the ‘container’ that is able to simply hold all the negative emotions a child might experience.

All the child’s thoughts and feelings that give rise to fear, anger and anxiety are thus ‘contained’ by the ‘healthy’ adult.

The power comes from merely learning to be there for the child, giving them the space to vent and not judge or shame them for having all these feelings that they still haven’t learnt to hold and manage for themselves.

It is also about learning to soothe the child in a loving and genuinely supportive way.

(ie Telling them they are overreacting or that they need to toughen up only compound a childs anxieties).

The idea is that by providing this safe space for your child means that they will slowly learn how to contain and vent emotions in a healthy way

as well as begin to self-soothe themselves.

This concept is also used in therapy where the psychologist essentially becomes that “safe space” for the client.

With patience and time, the ideal is that the client will start learning from this model and begin reshaping how they react to situations AND hopefully learn to be a little kinder to themselves.

So I found myself briefly explaining this concept to this mother and asked her to try as much as possible not to take her child’s temper tantrums personally, to do her best not to react with anger and just try, as much as possible, to talk to him calmly when it happened.

He is hurting and the anger, is his mask – hiding a whole host of other emotions he has no words for.

Dam such good advice I tell you.

Unfortunately, as a teacher, I know that containment is a particularly hard thing to practice with children if you haven’t mastered your own ability to ‘self-contain’ yet.

All too often what happens in situations when tempers are flying is that we act out of our own pain and insecurity, we feel judged and we end up on the defensive, fighting anger with anger.

Which unfortunately never works.

I truly do speak from experience.

I am embarrassed to even admit how much I used to shout as a young, new teacher when I first started teaching.

(I find it interesting that in all my 4 years of studying, not once were we taught how to discipline or emotionally understand where our students were actually coming from.)

It took almost 8 years of supply teaching (i.e. different kids almost every day) and working with some of the angriest most volatile kids, that you could imagine , for me to learn this hard lesson.

Sometimes the slightest sign of anger from me as a teacher would simply send a child into a downward spiral of rage.

Random story:

In my first year of full-time teaching, I had the sweetest, saddest little boy in my class who simply could not control his temper at all. Almost every time I asked a question on the carpet, this child would manically wave his hand at me. The simple act of me not choosing him to answer the question would often result in him clenching his little fists and randomly punching any child who was sitting next to him, full-on – often in the face.

Sadly, he was eventually asked to leave the school as we had no way of protecting the other children from his tantrums. He was only 6 years old. I know for a fact that this child was beaten with a belt on a regular basis at home. Often after a meltdown of punching, kicking and screaming this poor child would be beside himself, sobbing, clinging to me, begging me not to tell his parents because he was so fearful of the beating they would give him.

It was heartbreakingly difficult for me to know what the right thing was to do.

This story is an extreme example of a child that has had zero experience of any sort of containment. In dealing with these types of cases you quickly learn, as a teacher, how to reign in your anger or frustration and find more healthier ways of helping your students…but it’s not always easy.

So this skill of learning containment has been an ongoing process for me over the last twenty years or so. While I feel I have learnt (most of the time) not to fight fire with fire…. my self-containment in the sense of soothing myself is still pretty dismal.

In fact, I’d go as far as saying I still pretty much suck at it.😨 

For years I have relied on cigarettes and phoning friends\family to help me regulate and calm down after a hurtful or shaming situation. I don’t believe that there is anything wrong with reaching out for support in these types of situations and in many ways, it can be healthy. Twelve-step programmes are actually based on training people to start reaching out for help when they feel triggered or stressed rather than isolating themselves. But frankly, after years of relying on others, I’m ready for the next step now….I desperately want to be able to deal with my own emotions without the need for my aids.

So Saturday morning I found myself in such a space.

Dealing with an incredibly hurtful situation that had happened and trying to sift through all the negative emotions that it had created in me.

Instead of simply allowing my emotions to exist, I then beat myself up with guilt, more anger and self-judgment for not handling the situation better.

(The exact thing I told this parent not to do with her child)

Fact of life: Sometimes your head gets things but your heart takes longer to catch up. So in an attempt to self-soothe, I ….umm….took to defrosting my freezer – … manually with a knife.🔪🔪 . As I hacked away, manically for about 20 minutes my cleaner Zukie said nothing, and just cleaned quietly around me.

(Either she knows me too well….or she feared for her life😬 )

Eventually, after I managed to accidentally slice my thumb on some ice I took that as my sign that meditation might be a more ….mmmmm constructive way to deal with my emotions.

I took myself off to meditate and wrote for about an hour.

For the last couple of years, all of my writing has been in the form of letters to God. It’s kind of my way of praying. So I implored God to tell me why I kept experiencing the same hurtful situation over and over again as clearly I was meant to be learning something?

(I know this much..if the common denominator in repetitive negative situations is always you….then it’s definitely your lesson.)

I resorted to pleading.

“Please just tell me what this life lesson is I’m begging you …..I’ll listen I promise. I am just so exhausted of trying to figure this one out.”

The worst part was I had agreed to help my new friend Paul with another photo shoot for one of his students later that day and it was the absolute last thing I wanted to do. My eyes were puffy slits and I frankly all I wanted was a ‘black closet’ day to regenerate my energy and my self-esteem. Roxy was nowhere to be seen, plus ‘she’ had agreed to wear a bikini .

(I haven’t posted in a bikini for at least a decade)

I was silently cursing Roxy for her over-eagerness be brave.

(Sometimes she is a bit much😤.)

But I had made this commitment to Paul so pulling out wasn’t an option. Interestingly enough the chapter I am currently reading in my Writers Way book is called “Recovering your strength”. A quote that particularly stood out for me was this:

“Pain that is not used profitably quickly solidifies into a leaden heart which makes any action difficult. When faced with loss or pain…immediately take one small action. “

So I didn’t cancel the shoot and my action was to just keep moving forward👣👣👣.

It truly was an amazing day.

I had so much fun, the student was awesome and Paul was hilarious (as usual).

FYI Can I just say as perfectly effortless as my sand dune shots may seem…they were not. Running around waving a random piece of chiffon above your head for what seems like FOREVER is exhausting and you do feel a lot like an absolute idiot! 😂But I guess sometimes it pays to do things that make you feel stupid because I absolutely loved these shots. When we got back that evening Paul and I were looking through all the unedited photos and I was just blown away at how gorgeous they were. Not a puffy eye in sight. I tried to compliment Paul on his beautiful work but he is good at deflecting compliments and simply said…” It’s all you. This is how people see you.” I have to admit something shifted in me that night. Maybe the internal version of how we look really isn’t as bad as we so often think it is?

So I’m not too sure what the actual point of this post is. It’s a little all over the place… I certainly didn’t get any grand answers or insightful clarity to my questions this weekend.

(Although I have faith that I will get them eventually).

I was however reminded that no matter how many curve balls or hurtful situations life throws at you ….life goes on. I have a choice to give up and go home or I can turn up and smile for the camera. As always, I’ll keep smiling.😁😁😁

Thanks, Paul for an awesome week of beautiful photos.🙏❤💕💖

As always…if you got this far….thanks for listening 😘🤗
💘
Gayle

🤗😘😍🐝🌸🌼🌺🌹🌱