3 Keys To Help Your Child Tolerate Frustration And Emotional Pain
Just as there are sunny days and other days in which clouds cover it, there are also days or moments where we feel joy and others in which it is frustration, sadness or pain that floods us.
To achieve mental health, it is essential to prepare for all these situations. For years, positive psychology has done a lot of harm in this regard, encouraging and directing us to bury the pain deep within us. as if there were a place where unpleasant emotions could magically disappear just like that
All emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant, involve a change in the electrical frequency of the cells and their chemical composition. This process is essential for survival and adaptation to life. Unpleasant emotions, which are not negative, cannot simply be buried in the underworlds of our interior; On the contrary, this leads, in the long run, to a high probability of presenting pathology.
Therefore, it is not about not hurting, but about accepting and learning to manage the pain. Maybe everything would be easier if from a young age we knew the world from a prism and a real perspective which would show us the world as it is, helping us and providing us with healthy channels to handle these types of situations to which each and every one of us will be exposed throughout our entire existence.
Our children look at each other, know each other, and know the world through their primary caregivers. Their brain is born unformed, and it is through learning, through their caregivers, that they acquire these beliefs and knowledge about themselves and the world around them.
We are your companions and your guides on a path of wonderful discovery, we are teachers of teachers where most of us have probably never looked at the world in this way but where thanks to the neuroplasticity of the brain, instead of anchoring ourselves in the world of guilt and error, we can learn, we can incorporate this information into our networks and provide to our children beliefs and channels to face the incredible challenge of life from safety.
1. Explain that emotions are important and necessary
Each and every one of our emotions are our most precious messengers They bring us invaluable messages, sometimes pleasant, others not so much, but all of them are necessary and natural and all of them have a function. Accompany them in each of them and provide a model of acceptance and support from calm.
If as an adult you are dysregulated or tired, first allow yourself your time and care and only when you are calm provide this accompaniment.
2. Tell them from a young age that suffering is part of life
And tell it to him in a way that he can understand. Use examples from the animal kingdom and nature.
I am going to tell you a great secret that you can keep in your heart forever and it is important that you listen carefully: suffering is part of life and it is natural. Just as trees bear fruit and other times shed their leaves… just as the butterfly before being able to fly suffers the darkness of the cocoon, and the effort of breaking it… Just as the bear remains still, asleep and protected in winter before running around in spring… just like the tree breaks its structure in order to grow…
Just like the eagle, when it is 40 years old it has to make the decision to let itself die or renew itself and if it decides to renew itself it will have to take refuge in a nest and hit its beak and it will take five difficult months until it has a new beak and new feathers that allow it to fly. again…
You know, just like all this, human beings also go through pleasant and unpleasant moments, that’s how it happens to us and it happens to you too, and it will happen to you and it’s natural, and I love being by your side in your joy, when your sun shines and also I love accompanying you in your pain, when the clouds cover it.
3. Act as a model, practice it with him and offer him an outlet
We are going to lie down on the grass or on the beach or on a park bench, face up looking at the clouds, and we are going to imagine that the cloud is the pain, that it is the suffering, the discomfort. It doesn’t seem to move, right? It seems like it will never go away.
The truth is that if we look we can see how slowly, little by little, the cloud follows its natural course and moves until finally it always ends up leaving.
Remind him or her of this story every time he or she feels pain and accompany him or her by reminding him or her that he or she is always bigger than his or her cloud bigger than his discomfort, that the sun will end up rising and that, in the meantime, you will always be happy to stay by his side.
In conclusion…
If we accompany the child in both pleasant and unpleasant emotions, we naturalize them, we help them identify them because they do not know them, we label them, we give them a physical form, we give them examples and we give them a model and tools to manage each of them. these situations, and we do it from joy and love, the wonderfully plastic child’s mind will develop with resilience capable of facing any frustration or pain from self-love and of course let’s not forget that together with this great challenge we will make millions of mistakes as caregivers because that is how human beings are and because error is inherent to learning, and this is also natural.
The fact is that, although as caregivers or guides there are situations in which we deregulate, if most or at least 30 or 40% of these occasions we can accompany, support or even repair, this will be enough for the child to incorporate these tools that, without a doubt, will be the best inheritance that we can leave both to our children and to humanity itself.
