A common refrain
“They know all the right answers when we do our SEL program, they can recite all the strategies we’ve learned for self-regulation when they’re calm. The problem is, as soon as they’re angry, all those tools are quickly forgotten!”
I hear similar messages all the time from parents, teachers, and many others. They’ve taken all kinds of classes and taught all kinds of lessons about feelings and how to manage them. Yet they all go out the window when things really heat up.
There are three main reasons for this:
Our intellectual brain is offline when we’re dysregulated, so we can’t access newly learned skills. We need more co-regulation, support, and practice while regulated before we’re able to access well-practiced skills in our long-term memory (as opposed to new information stored in short-term memory).
We aren’t teaching interoceptive skills alongside these emotional literacy lessons, we’re primarily teaching general feeling words and strategies. It’s hard for kids to utilize their regulation strategies if they don’t know when they’re feeling dysregulated until it’s too late.
2b) Often adults are trying to use these programs as a behaviour management tool. That’s not what they’re for.We’re focusing too much on academic and intellectual knowledge and not enough on the impact of the environment and our sense of safety. Kids can learn all the feeling words and regulation strategies in the world, but they won’t help much if the adults in their lives aren’t providing co-regulation and helping them feel safe.
I’ve written previously about the first two issues, so here I will address the third: neuroception, felt safety, and emotional regulation.
The body knows (or thinks it does anyway)
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