As parents, we would do virtually anything to ensure the health and success of our children, sometimes to the detriment of our own health and success. However, there are times when we do things designed to help them that actually make certain problems worse, at least in the short term.
As children, many of us were taught to just “forget about it” or “suck it up” when we faced emotional problems. Of course, in a very short-term sense this could work in some ways to get through a day or two but in the larger scope of life this is almost always an unsustainable way to deal with problems.
If we learned to deal with our emotions by means of avoidance or denial, we are setting ourselves up for much larger problems as adults. Whether we choose to deal with our feelings or not, they do not simply go away with time. If this idea were true, most veterans or children with PTSD could easily function without issue.
Pushing down or denying our feelings or fears can affect virtually every aspect of our lives in some way. Our career, relationships, habits, basically our entire outlook on life is colored by how we deal with, or fail to deal with, our responses to things that happened to us in the past or to the possibility of things that may happen to us in the future.
By the way, that is a pretty fair definition of emotions in general: your personal physiological response to events that have happened, are currently happening, or may happen in your life. If you do not take the time to fix your interpretation of these events and are just avoidant of them, one event, even a thought, can start a chain that will color virtually everything you do.
So how does this all tie into supporting your child when they are in crisis? As mentioned above, your personal means of processing your emotions is going to affect your reactions to relationships, including your children. This will, in turn, affect their style of coping with their own emotions.
So let’s take a typical person who was raised to deny their emotions and has little ability to process them to any degree. Let’s say this person has a daughter, say 15 years old, who is really struggling with friends or peer pressure or some common social struggle. What is that person going to tell their child? Let’s just leave out the implicit messages that have been sent from the parent for 15 years.
Are you going to tell them “just forget it” or “quit being a baby”? Or are you going to say “I know exactly how you feel”?
At very least, those responses are probably invalidating, if not insulting. At worst, they contain the potential to affect how they begin to handle every situation they interpret as a crisis, whether relational, academic, or whatever it may be.
It is our opinion at psychdomain.com that there is a simple way of helping your child, at virtually any age, navigate a perceived crisis. Of course, if your child is making suicidal statements or engaging in self-harm, it is important to monitor them and take them to the Emergency Room if necessary.
The best way that you can support your child is to be there for them. Don’t talk or criticize their judgment or their friends. Don’t even pity them. If you need to talk, making sure your comments are validating, such as “this must really be hard to go through right now.” Let them do most of the talking. If they don’t want to talk do something with them. Go for a walk or a drive. Go fishing or hiking.
While you are helping them through the situation, help them problem solve as much as possible, with the clear message that avoidance is not an option for the long term.
The time you are taking to help them process the situation, will hopefully pay dividends in larger ways down the road, especially if you have helped them learn ways to negotiate the raging waters of being a child. If you are able to do this consistently, you may even learn something yourself.
Stay connected to psychdomain.com to help your family stay afloat in today’s topsy-turvy world.