When life issues are unexpressed or un-acknowledged, they become locked in "frozen blocks of time".

These frozen blocks of time stop the normal grief process denying the child the ability to grieve. It can feel as if life stops & time stands still. The natural flow of feelings is inhibited.

There's no movement forward until the issues are resolved & the feelings released. Suicide, homicide, AIDS, abuse & violence are familiar examples of situations that lead to complicated grief.

5 Steps to Change of Heart:

Step I: Identification of Feelings

You can use any situation to help children understand feelings. This is true for the national violence on September 11 as well as any national or personal disaster. To help children deal with their feelings: acknowledge kids’ feelings, offer them tools to deal w/those feelings & ways to deal with the situation.

Acknowledge feelings

The easiest way to acknowledge feelings is to talk about them. You can talk about your feelings or reflect kids’ emotions.

Model your feelings. Children know when a grownup is upset. It's helpful to share your feelings with your child. You might say,

“When I heard the announcement this morning, I was shocked. It was hard to believe what happened.”

Or,

“When I heard the news, I was afraid something might have happened to my sister in New York City.”

You might elaborate,

“I didn’t realize how upset I was until I realized until I noticed my stomach ache.”

You don’t need to go into great detail about your feelings, just enough to make feelings “discussable.”

Reflect the child’s feelings. Children learn about feelings by having them labeled in context. You can label your feelings or those of the children. Reflect what you think the child is feeling.

For example,

“It looks like you’re sad for all the people who died.”

Or,

“I’m wondering if you’re scared that a plane will crash in our town too.”

When you reflect your child’s feelings, include both the feeling itself & the situation that precipitated it. Let the child know that other people feel similarly.

For example,

“I’ll bet a lot of kids are wondering if more buildings will be attacked.”

Tune in to your kids & focus on their feelings.

Offer tools to deal w/ feelings

Identifying feelings is helpful, but it isn't enough. We need to give children skills to deal w/those feelings. Again we can do that by sharing how we cope & offering kids specific tools.

Share ways you calm yourself. Comment on what you tried & how it worked. You might say,

 “I was so upset this morning that I took a walk in the park. Somehow the trees & bushes helped calm me.”

Or,

“When I heard the news, I cried & cried. Crying helped me feel better.”

Offer your child ways to calm himself or herself. Feelings are valid, however few people want to stay sad or scared or angry. Offer your children several ways to calm themselves.

For example,

“You look scared. Would you like to draw a picture of how you feel, or ask me to hold you?”

Or you might ask,

“What would help you feel safer?”

When you offer ideas, consider what activities have helped your child calm himself or herself. For babies & toddlers, you can simply comfort them.

With older children, however, it's more useful to let your child be in charge.

As children grow older, offer them more ways to calm themselves. A minimum goal might be for children to have as many tools as they are years old.

A 3 year-old would have 3 ways to comfort himself. An 8 year-old, 8 ways.

Children need a variety of tools – auditory, kinesthetic, visual, self-nurturing & creative. Depending on your children’s interests & ages, they could listen to music, run around the block, read a book, take a bubble bath or make up a song.

When feelings are very strong or recur, children need to know how to deal with the situation. Children need tools to deal with the situation & they need to know what adults are doing to keep them safe.

Ideas to deal w/the situation

As children grow, they'll be faced with difficult situations. The more experience they have considering their options, the easier it'll be to act. Doing something almost always helps people cope better.

What children can do. Children need to know what they can do about the situation. Their actions can be practical or symbolic. i.e., if they were planning to take an airplane trip to see Grandma, they could ask you to cancel the trip & call Grandma instead. Or, they could help develop a disaster plan for their school or home.

A symbolic response for a child might be to write a letter to the terrorists & tell them her opinion of their action & what she thinks they could have done instead. The letter its self wouldn't change the situation, but it would focus the child’s thoughts & give her a sense of doing something.

What adults are doing. You can explain that, “The FAA has stopped all air flights until they can figure out how to make things safer.”

It's also the adults’ job to see that schools are safe for children. You can explain that what you see is terrible, but most children grow up w/out experiencing a disaster.

Talking about feelings helps children deal w/their feelings. This is particularly true when you acknowledging the children’s feelings, offering them self-calming tools & ways to deal w/the situation.

Although this article focuses on dealing with feelings caused by a national disaster, the approach can be used in all situations including earthquakes, floods, hurricanes & accidents. Remember, also, to reflect & celebrate pleasant feelings.

by Elizabeth Crary

excerpt:

...So the FIRST STEP in dealing with anger is to resist acting on it & simply to acknowledge that you’re hurt.

This isn't as easy as it sounds.

i.e., if you “get angry” (as we popularly describe it) you don’t really allow yourself to feel your inner hurt. In essence, your outbursts of rage paradoxically hide your inner feelings of vulnerability, so you never recognize the hurt you’re feeling that triggers your hostile reaction.

All the bitterness & hostility is a big puff of smoke, an emotional fraud. It hardens your heart toward others so that you can seal off your own emotional pain.

Years ago I became a very good marksman with a pistol. As I was learning to shoot, I'd be told things like,

“You’re flinching your wrist just before you pull the trigger.”

But did this stop me from flinching my wrist? No, of course not, because at the beginning I didn’t have the experience to discern the subtle muscle actions in my wrist.

How could I learn not to do something unless I'd learned how it felt to do it? So, in order to shoot well, I had to train myself to feel the various tiny muscles of my hand & arm; once I felt them, I could then direct them.

Well, that was all many years ago & I no longer have any use for guns, but I learned a good psychological lesson from it. How can you learn not to respond defensively to a feeling of vulnerability unless you understand quite clearly how it does feel to be vulnerable?

If you're always hiding your hurt feelings behind a protective show of bitter curses (or guns even) you'll never catch on to the concept of emotional restraint.

Or you might feel hurt by someone emotionally close to you & out of fear of losing that person’s “love” you suppress the awareness of your honest inner experiences.

If you do this often enough you can end up convincing yourself that everything is fine & peaceful. In this case the hurt becomes anger anyway, only it becomes unconscious anger.

And so, in reality, you're just deceiving yourself & defiling your relationships when you deny that you have anything to feel angry about.

And before you know it you’re wondering why you’re so depressed. Depression, after all, is often “anger turned inwards.”