Name It To Tame It: Telling Stories to Calm Big Emotions*

Your child falls and breaks her leg.  
Or watches a friend get bullied at school. 
O loses a beloved pet. 

Distressing things happen to all of us, but when you are a child, you do not have the brain development to process what has happened to you without help. 

Sometimes as parents, we feel that it would be better to take a child's mind OFF a distressing event and so we avoid talking about it.  We think we are helping them by NOT discussing hard things.  But the opposite is actually true.  

I observed this first hand with my girls a couple of months ago.  My husband and I took them for a ride in the park, and he had an accident on one of the girls' scooters.  He got banged up pretty badly--the impact against the concrete baracade literally knocked him out.  After getting daddy bandaged up and in bed to rest,   I turned to check on the girls.  They were still quite distressed!  Even though I was certain that he did not need a trip to the ER, the girls were plotting a takeover by preparing to call an ambulance to pick him up! 

I remembered this concept and we stopped to talk about what had happened.  They both had witnessed different parts of the event, so I asked them to relate what they remembered. We all filled in the details and named what we had seen.  They asked me again how I knew dad was OK as well as other questions about injuries.  Then they circled back, telling the entire story again. By the end of our conversation, they had grown considerably calmer. Over the next week, they returned to the story of dad's fall a few more times.  Each time they talked about different parts of what happened, visibly comforted by the effect of relating the sequential story.  So...

Neurologically, why does story telling help? 

Trauma is expereinced in a part of the brain that allows for a quick emotional response that is prepared to take necessary steps to survive, NOT the part of the brain that can logically tell a moment by moment story.  Actually, it has been shown that when trauma happens, the language centers of the brain have decreased capacity.  By encouraging your child child to talk about what is scary, you are literally re-engaging their left hemisphere, where language happens, enabling their left and right sides to be more integrated.    

*Adapted from Dan Siegel's The Whole Brain Child 



 

Helping Children Integrate Right & Left

Most of us are familiar with right and left brain distinctives.  

We know that... (in general, though its actually much more complex!)  

Left brain involves, rational, logical, orderly, objective thinking. 
We accept that there are "left brained" people, that go into fields like mathematics, engineering, and accounting. 

Right brain involves holistic, intuitive, creative, big picture thinking. 
We accept that there are "right brained" people that thrive as musicians, artists, creative writers, etc...

But what we often don't hear is that we were MADE for both sides to function together as an integrated whole.  Our brains respond to our relational experiences.  People who we call "left brained" may lack empathy, an ability to experience emotion and consider the bigger picture.   People we call "right brained" may lack the ability to think clearly and make rational decisions when they become flooded with emotion. 

As parents, we know that our children's brains are not fully developed, and yet we can foster the integration of both sides, so that our children can learn to grab ahold of the amazing functions that are needed at different times from either side. 

Young children are right-brain dominated.  They learn by sensing things from their environment and they are not yet able to use language to express themselves.  When a child begins asking "why" all the time, you can tell their left brain development is kicking in-- they are looking to make sense of their experiences with words.  

Why is it important to help children integrate right and left?  Because you don't want your children to live in an emotional desert (L-dominated.) But we don't want children to be overtaken by an emotional flood (R-dominated.)  We want them to learn and grow from their difficulties. 

In the next post look for Siegel's first strategy for helping children integrate both right and left sides of their brain.