Growing Emotional Resilience by Zanni Louise
On ANZAC day our eight-month puppy, Adeline Lemonade, went missing. After looking around for hours, and posting notices on Facebook, the girls and I distracted ourselves by gardening. My nine-year-old planted twenty-five garlic cloves to grow into twenty-five garlic bulbs.
At the end of the day we got a call. Someone had seen my post and was crying as she let me know that our dear little puppy had been hit by a car. The girls erupted into howling.
As a parent of kids grieving a pet, there isn’t a lot of space to feel. You are comforting them and holding space for them as the emotions explode and torpedo. Later, in the quiet, when they’d gone off to school and I was at last on my own, I could cry.
The world of emotions is particularly heightened when you lose a loved one or a pet. The pendulum swings from anger to frustration to despair and none of it makes sense. As my daughter howls herself to sleep, I lay next to her, my body pressure against hers, breathing deeply.
The parents’ role is so much more than making peanut butter sandwiches and changing nappies, I’ve come to realise. Every day, I’m growing and learning and looking at myself and my behaviour through new lenses. Some I like. Some I don’t. There’s been plenty of times I’ve chided myself for losing my temper at my toddler throwing a fit, or my teenager throwing her eyeliner pencil across the room. It’s easy to feel guilty and despairing, and feel like you are doing it all wrong.
But there’s also an opportunity to stop, breathe and ground yourself in the moment. When I do remember to do this, the moment starts to shift.
I remember way back when my daughter was very new and her howls were very loud. I had her wrapped tight and rocked her as I sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah for the twentieth time. Singing kept me grounded. Singing kept me there with her and helped me breath through it.
The crying stopped after the first few months, and communication became so much easier and more joyful. But those early months gave me an understanding of how powerful deep breathing and centering yourself can be. Now, in the midst of a tantrum, I try to go back there to that dark room with Leonard Cohen on repeat.
My cousin, Ameika Johnson, who also happens to be a child psychologist, has helped me understand that what’s happening in these moments for both the child and the parent is emotional resilience. With every cry that’s attended to, and every pain that’s understood, the child learns to listen to their emotions and feels loved unconditionally.
They also come to understand the world of emotions isn’t simple and easy. That pain will be felt but it will be understood and acknowledged. That pain isn’t the end of the world. It changes. Even if it takes a few rounds of Hallelujah.
If parenting teaches you nothing, it will at least teach you this: everything changes. And so goes the famous Buddhist adage: The only constant is change.
Every day, every moment in a child’s early life is different. Development is happening quickly. The emotional world also can change moment to moment. Emotions creep from nowhere, fast, and suddenly you have a Mt. Vesuvius eruption on your hands.
Then you remember: this too will pass.
I’ve long wanted to write a book about the world of emotion and emotional resilience. Over breakfast one day, Ameika and I started talking about these very ideas. How using the natural world as a metaphor for exploring emotions with curiosity and acceptance was a really effective way in. We talked about Kintsugi — the art of repairing a broken bowl with gold glue. How pain changes but it also adds to the texture and beauty of life. We talked about the beauty of the emotional spectrum and how we can create space for all kinds of emotion, no matter how uncomfortable. So began I Feel The World.
We drew on a range of therapeutic approaches when creating this book, including emotion coaching, ACT, narrative therapy and mindfulness. Our hope is it will also help parents to develop a more open and accepting attitude towards their own and their child’s emotions, and provide useful information about the function and value of emotions in their children's lives. Accepting our own emotional world helps us show and be present for our kids when they too are faced with uncomfortable feelings.
I Feel The World is available in bookstores now.
Zanni Louise has authored 30 books for children. She lives with her two daughters on the North Coast of NSW. www.zannilouise.com
Dr. Ameika Johnson is a clinical psychologist with a special interest in the needs of toddlers and preschoolers. She currently works for Brainstorm Productions on the North Coast NSW between parenting a one-year-old.