Restart by Doreen Dodgen-Magee

Author:Doreen Dodgen-Magee [Dodgen-Magee, Doreen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2021-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

DEALING WITH OVERWHELMING EMOTIONS AND TEACHING SELF-SOOTHING

When we feel overwhelmed it’s easy to become dysregulated. Our heart speeds up, we feel agitated or “jumpy,” we can’t think clearly, and our emotions are right at the surface. Sometimes the opposite happens and we shut down, we can’t breathe well, and our minds go blank. Whichever way we, or our children, go, it’s a difficult reality to live through.

One of the ways that we use to get back to a sense of “normal” is by having freedom to leave situations that overwhelm us and get into spaces that help us feel calm. We reach out to someone who will listen or help us laugh. We run errands or shoot hoops or do whatever our calendar reminds us we’ve committed to and, over time, we find ourselves coming back to center. In this time of shutdown, we haven’t gotten to do these things, and we’re all less regulated than ever as a result.

This is a scary and uncomfortable state of being for children … especially when they have little control. They feel the full weight of their feelings but sometimes don’t have language or skills to express them. They feel stimulation will actually calm them so they seek it out nonstop. They’re “not tired” (they are never tired) when we can clearly see that they can barely keep their eyes open. Their overwhelm causes them to feel vulnerable, which can make it very tricky for them to want to acknowledge. Even if they did, COVID-19 has left them bereft of ways of working through it.

Children have been sheltering with a fixed number of people in only a few spaces, which has severely limited the options they have for getting their feet under them when overwhelmed. They’ve missed out on a lot of the kinds of physical and social activities that would normally offer them release, and there aren’t many non-digital distractions within their reach.

It’s important to note that long before the pandemic had us relying on our screens for nearly everything, our devices were shown to create high levels of emotional and physiological dysregulation. This means that too much time with a screen can leave us feeling overstimulated and jittery, agitated and out of touch with our bodies. We’ve acclimated to such high levels of stimulation, however, that we feel overwhelmed when we try to step away from it. Especially for kids, they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

For far too long we’ve substituted stimulation for soothing. We’ve told ourselves that a couple of hours gaming, or Pinterest, movies, videos, or scrolling through social media at the end of the day “calms us down.” In reality, however, all it does is distract us from our disease and reinforce the reality that we don’t have what we need to comfort or regulate ourselves on our own. This is especially true for children.

If I want to run a race and my stomach is empty, I could make the choice to guzzle a bottle of water to make it feel full and stop growling.

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