You may already know from Episode 10 that to nurture the child's emotions means to care for their emotional world. We care by accepting, supporting, and helping the child grow. Nurturing our own emotions is similar in this way, but has a set of its own challenges:

• One challenge to this process is lack of acceptance of our own emotions. Often, it is easier to accept that a child — because of their development will and can have emotions, but that we shouldn't. It is easier to accept that a child may have strong feelings and meltdowns, but that we shouldn't have them and, because of that, we repress or deny our emotions. And this gets in the way of nurturing and attending to our emotions.

• The other challenge of working with our emotions as opposed with the child's emotions —— is that over the years we have developed mechanisms to COPE with our emotions, instead of learning ways to PROCESS them. We may have found a way to deal with an emotion, wait for it to go away or to distract ourselves from it, instead of using specific tools and looking at the emotion directly. And so we don't have an understanding of what message a particular emotion holds and specifically what needs to be done about it. This approach comes with a set of strongly ingrained habits and reactions that also get in the way of nurturing our emotions and require intentional practice to reset and retrain ourselves.

We address the first challenge by understanding the value of our emotions. And we resolve the second challenge by learning specific tools of processing emotions and by developing awareness for when we default to our coping habits.

Host: Julia Pappas | Psychologist & Parent Coach

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