Walls, Floors, Emotional Ceilings.
The kid’s temper has been on a hair trigger this past week. This morning we finally managed to help him articulate what was causing him to rage and hammer at the radiator covers using this wheel, which asks you to start with the larger emotions at the center and work your way through the more nuanced ones on the outside.
He told us he was feeling Fear, then more specifically that he was feeling Insecure and Worried. Then he told us he was feeling Sadness, more specifically Inadequate and Uninterested.
For the former set of emotions we were able to pinpoint that the concern was — as presumed — about getting sick or spreading the coronavirus to others, and we spent ten minutes giving him as much of an impromptu crash course on virus behavior and epidemiology as we’ve gleaned in the past month. For the latter set, we recognized that part of the problem is that the e-learning setup we’d been provided was a challenge for him, with its tricky interface and finicky drawing/writing tools. His feelings of inadequacy were that he didn’t feel smart enough to do work he found easy in the classroom environment, and this had cascaded into disinterest. We’re trying paper printouts and photo uploads of the finished work for now.
This is today. Tomorrow may be different.
It’s what day-to-day currently is in our household within the Parenting column, which may overlap with yet is distinctive from the School column, is distinctive from the demands of the two Working From Home columns, is distinctive from the Self Care columns, is distinctive from the Coping Mechanism column. I keep thinking of life in terms of charts, graphs, and pictograms as a way of keeping my distance from the data of the pain itself.
Creative Control 