Let’s face it – stuffing my feelings for most of my life has caused considerable difficulties for me both personally and professionally, particularly given that Happy and Sad have predominantly been behind the steering wheel. It’s like driving a car with two gears. Except each gear has varying degrees; put on the song Rocky Top and it’s like Happy on steroids or watch a tender movie and Sad becomes waterworks.
So Depression seemed a natural suitor. At 35, he knocked on my door and I obliged. My father had passed away, the man that I thought I was going to marry thought otherwise, I thought I was going to lose my house and one of my best friends moved. Repeated pleas from my mom and friends led me to counseling.
Fear and Anxious greeted me in the counselor’s waiting room and kept me company while I waited. The counselor’s warm smile and gentle disposition seemed to ease them both. She asked, “What brings you to counseling today?” I recited the series of events to her.
She then asked me, “So, how do you feel about this?”
I said, “I don’t know.” As odd as this may sound, I truly did not know. And then the same scenario was repeated two more times with the exact question and the same answer. Doesn’t she have anything more in her bag of tricks other than ONE question? I thought. I stopped going because clearly she didn’t have any idea of what she was doing.
Several years later my interest in Anger began during my 8-and-a-half year involvement with the juvenile court system. It seemed every child who entered the court had a chip on their shoulder. While this chip manifested in different ways, Anger was its common denominator.
Determined to proactively help children before they became part of the juvenile justice system, I pursued and completed my master’s degree in counseling at age 51. I researched three main areas; anger, social skills and biblotherapy (a story with therapeutic value). One of my biggest epiphanies came when I found Saarni’s Theory of Emotional Competency. I felt like I had discovered the Holy Grail! It had the following eight components:
• Awareness of one’s own emotions,
• Ability to discern and understand other’s emotions,
• Ability to use the vocabulary of emotion and expression,
• Capacity for empathic involvement,
• Ability to differentiate subjective emotional experience from external emotion expression,
• Adaptive coping with aversive emotions and distressing circumstances,
• Awareness of emotional communication within relationships, and
• Capacity for emotional self-efficacy.
I read them and re-read them again. I only had one component – the capacity for empathic involvement. In that moment I flashed back to when I was 35 years old and sitting in the counselor’s office. I replayed the events in my mind as to what had happened and I became painfully aware that it had not been the counselor who had not known what she was doing but it had been me.
My passion is to help children develop connections with themselves and others so they don’t turn out to be middle aged and not know what they are doing.
The Stellar Way, Discovering the Star Within, is a product of years of researching, creating and testing the bibliotherapy-based curriculum. In two separate studies it was found to be statistically significant in the areas tested. It’s a reflection of both personal and professional experiences and has been designed to ameliorate anger long before it becomes problematic. The supplemental guide is coming soon! Find this book on Amazon at http://a.co/2NS5NXn
Tomorrow’s blog: The Beginning
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