What are big feelings?
Big feelings describe strong emotions like anger or sadness. When person feel big feelings, they often haven’t developed the skills to cope with them and may act out or appear to overreact. As caring humans, our job is to help equip people with the tools they need to manage emotions in a healthy way.
Talking to someone about big feelings
If a person is struggling to manage their big feelings, talking to someone about it can be very beneficial. Parents, friends, mentors, and teachers can all help people to talk about their feelings. Psychologists and Counsellors are trained professionals that can help further navigate these feelings. They will listen without judgement to what you or your person are experiencing, validate your feelings, and help to figure out strategies to manage difficult emotions.
Teaching people about big feelings
Here are some tips we can use when teaching people how to manage big feelings:
- Pay attention to cues. Feelings are not always immediately clear.
- Observe your person’s behaviour and try to understand why they are behaving like that. Behaviours are driven by feelings.
- Help your person to give a name to their feelings. Sometimes, it feels better just to be able to identify “I feel sad.” There are a lot of complex feelings out there, and we can help by teaching people about the different feelings that we can have. This can also help people to sooner identify the feeling in future.
- Discuss feelings in other people. Point out and provide examples or reflections on how we may be able to tell that someone else is experiencing these feelings.
- Be a role model. Sometimes it’s hard but focussing on expressing our own feelings in positive and healthy ways is one of the best ways to show a good example to your person.
Strategy: name it, explain it, contain it
This technique can help people to develop their coping skills and emotional awareness and intelligence. There are 3 steps to this technique:
- Name the emotion
- Explain what might have led to the emotion
- Work to contain the behaviours related to that emotion