In the days immediately following the birth of my first daughter, Maddy, I was a hot mess. I was tired and overwhelmed, but I was something different, too…something panicky. Anytime that I looked at her sleeping, or heard her cry, or touched her skin, this feeling would scramble my insides and make it hard to breathe and I didn’t know why. I was ugly crying the better part of my first week with her, absolutely terrified in ways I’d never before experienced, and I remember the moment, very clearly, when I figured out what was happening. I was sitting on our old burgundy couch, watching reruns of House. Maddy was laying on me, her tiny arms splayed across my chest, and her tiny legs sticking out from a onesie that was much too big for her, and I looked down at her and I finally understood that what I was feeling, for the first time, was the kind of love reserved for a mother towards her child. I couldn’t have easily recognized it, but once I did, I could name it, and once I named it, I owned it. I remembered it. I felt it freely, and it didn’t scare me anymore because I knew what to do with it.
Cut to last summer. I was outside the gates of the camp at which I worked, waiting to be let in by the security guard. My younger daughter, Stella, sat singing in the backseat of our car, quieted, and then said “Mommy, there’s a bear.” I turned to look at her, and then turned to look back towards the entrance of camp, and lo and behold, there was a bear sauntering across the driveway about 30 feet in front of our car. I won’t bore you with the details of the next five minutes, but it involved a frantic security guard, three golf carts, four airhorns, and one SCREAMING child. I tried to console her; none of us were in any real danger, but it’s hard to allay the fears of a five year old who’s just seen a black bear chillin’ out a few yards away from where she sleeps.
Our camp is located in the Berkshire Hills, and really, the bear has as much right to the space as we do. While it was chased away quickly, there was no question it would be back at some point, and so, when things had calmed down, the directors came and told Stella to name it. That way, they reasoned, if they saw it again, they could communicate to each other on their walkie talkies by referring to the bear by name rather than saying “The bear is back on camp.” It seemed like a less alarming alternative in the event that campers or staff overheard their exchange.
Stella named the bear Lovebug, and what followed was pretty interesting. She became immediately unafraid of it. In fact, she spoke of it tenderly, spending the remainder of our summer with the high hope of seeing it once again. I have no doubt that she would not have felt the same if the bear had remained “the bear.” By naming him (her?) Lovebug, she gained a sense of control, and in so doing, she gained a hold of herself.
From both of these experiences, I took away a powerful lesson about managing difficult emotions: the only way to regulate them is to tag them. Step one in this process necessitates enduring them. You have to know what they feel like in your body and what thoughts they trigger in your mind before you can assign them a name, and only when you name them can you implement strategies to manage them. For instance, sometimes I feel a clenching in my chest, a tightening in my jaw, and unrelenting hostility. I call this feeling “anger.” It has its own signature on my mind and body, and when it shows up, I say, “Oh, hi Angry. It’s you again.” Over time, because I’ve developed an arsenal of tools to assist, I understand how to keep it in check and channel it in ways that are productive. I treat it differently than I treat Anxious and Afraid, which sometimes masquerade as Anger, but which require different strategies to manage.
I am trying to teach my girls how to do what I am learning to do. When I see them overcome, I say, “Wow you are having some really big feelings right now. I notice that you are yelling and that you tried to hit me. You must be Angry. When I’m Angry, I take some deep breaths or go read a book or take a bath to help me calm down. Is that something that you think would be helpful? Do you have any different ideas?” I try to draw their attention to the way they are experiencing a feeling, name it for them, and then start a conversation about how to regulate it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but I am confident that going through this process with them will, over time, provide them with a framework for managing their own emotions.