Emotional Awareness

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Does anyone have good (inexpensive) resource suggestions for emotional awareness? My son is 7 and has almost a binary approach to emotions: positive (happy)and negative(sad). We have made some inroads on fear this summer, and we also have had a little progress on separating sorrow from fear. He can answer some theoretical questions correctly, but in real life he combines them into upset.

I had a whole curriculum planned for this summer, but was thwarted because his special interests had changed. Whenever that happens you kind of have to let him script the role playing for awhile before he lets you deviate it to create teaching moments for the characters in his role play.

I managed to make do with some natural teaching moments. I would articulate the appropriate emotion when applicable. I also added some new scenes to his role play once he allowed me.

We have also taken some books out of the library and he has some at home, but this is really something we struggle with.
It just is not clicking.

What was the curriculum you had to bag? Some folks here have used the How Does Your Engine Run? program with some success. We haven't used any one program in particular. Our OT helped DS make an emotional speedometer with the numbers 1 through 5 on it. 1 is Calm, 2 is Happy, 3 is nervous, 4 is A Little Angry, 5 is Really Angry. The speedometer has a pointer onit that DS can move to indicate how he is feeling. At home and with the OT we used the speedometer a lot, trying to remember to ask DS "what's your number" not only at times when he is obviously 3, 4 or 5 but also when he appeared to be at a 1 or 2. We've been doing this for several months now. At first when his number was high, I would show him the speedometer and he would just get more angry but as we kept doing it he became able to move the pointer to the number he was feeling. Then we started talking about what we could do when our number is high to get it back down to a 1 or a 2. We still have a lot of work to do on actions to take to get anxiety or anger under control but he is much better at telling us how he is feeling. We don't really even use the visual aid anymore, I just ask him what his number is. If he is high and can't verbalize he will hold up the number of fingers he is feeling. I think we need to expand the effort a little and start catching his emotional state as he is ramping up. Right now I usually catch it when he is already to a 4 and I'd like to help him learn to identify when he is on his way to a 4, although it still happens so dang fast sometimes, 2 to 5 in nothin' flat. That is the challenge, I guess!

It was not a published curriculum. I probably should not have used such a formal word. I had a whole role play thing planned based on what his then current special interests were. I had worked on it while he was at school, and just in the very beginning of the summer his special interests morphed so all my role play topics were kaput. They were very specific, and tailored, which I thought was brilliant to do at the time. Of course once he was not in school, and he was home 24/7, I couldn't really plan a new one.

I might have been able to adapt it somewhat, or at least some of it, but when he starts role playing based off a new special interest, he allows no one to change the script he develops. So, basically after the whole summer, I have been only able to add things in the last few days. So, I am just kind of working on the fly to introduce lessons involving emotional awareness scenarios now. Before that it was very repetitive, very short scripts of his design, that run all day, with me having assigned lines.

So, it isn't that I am looking for a full fledged curriculum, so much as a way to connect him to emotions that is not pedantic and boring, but on the other hand where I have a -hook.- We haven't even been able to talk about emotions without him getting upset with me until about a year or so ago.

The speedometer is a good idea. I have a volume temp thing from 1-10, so he will have an idea of how that works,

My daughter and I talk about characters on television. I can pause it and say, "does she look disappointed to you?" etc. Sometimes we'll talk about the difference between being angry and feeling hurt, etc. and I'll ask which she thinks it is. Sometimes I'll ask why she thinks the character is feeling this way. It's become a fun game and we're getting into a lot more complex questions than when we started.
J.

http://www.sst-institute.net/

My son did this program (which wasn't cheap, but our therapist offered it so it was covered by insurance.) What I liked about it was that it had several levels on this particular issue. One described emotional feelings in terms of body responses: heart rate, breathing rate, muscle tension, etc. It was easier to show degrees of feelings as expressed in these ways. Another was matching phrases with the correct feeling. Another task was figuring out words for the degrees of different types of feelings, they used what they called an "emotionometer" like a thermometer.

This is a tough and really important lesson, good luck to you.