Resources for Teaching Emotional Regulation

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I wanted to quit hijacking another thread, http://www.wrongplanet.net/posts226600-start15.html so I am posting this.

Momsparky posted the following in response to a query by me asking if she had a list of physical/physiological responses for the various emotions:

As an update, I emailed the Secret Society folks about the cards. I got an autoreply b/c they evidently are having a high response to inquiries due to some TV program that recently aired. I will update this, once I get a response.

Also I wanted to add the following resource:

http://www.do2learn.com/activities/Soci ... index.html

They have some good information on social/emotional skills as well as an emotion color wheel.
http://www.do2learn.com/organizationtoo ... /index.htm

If you look on the left nav bar there are versions you can customize, versions to make a simpler version, or if you do not agree with where a particular emotion was located. (There is some subjectivity here)

Anyone who also has resources, please feel free to add to this thread.

I made a chart for myself to help me stay ballanced. You're welcome to have a look if you like. https://kateuher.wordpress.com/stress-chart/

Kate, this is awesome, thank you!

This is the email response I received from The Social Skills Training Institute, for anyone interested in the Secret Agent Society Game.

http://www.sst-institute.net/us/parents/home/

Thank you so much for all these resources, ASDMommyASDKid! You did a terrific job pulling all of this together.

I did a little more digging on my own. This slideshow is meant for adults, but could be the basis for a "homemade" version of the SSI thing: http://www.slideshare.net/shaan_47/phys ... on-5651975

Another place to look for this is a place I enter with some trepidation: Emotional Intelligence. Some of this is a lot of touchy-feely trendy crap...but hidden in there are real resources for kids who struggle. So, proceed with caution, but I found the following resources mostly helpful and interesting:

Why the Ohio National Guard and the UIC extension/4H has these resources, I don't know - but here they are; I thought they were mostly pretty helpful:
http://my.extension.uiuc.edu/documents/ ... _13-18.pdf
http://ong.ohio.gov/frg/FRGresources/em ... e_8-10.pdf
http://www.ong.ohio.gov/frg/FRGresource ... es_5-7.pdf
http://www.ong.ohio.gov/frg/FRGresource ... ce_2-4.pdf

Somebody who is probably a social worker put together this Pinterest page: http://pinterest.com/jkl5502/feelings/ Haven't looked through it thoroughly, but I bet there is help there.

I happened upon this page - it is a program of animations behind a paywall (makes me suspicious) but you can look at the blog I'm linking for free. Found some interesting resources there? http://www.gostrengths.com/category/blog/gotalk/

These are awesome; I am going to have to go digging through them when the kids are asleep and I can read uninterrupted. I can type in installments; if I try to read one phrase at a time between other stuff, it just fails.

Maybe there will be something that can help. Maybe if this had been around when I was young, things would be different now.

Can some smart mom do us a favor?? Explain the difference between this version of emotional regulation and the version I was taught: "Act happy. Show only happy emotions, and those only very discreetly. Do not permit yourself to express anything that might cause another discomfort; do not allow yourself to acknowledge emotions that might cause unacceptable expressions. Force yourself to be quietly happy at all times."

That's what I think of when I hear "emotional regulation." "Forcing yourself to feel only what people want to see." I hear that what that actually is, is the pathological iron-fisted control of someone who's going to end up permanently playing with their toes in a room with soft walls.

I mean, obviously we can't be running around acting exactly how we feel, or having children that do so. That's simply impossible, unsustainable, completely insane.

I would like this to be true. I would like to stop trying and trying and trying to live under that. I would like there to be something better.

A lot of us, especially women, were trapped by the "act happy" Stepford-wife thing. It's out there - when I grew up, our family mascot was Mr. Spock because he showed no emotion. Yes. Bad. Definitely.

However, many kids (and adults) are not able to step back from their emotions and those emotions direct them. This is not a good thing: emotion usually is in response to only the most immediately accessible information, and if you act on them without thinking, you tend to mess things up. Case in point: DS was at a friend's house and saw that someone was accessing his Xbox profile. He immediately became enraged and started a blanket message to all his friends accusing them of hacking. It didn't occur to him that DH was home probably trying to watch a movie on the Xbox. I stopped him in time, but he could easily have damaged those relationships by acting on that emotion.

So, emotional regulation is about taking a minute to catch your breath and figure out what is really going on before you act on an emotion. First, finding out what the emotion is telling you or why it is there, and second, figuring out if you have all the information you need to act. It is NOT about suppressing emotions, it's more about learning to use them appropriately as one source of information among many.

It is also about learning to listen to your body and what clues it is giving you about how you feel. DS used to misinterpret all emotion as either angry or happy. He didn't understand that he actually was feeling sad or afraid some of the time. This caused him to become exponentially angrier than he actually was whenever he was afraid or sad or embarrassed - for instance, he would get violent. We had to teach him to identify the appropriate feeling from scratch, largely from the physiological responses, but also from the kinds of phrases he used.

Yet another issue is addressing black and white thinking. DS couldn't tell the difference between mildly annoyed and irate - so he went straight to irate. Same went for happy - he was either miserable or ecstatic, never just content. We worked for a long time to help him figure out what it felt like to be in a middle-grade kind of a feeling. It was exhausting for him to be always on the pinnacle of some emotion, I think it gave him a lot of relief to finally figure out that he didn't have to turn it up to 11 every time.

We didn't have to work so hard on appropriate expressions of emotions when DS figured out all the above stuff, it came naturally - but sometimes, that's not the case. Some kids need practice, scripting and direction to appropriately express their emotions - for instance, many, many kids on the spectrum will laugh or smile when upset or nervous. If they can change that, great - if not, they need to know how to express themselves so they don't send other people the wrong message (e.g. "sorry, I sometimes laugh when I'm nervous.")

Some of those Emotional Intelligence exercises do, indeed, edge-a-little Stepfordwards, which is why I wrote about being cautious - but I thought there was some definite positives to some of it.

Momsparky, thank you for finding all of that! I have not had a chance to read through all of it, yet, but it definitely looks there are a lot of things we can adapt and use.

BuyerBeware, I was not thinking of emotional regulation as a Stepford happy happy all the time thing. To me, it means having enough self control to let the rational part of the brain do its thing. When the brain is flooded with too much emotion and someone is prone to impulsivity anyway, (A lot of people on the spectrum have issues with this) the rational part of the brain just does not function as it should. Also, if you have a child that is prone to meltdowns over "little deals" it would be a great help to have him stay calm enough to explain what a proportional emotion would be. It isn't about killing all emotions other than happiness, at least not to me. It is about being able to understand the range of emotions, which also includes the milder versions that some of our kids seem to pass right over.

I do not want a Stepford Child. What I want is a child that can control his emotions well enough to make choices that will not get him into trouble and will not make him easily manipulated by others. Even though my son is young still, (7) there are a couple of kids who like to rile him up, just to see his response, and/or try to get him in trouble. (They moved those kids away from him, but that is not the point.) It doesn't mean (at least to me) that you can only show quiet contentment. Positive emotions show us when we are on the right path. Negative emotions are a warning that something is wrong. We have fear so we don't do dangerous things. We have anger so we know when we have been aggrieved. We have sadness because we care about things and people. Emotional regulation is a tool for acting on these feelings intelligently.

Edited to clarify the bit about (negative) emotions being a warning and to add the purpose for positive emotions.

I lifted this from another thread. I hope that is OK, Momsparky. I think this can help with emotional regulation because it deals with cognitive distortions that can create distorted emotions.

No problem, of course - I wasn't sure if it applied, so I didn't put it here.

Thank you for the distinction. Thank you, um, effusively.

Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.

I think I actually remember knowing or believing this at one time, somewhere in a shadowed happier past. I think I actually remember teaching this stuff to DD11 as a toddler. I guess I lost it somewhere (probably around the time I became a Stepford Person). It's been forgotten.

**watches neural pathways light up like cartoon neon tubes**

Maybe it can come back????

This is exciting. Very exciting. I need to go think about this.

Saw this on NPR and thought it would be useful to this discussion: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/12 ... m-all-over?

Thank you ladies for putting all of this great info together! I just added this thread to the Parenting Index so it will be in easy reach for future reference!

I hesitate to add this to the discussion, because my contribution really just about the expression of emotion, not emotional regulation at all, but some people have already gone in that direction....

My students and I created a giant website about social communication in general. I really started putting it together years ago for my son, but I'm a professor of sociolinguistics, so my students got interested and it just grew and grew. It's not specific to people on the spectrum, but anyone who feels they have social communication challenges. I was thinking mostly about adolescents and adults, but some sections are accessible to younger users. As it says on the website: