Feelings Are Real

Kristi Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135892272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

This guide helps children meet challenges, use existing skills and develop new ones, reach out to adults and peers, and develop an inner sense of character. It stresses working both alone and with a group to learn constructive ways to express feelings. The end of each activity is designed to help teachers evaluate that activity.

Contains rationale, orientation, structure, organization, and manual for each of the two workbooks. Step-by-step procedures provided for each session.

Part I

Rationale and Orientation

Feelings are Real Group Activities for Children

Group support is especially important for children and youth. This is evidenced in their natural affiliations with peers and with family. Both of these groups can either facilitate or reduce the youth’s prosocial behavior. A positive impact can be made on children and adolescents if the power of the peer group can be utilized to assist children and adolescents while they develop their identity, self-esteem, emotional assertiveness, and coping skills. Intensive group work will be effective in helping school-age youth develop their ability to adapt to the world. Further, each child’s competence will be strengthened by involving the major components of the child’s world: the school, the home, and the community. Therefore, school-age children who experience emotional, social, and family difficulties will be the target population for this intervention project which will focus on group procedures as the primary method of developing healthy, adaptive behaviors.

Rationale

Winning in the world can be equated with succeeding by adapting. The child who is winning will tend to show certain characteristics. The child will have social skills appropriate to the age level, such as relating to peers and feeling at ease. A sense of competence or ability to master stressful situations will be demonstrated by the child. Therefore, the child who sees a problem as a challenge instead of an insurmountable barrier is displaying competence and selfconfidence. Additionally, the child’s willingness to utilize adults as resources or teachers is showing a sign of winning as well as developing a sense of independence, defined as being capable of making decisions based on internal reasons not on external influences. Finally, the winning child is achieving and receiving recognition from family, school, and friends which can include hobbies, school, and activities. The child needs to feel the sense of mastery while developing skills which are recognized by others. The winning child is meeting challenges, using skills, developing new skills, reaching out to adults and peers, and developing an inner sense of character.

Why Intervene?

The decade of the 80s witnessed the change of and perhaps the undermining of the natural support systems of the child. Family roles and relations have changed and have resulted in increasing fragmentation in the lives of families. This is evident in the increasing number of single-parent homes, the shortage of adequate child care, the number of children who “mind the house” until one or both of their parents return home from work late in the evening. For the child, the result may be an increasing sense of impermanence in daily life: some call this ever-changing routine stress.

School adds to the demands of the child’s world. The education system is being criticized for falling short of goals of education. In turn, the school pushes the child to prove that a certain quantity of knowledge is attained. School, the major developmental task of childhood, becomes a source of frustration, demand, and stress. The media makes clear computer skills are a prerequisite for success at school. Thus, the child is in the center of two crucial systems both producing stress, turmoil, and demands without providing challenge or safety.

The peer group is subjected to a “pseudosophistication” from the media. For example, the speeding up of the child’s development is seen when a twelve-year-olds fashionable dress is to appear eighteen-years old. Many of the privileges formally reserved for the teen years have become boring for even the preteen. Perhaps, this is because the child’s knowledge about the world has increased due to the media and the pervasive attitude that children can understand whatever an adult can: in reality children are more similar to adults in their feelings than in their understanding. This can make much of the child’s knowledge about the world incomprehensible to the child at a level of deep understanding. This partition between actions and understanding is confusing and contributes to stress for the child.

Family, school, and friends—all natural support system— have been rendered less effective during this last decade. The child experiences a fast-paced, ever-changing world in which reactions are expected and given quickly. The child/ adolescent appears grown-up because they have copied ways of dealing with the world from media, teachers, friends, and parents. The future of these natural supports can be in the lack of time and/or encouragement given to the child to construct actively an individual realty. Group support can provide a place to learn about feelings.

Why Group?

Children have needs for belonging, security, recognition, and affection. Interactions with other children can help to meet these needs through support, shared feelings, and ideas. As children in a group form trusting relationships with the group leader and members, they begin to feel more accepted by others and less alone in coping with their problems. Group problem solving teaches decision-making skills and provides models of new behaviors. In addition, the support of the group can take away feelings of isolation. The skills learned in a group apply to all human interactions. These skills are among the basic skills which people most possess: communication, identification of feelings, empathy with others, social skills, definition of goals, and self-esteem.

Yalom (1975) believed that nine factors operate in a group and contribute to its effectiveness. He believed group cohesiveness, defined as feelings of belonging and acceptance, solidarity and loyalty, support, and caring, helps make a group cohesive. The more cohesive a group is, the more valuable the group becomes. In a group, persons act the way they do in real life. This dimension of a group is called interpersonal learning and allows that the group can play a pivotal role in attempts to change. Another function of a group is advice/ guidance/information. Initially, the group leader, or facilitator, is primarily responsible for this function. Later, the group members become altruistic in giving mutual help and support. In addition, a person can learn by identification/imitation/ modeling. The group member can learn from the facilitator, the other group members, and norms or rules of the group. Yalom also believed that groups have universal qualities and offer hope to their members. The structure of a group can allow some members to re-enact family relationships. For example, if certain members viewed the leader as the authority then those members may react to that person like they reacted to their mother/father. Finally, group provides the catharsis, or a venting of one’s emotions. In a group setting, catharsis can be safe and channeled into appropriate expression of feelings.

Theoretical Orientation

The primary objective of this manual is to help group leaders teach children how to identify, label, understand, and cope with their feelings. Essentially, the feelings level, or heart, interacts with the cognitive level, or mind, through the behavior, or actions. So, heart talks to mind through our actions. This means we can simultaneously possess different levels of understanding. That is, we can cognitively understand and be able to explain an event. If our understanding stops at the cognitive level some psychologists consider that the defense mechanism of intellectualization is being utilized. The problem with intellectualization is that we may not be able to truly understand our feelings or to cope with our feelings. At other times we may experience a feeling that is strong and heart-felt. Some people refer to this as a gut- level feeling. At the same time, we may have little or no understanding or explanation of our feelings. Some theoretical orientations refer to this as intuitive, meaning felt or sensed without the use of logical process or reasoning. The link between our mind and heart is our actions. In some ways, we watch our behaviors and feel their consequences. During this process our feelings and our thoughts begin to connect.

Research Base

The theoretical orientation just described is eclectic but it mainly draws ideas from Rational Emotive Therapy (RETT) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). I will describe briefly each of these theories. Each theory has an extensive literature in texts, scientific research, and popular psychology books. Leaders who want more information on a given topic will not have problems finding it.

Rational Emotive Therapy (RET)

Albert Ellis (Dryden & Ellis, 1988) is the major theoretician associated with RET. “The focus is on working with thinking and acting rather than primarily with expressing feelings. Therapy is seen as an educational process … teaching strategies for straight thinking” (Corey, 1986, p. 209). In RET our thoughts, emotions, and actions are viewed as being an interactive system. An emphasis is placed on rationality. People can develop irrational thoughts or beliefs. If this occurs, their emotions and actions become a response to their irrational beliefs. The key to changing behaviors is to change faulty beliefs. The change period is assisted by a therapist who accepts the client, listens to the clients, and helps to identify irrational beliefs. Homework and bibliotherapy are tools used to help the client change. The client is active and works on changing feelings and behavior. The therapist is directive and encourages the client to do new things and act in new ways. Through this active approach the client can utilize new learning. RET utilizes behavioral techniques of rewards and penalties. Negative emotions may be the result of irrational thinking which can be changed by challenging the irrational thoughts, replacing them with rational thoughts and then acting in a rational manner.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Beck (1976) wrote that cognitive therapy ‘‘consists of all the approaches that alleviate psychological distress through the medium of correcting faulty conceptions and self-signals … We get to the person’s emotions through his cognitions” (p. 24). In this approach, emphasis is placed on examining what the person cognitively tells the self while in a given situation. It is our cognitive interpretation of an event that causes our feelings. The therapist helps the client re-examine the situation for other alternative explanations of a situation.

A variation upon cognitive therapy is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Again, the focus is that our cognitions mediate the world. When our behavior is maladaptive or our emotions negative, then CBT suggests examining our cognitions for possible sources of distortion. CBT with children concentrates on developing effective mediating strategies for the control of behavior. Meichenbaum (1977) discusses a three part process of change. First, the child learns self-observation. This includes listening to our cognitions and to what we tell ourselves (selftalk) about a situation. Second, the child learns to change the self-talk and to replace it with self-talk that is helpful in coping with a situation. Third, the child learns new behaviors for a situation. In CBT the therapist acts as an educator about cognitions and perceptions and as a model of new, coping behaviors.

Braswell and Kendall (1988) described a number of CBT interventions used with children. Problem-solving training is one technique these authors discuss. An early example of problem-solving is the “turtle” technique which was developed to help emotionally disturbed young children stop responding impulsively in social situations. Robin, Schneider, and Dolnick (1976) described their “turtle” technique as composed of 4 phases: (1) the “turtle” response consisting of lowering one’s head and pulling in one’s limbs as a response to threat, (2) relaxation training, (3) learning to find alternative solutions along with their consequences, and (4) social rewards for a child who uses the “turtle” response. Problem-solving can be used with families as well as with children.

A second CBT intervention is verbal self-instructional training defined by Braswell and Kendall (1988) as “selfdirected statements of an internal dialogue that an individual uses to guide himself/herself through a problem-solving procedure” (p. 182). These authors described their method of teaching self-instruction as (1) clinician models self instruction, (2) child performs the task while clinician verbalizes self-instruction, (3) child solves problems while verbalizing self-instruction, and (4) child completes tasks using covert self-instruction. This self-instruction serves as a cognitive mediator of behavior. It also can be a source of feedback about performance. In self-instruction the child needs to learn the concepts behind self-talk and not merely to repeat memorized words. Children appear to best accomplish this goal by learning self-instruction utilizing a familiar task.

A third CBT intervention is attribution retraining, or the investigation of the children’s causal explanation of behavior. Attributions of causality must be based in reality and be accurate if they can serve to guide the child’s behavior in an adaptive way. Attribution retraining tries to get the “child to take more individual credit for his/her achievements, thus encouraging the child’s experience in positive control and/ or self-efficacy” (Braswell & Kendall, 1988, p. 191). At the same time some children find internal causes for situations or events truly outside themselves, such as a parent’s divorce. The children who are internalizing the attribution will blame themselves for the divorce. In this case the clinician must help the child seek a realistic and external attribution of causality.

In CBT the clinician uses modeling of behaviors. The child learns by watching the adult perform, or model a behavior. The clinician also uses role-playing to teach social behaviors. Again, the learning is based upon experience gained through the role-play. The clinician uses traditional behavioral techniques of rewards, and response cost. CBT emphasizes completing homework as a means of changing behavior.

Summary

This manual is concerned with helping young children identify, label, and understand their feelings. The premise is that information regarding feelings can be taught. This is supported by RET and CBT . Feelings also are influenced by cognitions which can be either rational or irrational. We can teach people to identify irrational cognitions and to replace them with rational ones. The person’s actions will reflect the conditions. All three—feelings, cognitions, and actions— are linked. According to Ivey (1988) “many authorities argue that our thoughts and actions are only extensions of our basic feelings and emotional experience” (p. 109). A developmental perspective would suggest that we begin by teaching feelings which will build to a greater understanding of cognitions and actions.

Part II

Structure and Organization

Group Essentials

Background

The leader needs to understand the characteristics of the age group with which they are working. A child development text or a text on childhood psychopathology can be a good refresher for many group leaders. This manual will describe briefly characteristics of children at the age levels for each designated group.

Mechanics of Beginning

Prior to a group beginning the leader should

1. obtain a place for the group to meet. Be certain the room is appropriate to the age, size, and number of children that are expected.
2. obtain supplies of materi...