Eluna’s Expert Voices – Importance of Communication Through Grounding & Mindfulness

Have you ever experienced an emotion so big that if feels like your world is turning upside down? We have! Getting caught in a riptide of emotions is universal and lucky for us we have Leah from Camp Mariposa Nashua to walk us through some grounding and mindfulness techniques in the moment. Watch the full video to hear Leah’s clever way to trick your senses in the moment using candy or videos! As Leah says, you’ve got to “train that brain”!

Anger is the Default

We go to anger because it is protective. It makes us be the aggressor instead of being the aggresee. We have power, we are in control. If we get vulnerable then we are attackable. For a lot of the kids that we work with, they’ve been in situations where they are experiencing distress and nobody is coming to them and saying hey:

• “I know you might feel really scared because your parents are arguing.”
• “I know you might feel really scared because you don’t know who is in the building, who your mom or dad has brought in.”
• Whatever situation makes a youth feel like they don’t have control over that situation.

To be angry sometimes you have the power and you can’t be as hurt. Letting them know that whatever feeling you are going to get through, we’re going to get through. You have tools in your toolbox. By avoiding them because we are struggling to handle those big emotions, we’re not really teaching ourselves how to handle those.

Mindfulness in the Moment

Being able to recognize what’s going on…when you are calm. So for kids, not even trying to access that thinking part of your brain until you are calm. Because if you are not calm, those chemicals get the way. It’s a big blockade. Getting them to really work on their behavior in the moment to calm down so that then they can access the thinking part of the brain to process the feeling that they are having.

Distracting Your Senses

I talk to kids a lot and say that your brain gets information from your senses. Things you taste, touch, hear, see, smell. If you are getting stimuli from a sense, you want to distract that sense. If you are listening to something that’s distracting, you can put in a piece of candy and focus on that candy. Then you are bringing the attention away from the other sense that is causing the distress. It’s being able to recognize the feeling in the moment and a skill for it:

• I’m angry > I’m going to have candy
• I’m sad > I’m going to watch a video that makes me feel happy

Not really thinking about the why’s in what’s going on. The ultimate goal is to bring me to calm state so that then I can process that information.

Don’t Think About the Why, Think About the What’s

What is going on for you right now:

• “You are angry and clenching your fists. Can you take a couple of deep breaths so that you are not clenching your fists and you are calm enough to hear me.”

For me it’s always grounding techniques and distracting your brain from whatever it is seeing, hearing, tasting, or smelling that is stressing you. Then trying to explain that by incorporating mindfulness, it’s being preventative. Yes, you are doing all of these actions after you’ve been upset. But, you have to train your brain to know how to do those things.

Click here to see a full list of Expert Voices videos!