SWEET EMOTION

PREFACE There are many paths to healing and this is one. My story begins a couple of years ago when my family was turned upside down because of the actions of an overwhelmed inexperienced first grade teacher. At the time, my son was a happy, healthy, well-adjusted seven-year-old. Then, in an instant, he was not. He was a terrified, screaming, aggressive shell of the boy he had been just weeks prior. As we learned what it meant to live with this new version of our son, who he later named Tsunami Son, I began to break under the pressure of navigating psychological evaluations, physical, therapy, and endless school meetings for my son, all with my infant daughter strapped to my chest. Within four months of his world crumbling trauma, I woke up with crippling sciatic pain rendering me unable to walk or meet my own needs, let alone those of my children. This occurred without a whisper from my body in advance, without an injury or inciting physical event. I simply broke. I was asked by a team of medical experts to accept that my new life included chronic pain, mind numbing medications, and a devastating decrease in physical ability that would last forever. In many ways, my physical pain mirrored my son’s emotional pain. It represented my intense fear that I would fail on my quest to support his healing and my grief for his lost innocence. I was also angry at those who refused to see the boy he once was. As he cowered in a corner or lashed out, they rewrote his story—one of deficits and permanent struggles. But deep in my gut, I knew that wasn’t his truth. For months, I was the only one who could hold both who he was and who he could become. It nearly broke me. I was his ally, his advocate, his grounding cord. Today, my son is nine—charming, gregarious, making friends wherever he goes. I can hike, practice yoga, and play on the trampoline—all things doctors once told me I’d never do again. The same tools healed us both. I spent hundreds of hours researching trauma, social-emotional development, and healing. We tried, modified, and discarded countless strategies. What remained became the foundation of our family’s healing. From darkness we never expected, we found each other and walked out—hand in hand. This book holds our story and the tools we used to rebuild well-being, connection, and calm within chaos. It’s a guide to becoming the parent you want to be. Whether you’re preventing hardship or already deep in it, these pages offer a lantern to light your way INTRODUCTION The purpose of this book is to give you the tools and techniques you need to teach your children how to process their emotions in a healthy way. As many of us have been raised in a culture of emotional repression, you will also be learning these tools and techniques along the way. Those of us who are parents now did not receive explicit instruction on what to do with a feeling. By example, through movies, television, our communities and even our families, we learned that men who show emotion are weak and women who show emotion are hysterical. We have been taught to stuff our emotions below layers of food and alcohol, long walks and intense venting sessions. While all of these are valid ways to cope when you have a big feeling, none of them will clear the feelings. To clear a feeling involves bringing it into conscious awareness, acknowledging it, allowing it and ultimately releasing it. When a feeling has been properly cleared, a lightness takes its place. Others describe it as a calmness or the edge of a smile. When you use the techniques in this book, you will find that there is a tremendous benefit to releasing low vibration emotions such as shame, guilt, and anger and having the space these once took up fill with lightness. This is not going to be your average parenting book but if you embrace it, the process of becoming a feelings family will change your life and the lives of your children forever...