Freeing your child from negative thinking download

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All aboard the two tracks of the brain train. To introduce this concept see the illustration below , have your child choose an adverse situation to work on. To start, make it an issue that is comfortable for her, rather than one that presses the hot-seat button. Next, go a little closer to home: If your child struggles with negative thinking about grades but has clear thinking about friendships, use the brain train on friendships first.

Beginning with something your child feels accomplished about has added benefit. First, fill in the situation box, and go with the negative track first because that is what your child is used to. Ask him what his negative brain would tell him about that situation, how it would make him feel, and then, given those thoughts and feelings, what he would do.

What would your coaching brain tell you? How would you feel, and then what would you do? Highlight that the same situation—for example, not getting the lead in the class play—has two very different outcomes: One is missing out, and one is getting a great but different experience.

They hold the power in their hands to decide which way to go. You can copy the drawing in the illustration, or your child can draw his own. Which track are you on? It really sounds as if the negative track picked you up and is taking you for a ride.

I wonder what this would look like on the other track. Can we see? After the first few hundred times of feeling this way, parents begin to recognize it as a temporary feeling state—although an uncomfortable one, a moment of agony at times—which is usually forgotten as quickly as the last meal.

We have come to recognize the distinction between facts and feelings. For children, however, like us on a bad day, feelings blur facts like rain on a sidewalk chalk picture.

Everything gets murky. Children are what they feel, and they feel it in every negative fiber of their body. Feelings are temporary. Another thing that will help it pass is if you think about the facts: What was your mistake, and how do you want to fix it? That kind of thinking happens in the smart part of your brain, so when you switch on the smart part, the feelings part fades out.

Giving your child room both to express the intense feelings and also to see them as distinct from her beliefs and predictions will allow her to make the switch to logical thinking. Then you will not need to reassure her that she is not a villain; the facts will speak for themselves. Negativeminded children tend to generalize from the exception rather than from the rule. It takes just one mistake, one data point, to create a negative theory, while it takes many, many good happenings to see a positive trend.

You can think of a few embarrassing or frustrating moments like those in the list below. I forgot my homework two times. Parents can help their child step back and rescue her gifts of smart, rational thinking by not confusing the child with the negativity itself. This strategy of externalizing the problem, first introduced by the founder of narrative therapy, Australian therapist Michael White, defines the problem as the problem, rather than the child as the problem.

No—the real bad guy ruining her day. But what would you call that voice in your head that made you feel that way then? To lightheartedly point out the necessity of viewing the positive positively, have your child name a few successes she admires in others—her favorite film, her favorite athlete, the best day of the year—and describe them pessimistically, using the 3 Ps as her guide. Challenge your child to say the most positive, expansive, permanent, and personal things about her accomplishments, while still being accurate and truthful.

Take the specificizer drawing from Lesson Two on page 52 and reverse it: Start with the small way that your child is describing her triumph or success and help her enlarge on it. Repeat frequently! Children with all-or-none thinking are missing the shades of gray between what is black and what is white.

Things are either all good or all bad, perfect or failing. The key is finding the middle ground. Talk to your child about the behaviors that make up each part of her circle and, in the process, help her move to a more balanced view of herself. Ask your older child to identify the partial successes in a disappointing event. Here is an example based on losing a baseball game. First thought: I am terrible at everything. Do you hear the everything?

Specific thought: I did hit that double, but then I missed the ball when that guy stole third. When we jump to conclusions and play out disastrous scenarios based on one small event, we are borrowing trouble from the future that will likely never materialize. I bet no one will ask me to dance. Maybe I can find something else to wear that I like better. You yelled at me! Or is she caught in the cognitive error of mind reading: being convinced—without any proof—that she knows percent why people are acting a certain way and specifically what they are feeling about her.

Flexible-Thinking Exercise: Switch Shoes! With young children, switch shoes to make the exercise fun. Often, just switching into play mode is enough to loosen the negative grip. For older children, think of this as the Freaky Friday intervention, named for the Disney movie in which a warring mother and daughter are forced to understand each other to undo a spell that has switched their bodies.

What would your friend see if he looked in the mirror? Anyone can do what I do. The disappointment is temporary, but all of your accomplishments up to this point are yours, even if it feels as if they get washed away just because of this. I guess it is just disappointment— but it feels big. Flexible-Thinking Exercise Ask your young child to draw or construct three different mirrors: a minimizer, an exaggerator, and a real mirror.

Creativity is welcome in this project whether the mirrors are drawn wacky, scary, or silly. You can also invite children to give their own names to the mirrors: the mirror of doom, the meany mirror, or the power mirror. Children first choose three things that they feel bad about. Have them write down what those things feel like in the exaggerator mirror,; then have them write down what they feel like looking in the mirror of truth.

Help a young child whose exaggerator is making them feel bad about a mistake to distinguish between the whole of who she is and the tiny part that had the problem. She can represent the relative size by coloring in a picture of herself and circling the small part that made the mistake. Then encourage her to do a second drawing of how you see the mistake. For fun, the mistake can be represented by, perhaps, a freckle on her arm. You can explain that unlike freckles, the mistakes actually fade away.

Always end on a good note: After all the twotrack mind work is done, ask your child to say the new, rational thought—the one she would choose—loud and clear, and with conviction even if it takes a few tries to sound convincing!

Researchers have found that even more than IQ, your emotional awareness and abilities to handle feelings will determine your success and happiness in all walks of life, including family relationships. I never saw it coming. What happened? How can I help her if I really want to hide? One afternoon while I was writing this very chapter on big feelings, my six-year-old conveniently went into a total meltdown. She had been playing with her treasured brand-new sparkly Rapunzel computer game for an hour when I reminded her she needed to stop.

It was one great big bowl of bad. The tight feeling in my throat was not heartburn from lunch; it was stress. On the verge of my own internal meltdown, I felt myself stretched between scrambling to figure out how to make her happy again not just because I desperately needed to get back to work and wanting her to follow the rules one hour on the computer is the house rule.

I had just written about how we need to help children see that their feelings are temporary and manageable, and there I went trying to fix it, and in the process was just fueling her growing fury.

Suddenly, I realized that I needed to do nothing except let her sit with and ride out her feelings without distracting her or trying to find the nearest exit, while she was in the process of learning the life skills of accepting that things would not always be exactly as she wanted them to be. We both needed to, in the words of meditation master Jon Kabat-Zinn, deidentify from our feelings and see them as a fleeting storm passing through our steady sky.

The more I calmed myself, the more I could be that sky—steady and stable—as Hurricane Raia blew through. And rather than trying to steer her away from what she was feeling, my steadiness also allowed Raia to reestablish her own base— her own sky, through which her tantrum gale-force winds were blowing. The first yes! Within a few minutes she found some musical instruments in the living room and was back in her flow.

We had averted the crash of two storm systems and all was calm again. In retrospect, I am deeply grateful for that episode. Though different in magnitude, it had all of the same elements as the scenes that my families bring to me each week, and it helped me recall both how easy it is to cling to our Mr.

This is a lesson that we may need to relearn frequently, but in the long run our children will benefit greatly from our study. In Chapter 2, we looked at cognitive strategies to address negative thinking patterns. Children with a negative thinking style get in deep with big negative emotions—typically lacking the skills to work their way out—and pull parents in, too. In a swimming pool, kids are allowed in only as far from the shallow end as they can handle. But these kids get in over their heads with emotions, and they flounder; as parents, we see them floundering and instinctively jump in to rescue them—trying to make it all better.

What if they floundered, tried a few new moves, and then prevailed? Our goal is to build true resilience—teaching our children not to fear the water and to stay afloat with their own feelings, especially when things get choppy. It is best to know what our kids are learning from us. Because of how big and deep the feelings get for children in a negative spin— whether this is their home base or they are just visiting—they truly need tour guides proficient in the ins and especially the outs of uncomfortable feelings.

None of us would want our children to learn math from the teacher who has a math phobia; we would wrangle through a stampede to get the teacher who loves math, can point out the neat tricks, even show kids the beauty of how things work.

In order to be that good a teacher about feelings for our children, we may need to take a review class. Fortunately the lessons are simple, and putting them into practice in the heat of a major moment will be much easier if we are familiar with the strategies and put them into action in the smaller moments of our day.

Making casual conversation while driving home from the hospital with little Allison in her booster seat, her father asked her how it felt to have a little brother. It felt awful. What we fear about feelings—especially big feelings—is that they are complex and messy and, perhaps like vomiting, are unpleasant and unexpected and feel uncontrollable, like something very wrong is happening.

Make it stop! Or parents can empathize and comfort their children, talk through what happened, and by their calmness lend confidence that this is normal, manageable, comprehensible, and solvable. Picture the specificizer illustration in Chapter 2. We often teach children this by demonstrating with our own booboos. Children are satisfied with those explanations, in part, because parents deliver them with conviction, unambiguously, and with great authority.

They come to know what to expect. It is temporary. It is normal. I can handle it. It will pass. Keeping in mind that the end is in sight helps make it come even faster. The feelings of some children are unmistakable: the child wears them on his sleeve, he is not subtle about them, and they make a deep, lasting impression on his mood and sometimes on others.

The feelings of other children register more like a Mr. Magic erase board: Pull up the sheet and whatever was there is now—poof! Humans are wired to have strong reactions because their bodies are always ready to protect them, but as they see that they are safe, the strong feeling signals fade.

How does the story start? It was gone! I was really mad! Were you still really mad about the pizza? Feelings start out strong but then they fade. Who is in charge? How is it that kids like Nate, sweet, thoughtful, caring children, can totally lose it and then be completely remorseful minutes later, without learning to control their feelings before they happen? Winnie the Pooh, taking a top-down approach, summons his higher brain functioning to solve problems.

As neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, author of The Emotional Brain,2 explains, the feeling brain was there long before the thinking brain got here. This is the reason we may find ourselves suddenly very angry or upset and may also see these out-of-proportion reactions in our children.

The first responder—the amygdala, which controls our fight-or-flight response—makes quick but not accurate assessments of the danger in a situation with an emotional reaction of fear that relates to the risk, with anger that relates to whether needs are being met or understood.

Older children and teenagers may appreciate this explanation because they will know that such strong reactions are not crazy; they will also appreciate your understanding that they are not in total control of their reactions.

The one in charge, the amygdala, is operating on the wisdom of the ages, but not necessarily on the exigencies or needs of the moment, and as much as we may try to think straight, the amygdala, not concerned with the fine-grained distinctions of learning and memory but programmed to survive, has chosen a reaction for us—in a matter of a thousandth of a second. Give her time to cool down from those strong first feelings, and then let the higher brain sort through and determine what started it all.

How to Make Feelings Pass Efficiently: Monitoring and Modulating While it may seem from the description above that our emotions are in charge, it is more accurate to say that our emotions are in charge first, and that we can do many things second to work ourselves back down. Intense feelings fully engage us and we are not open to information. Without numbers a child may not be able to distinguish the subtle shift when his feeling begins to give way.

How big do you want it to be? In a calm moment, have your child make a chart of things to say and do for the small, ING? For a young child, you can make the chart with various faces from neutral to very unhappy; for older children, you can simply use a scale from small to supersize. So, letting your child cool down when she is upset, rather than having to explain herself to you right away, is a good strategy. Do you think so?

Do you want to take a break from talking about it for a minute and do something else? Physical activities are better. Play a quick game of catch with a nearby pair of socks; shake out your arms and legs to break up the tension. Because reestablishing a safe, calm environment is essential before any other action can be taken, we will later look at exercises for accomplishing this. As was said earlier, feelings are a message, so once our children have calmed down, we are ready to decode the message and work on the real issue, what started the fire in the first place.

We all understand the basics of problem solving: Define a problem, generate solutions, and choose the best option given the circumstance. We use that model over and over throughout the day as we encounter obstacles.

Instead, we campaign. Instead, walk along with them, getting all the nuances and hearing the story as they experienced it. Being stuck in a big emotion gets worse because of feeling stuck, and just the idea that there could be a different way of looking at the problem—a different tact she could take, and a different outcome, presented gently and neutrally—frees a child from being stuck in the corner of a closed room.

Suddenly doors appear in their minds where there were none. So the specific steps you can take are as follows. When did you start to feel upset? What were you hoping would happen? Is your mind magnifying the bad? Is your mind minimizing the good? Is there something different that you wanted to happen? Young children may need your help with this, so you could start with an idea and then take turns back and forth. What are some ideas that might work to fix it?

Is there something else you could do instead? Choose the Best Option and Rehearse It Once you generate ideas, you can role-play them to let your child discover what would happen if she went that route.

Hold back from giving your opinion. What do you need to do to be ready? Do you want to practice with me? Do you want to write it down? Establish a Cue to Signal the Start of Trouble. Consolidate your learning with your child. That will come with time. Instead, you want to help your child learn how to rally from the obstacles that she encounters in her life and how to take care of herself.

In this section we look at specific strategies to help our children befriend their emotions as an important part of themselves and learn how to work with them. Empathy with themselves redirects children back to where the problems can be solved. Rather than jump in and fix the problem, empathize with his feelings.

You may be surprised that just giving him that support may help him locate the solution himself. Unprocessed, overwhelming emotion should be avoided as it can be frightening and confusing to children, but small displays of emotion like the one in the example above are essential for children to learn how things work.

The Pause That Refreshes: Cultivating Mindfulness in Children Watching our children get swept up in emotion, we may wish they could freeze—just for a second—and at that moment choose not to explode or fall apart. The mindfulness really helped. Why do we need to find this place?

It can become an internal orienting point for us, a virtual home base that is always there. Rather than the absence of control that we can experience when feelings bubble up, in that place we feel the presence of our calmness—like an internal hug.

Finding that place to quiet ourselves and reset our baseline is a practice that can be very useful, especially to interrupt the escalation of a big emotional moment. In general, once we have cultivated the ability to press the pause button, we have more choices than our automatic reactions. In addition, educators are beginning to recognize how mindfulness, when used as a regular practice, can help maintain a greater sense of calm and focus, and preliminary studies with anxious children suggest that young children truly can integrate and make use of these deceptively simple moments of being to improve their state of mind.

For our purposes here, we look at a specific exercise that you can do with your young child or teenager to help her experience some distance and perspective on her emotions.

Mindfulness exercises are primarily visualizations—focusing on either a single object or a place to facilitate the slowing down of breathing and the filtering out of distractions. For a child who needs more to do sitting still is hard , it can be fun to learn mindfulness by using sounds and keeping his attention focused on the sound throughout its length.

One can purchase meditation bowls making sounds that start small, widen out, and then return to silence, but even the slow whistle one makes when imitating a bird song will suffice. You can say this script aloud to your preschooler or even teenager in fact, try it yourself , and ask him to imagine this scene. Afterward, he could draw or illustrate the story in frames, for example, before the storm, during the storm, and after the storm has passed. What color is it? What color is the sky when the clouds are in it?

Are there birds in the sky? Look at the clouds: They are moving. Look at the sky: It is still. The sky is always still. And the clouds are moving. What wind do you need to blow the clouds by? Can you picture in your mind a gentle wind blowing the clouds away?

Do they go quickly? Do they go by slowly? What does the sky look like now? What color is the sky now that the clouds have passed? Can you describe the feeling you are seeing? When you are close to it on the stage or screen, how does it look and feel? Is it very big? Now imagine that you are stepping back from the feeling and are in the audience instead of near the action.

What happens when you choose a seat way back in the theater? Does the feeling shrink? How does it make you feel to see that you are separate from the feeling?

You can choose whether to get close to it or to hang back. Can you picture a canvas where you paint that color? Can you see it in a frame? Do you want a plain frame or a fancy one? Can you now enlarge the frame and make the picture bigger? Is it as big as an elephant, a house, an airplane, a shoebox? It could be as small as your hand. After the picture shrinks down and you are more comfortable with it, do you want to change the feeling? We can do that by changing the color.

What color would make it feel better? Notice how we can make feelings seem bigger or smaller just with our minds. Now that you understand the basic concept, you can invite your child to come up with his own images. Sometimes it may be a wave that feels big like a tidal wave and then gets smaller. For more information on mindfulness exercises for children, please see the resource guide at the end of this book. On the other end of the spectrum, but not in opposition to mindfulness, another option to use after your child has gathered herself is to get moving.

Like bumping the needle on a skipping record to move it along, this switch in activity opens up new feelings and new stimuli. Rather than being stuck and repeating the same grooves in the record, she is now moving ahead and will begin to feel better.

In a calm moment, have your child make a list of things she really likes to do. You can pull out this list while she is waiting for the intense feelings to pass. Rather than singling out your child, the whole family can truly benefit from this exercise, which can easily be done in a few minutes after dinner one evening.

Give each member of the family a sheet of paper with the headings in the accompanying chart, but leave some boxes open: Perhaps your children will come up with their own categories. Share your answers as collective brainstorming. But when the body is revved up with adrenaline and in an agitated state, a competing or opposite response such as relaxation can begin to reprogram the system and reset it to baseline. Your young child can picture inflating her favorite colored balloon or blowing out candles on a cake with her breath; your older child can picture matching his breath to the ebb and flow of a gentle wave.

If your child is not ready to do this with you, just begin to quiet down your own breathing; your child may be able to borrow calmness from you. That may be a moment to help them save face with some humor.

This kind of simple distraction is most flexibly applied with younger children, who are never very far from a mood change. We need you. Our pet zebra is refusing to sing because you are upset. Listen to him try to sing—it sounds awful!!! If you are voicing how they feel, they may be freed from having to be the messenger. For decades it seemed common knowledge that venting—in the form of punching pillows or hitting an inflatable Bobo doll—was a healthy way to manage anger or frustration, and many books, including my own, have advocated it.

However, the research has not borne out this theory. Because those venting activities are now recognized as increasing adrenaline, which as we saw earlier has already been released when we feel upset or threatened.

So when we get wildly physical, we are adding to the problem. If a child is overstimulated with anger and then goes at a punching bag for five minutes, he may be increasing the problem by releasing more adrenaline. He is really making you mad. What do you want to say to him? Your child walks in from school and is miserable about her day, but you find that after eating a sandwich she has transformed from her demon self back to your loving daughter.

What do I do? For example, if she always melts down on Wednesday, and Tuesday night is karate, this meltdown is likely to be fatigue-triggered.

The answer is not to quit karate, but not to add any extra responsibilities on Wednesday, and to make sure that Wednesday is an early-to-bed night.

Does that make sense? Saturday 10 a. Long line at the restaurant for brunch Meltdown Hungry? Waited too long to eat? Monday 4 p. Running errands after school Meltdown in car Tired and hungry after school? Too many stops? Instead, find a time when you can actually make it a learning experience. Kids can smell a rat, and if you have any agenda of making your child feel bad about the problem, she will make sure that this project will not be pleasant or productive for anyone concerned.

So if you get into a fight with your child at such times, you are increasing that meltdown exponentially, and you can feel the heat. You may not know that if you let up on the heat, even for a few seconds—while you pause, walk away, close your eyes, fastforward, and picture the moment after the crisis has passed— those small but crucially significant steps will decrease inordinately the momentum of the meltdown.

Remember the goal is to maintain safety, but not to stop the meltdown. Stopping it adds energy to it. Instead, you want to let it run out of steam. We need to slow this down; breathe with me. You are the boss of you; you are in control of yourself. This is a storm, but it will pass. You can decide how big you want the storm to be. We can keep it smaller by staying calm.

I want to help you. Figuring out the whys of the situation needs to wait until you have two people who can think straight. It will help you to blow off steam without actually losing control. Take three deep breaths, in and out slowly and evenly through your nose and mouth. You will only add fuel to the fire. Your heart is pounding because you are upset, not because there is something you need to do quickly.

Doing things carefully will have much more positive long-term effects. But actually, after the heat of the moment even if it is the next day , great learning can occur when you begin to sort through the rubble.

The goal is to rebuild and repair, not to repeat in slow motion the embarrassment or pain. Such a postcrisis discussion can be a mastery experience for your child, using their competence rather than their chaos.

Together, you can go through the problem-solving steps above to see how things might have been settled differently. Remember, the goal in what some may see as a rehashing is not to make your child feel bad; she probably feels bad enough already.

The world will never have peace that way. Can you think of a different way that we can work this out? But it will be truly savored at the right time. Can you think of a way to make it better? Remember that the goal of discipline is learning to be a good citizen, with behavior that we want repeated.

If you break something, even if it is the peace and sanctity of your household, the best reparation strategy is to fix something. When a Crisis Turns Dangerous Following the guidelines in this chapter, you can decrease the chances that you will have a crisis in your house. Take a look back on what you have learned here, and choose one idea that you are going to use to react differently this week, for example, to listen more and fix less, to breathe with your child, to practice mindfulness, to think of being the sky instead of the storm.

Any new move will not only make you more effective but, over time, will have a positive ripple effect on the rest of your family as you model for them what emotional intelligence looks like off the page. It usually does at the beginning. Normalizing their feelings: I think anyone would feel upset who was in this situation. Validating feelings: You feel really bad about yourself right now.

It seems as if right now, nothing you can do is right. That happens. I feel that way, too, sometimes. Making it a manageable size: How big does this feel to you? I can type your report for you. Invitation to problemsolve: Are you ready to talk about this now?

Can you tell me what happened? Is there a different way of looking at it? Can we think of what your choices are to fix this? Giving your children choices to help them move: I know it feels bad now, but the feelings will fade after a while. We can help that happen faster by getting busy with an activity.

Shall we try that? Or, what needs to happen so that you can do that? Often, children who are pulled toward the negative feel empty-handed when it comes to strengths. How can they identify and value their strengths when they are cursed with the uncanny natural ability to find fault with anything—the closest target being themselves?

Not yet, that is. However, their sense of what is right with them—how they are not only surviving, but often thriving—is artificially eclipsed by the surplus of observations they make of what is flawed. To put the challenges in their lives in perspective, your children need to right-size their strengths without diminishing, devaluing, or overlooking them. Overly impressed by the visible result—the grade, the trophy, the prize—they may lose sight of the invisible efforts that were crucial in bringing the accomplishment to fruition.

We will look more closely at Dr. Chansky books to read online. Search this site. Chansky Version. Report abuse. Page details. Page updated. This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic. In modern times, however, this habit of the brain leaves us reacting to a harsh email or difficult conversation as if our life were in danger. It activates a cascade of stress hormones and leaves us fixated on potential threats, unable to see the bigger picture.

Neuroscientist Rick Hanson has a great analogy for this strange quality of the mind. Three words: Notice-Shift-Rewire. This simple strategy puts into into practice the core insight coming out of the neuroscience revolution of the past 30 years--the insight that, in the words of early neuroscientist Donald Hebb , "neurons that fire together, wire together. Its habits aren't like plaster. They're more like plastic, strong enough to resist the occasional push but pliable enough to change in response to repeated effort.

That's the magic of Notice-Shift-Rewire. By taking a moment each day to bring our attention to this practice, we build the habit of shifting out of negativity bias to more useful mind states: remembering our past wins, celebrating our strengths, and seeing life as a series of opportunities rather than a relentless slog through setbacks and heartbreak. The first step is to bring awareness to this ordinary habit of the mind.

Catch yourself when you slip into self-doubt, rumination, anxiety, and fear. Notice when your mind starts spinning out worst-case scenarios about how it's all going to come crashing apart. Noticing opens the space for carving new neural pathways. Shifting allows you to flood this space with a more productive focus of attention.

A few seconds of gratitude is the most efficient way to do this.