Dealing With Emotions

I ran across the videos below when reading on a feed of mine. As a former teacher, I have often thought that children are not taught to deal with the hard emotions…grief, anger, fear, sadness, etc.  And, we have ended up with many adults who can not deal with these emotions. I believe it comes from learning how to talk about these emotions and about learning to express our emotions. But, this does not seem to happen anymore in schools and so we have a society that has many people who have no empathy for others, who resort to anger when scared or upset instead of dealing with the fear. I have heard people say that when something upsets them, hurts them, scares them….that they go straight to anger. Know why?  Because anger is easier to deal with and seems to be an accepted emotion and fear, grief, sorrow, sadness etc are not.

People not only have not learned to deal with their own emotions but they have not learned how to deal with someone going through traumatic times in their lives. I believe this is why when someone dies, after a few days…others will start telling them to “get over it” or “move past it”, not because of concern for the person feeling these emotions but because the one that sees or hears someone else with these emotions….it makes them feel uncomfortable and they don’t want to deal with that.  Pain is another one people have trouble dealing with. Seeing someone else in pain is too hard for some to deal with and then things happen like has happened to me….comments like “take another pain pill and let’s go”.

So, how do we deal with this problem?  I believe that the teacher below has one of the best examples I have ever seen. Children in school….young children…are being taught to deal with the emotions of a classmate losing a parent….which may in turn trigger a loss on the other children. I sat and watched all five of these videos and this man is an outstanding teacher. He is teaching for life skills not to make a name for himself as Teacher of the year. He is teaching for the future of the kids and them learning the importance of empathy, of dealing with emotions and not hiding them away, of acceptance,  of standing up when bullying or inappropriate behavior happens, of bonding to people….all things necessary to live in this world as a responsible adult.

We are in a technological world now where people do their socializing on the internet and by doing so, they do not have to see the pain on another person and if someone posts about something traumatic, a person can just click to another page or site. All advances are not always good for us as humans. We don’t teach this in school because so many raised an uproar many years ago and did not want values of any kind taught in schools, and then when we get out of school…the world is the monitor after we rush home from work.

While this teacher is teaching young children, I think you will see many valuable lessons in these videos, like the importance of not stuffing your feelings back but expressing them no matter how painful. For once you get them out, then they are not as powerful. And the importance of standing up for what is right and bonding beyond the computer with people who are loved ones and ones you care about deeply. The teacher also teaches the importance of owning up to when you have or are doing something wrong for if you don’t, you will carry it inside and it will come out at a later date. He teaches these children that blaming others for your mistakes or for doing what you know you should not do is wrong.  These videos are powerful. Hope you enjoy.

From the Youtube page these are on:

“In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates.”

Children Full of Life

videos by typoprone

Part 1  Holding sadness and grief inside

Part 2  Bullying and taking responsibility for your actions

Part 3   The Solution should match the Problem

Part 4  The Uncertainty of Life

Part 5   Bonding, Helping Others, Empathy

Related articles

• Kindness Counts: Teaching Empathy (education.com)
• Battling Bullying: A Whole-School Approach (education.com)
• Are your emotions helping or hurting? (georgesecko.wordpress.com)
• What Helps Children Cope with Bullying? (education.com)
• Forgiveness or how to free yourself from emotional wounds (unikcat.wordpress.com)
• Coping with Grief (mariadorfner.wordpress.com)
• They have no fear of their parents or respect for others (barbierfamilly.com)
• Natural & Unnatural Emotions (journalingtruth.com)
• The Power of Surrender (mjsen.wordpress.com)
• I Want to Feel This Pain (alivingoddity.wordpress.com)