‘Rational’ and ‘irrational’ emotions
At this point in the program, some of you may be attempting to understand how Emotion Coaching fits with other approaches to parenting and/or psychological therapies.
One parent in the pilot study of the TIK program felt a conflict between her desire to use Rational Emotive Therapy and Emotion Coaching. She spoke of how she responded to her child’s ‘irrational fears’ about being excluded from a peer play situation. She said that she wanted to teach her child to not be affected by friends excluding her and she coached her child instead to replace the irrational fear with self-statements such as ‘I know I’m a good person, they are just being bullies’.
This raised a discussion about the irrationality of fears. The Emotion Coaching philosophy suggests that by presenting a child’s fear as irrational to them, the message that the child receives is that they cannot accurately judge a situation, and their emotional responses are incorrect and inappropriate. This decreased the child’s belief in their own emotions as important information to listen to and reduces the connection between parent and child because the child does not feel supported and validated by the parent. Fears remain a fear for a child, and if that child is able to understand their own emotional response, they are more likely to be able to develop ways of calming themselves down and strategies that allow them to pro-actively manage anxiety and fear.
Please watch the following video now about ‘Meta Emotions’