Not enough words?

In our day-to-day exchanges with kids, we can inhibit their healing and growth by using vocabularies with too few words. For example, ‘anger’ is a word we over-use: we too commonly say "I can see that you’re angry" and as a result we give some unhelpful and inaccurate messages. One is that anger is one of only a small group of negative feelings. Close to this is the conclusion that most of our negative feelings are ‘angry’ feelings. Another is the suggestion that we are generally destructive or aggressive when we are angry – as if anger automatically leads to bad behaviour (and is therefore normal or excusable?) The use of the same old word gets us stuck with an undifferentiated and static construct which does not accord with development. ("When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.")

Once youngsters ‘get’ anger as a common human feeling, we need to move them on by offering more complex notions which start to unpack the clumsy "me-dominating" feeling of anger. Words like ‘irritated’, ‘annoyed’ and ‘frustrated’ are more transitive, more contextual, implying that their feeling (now more accurately defined) has to do with their relatedness with something or someone else. We can then use words which reflect different intensities ("cross", "peeved", "furious") and different feelings like ‘impatient’ and ‘exasperated’ which focus on their own (now more tolerable and rational) responses to being irritated or frustrated ...

Words, of course, are symbols of our feelings, and as we develop they help to put us in control of our anger. Our aim is to give kids more adequate and usable symbols to express their anger, more maturely. Reflections like "I can see that you're frustrated (disappointed, agitated, troubled)" move kids away from simplistic and self-involved "anger" towards a better knowledge, acceptance and responsibility for their feelings.

Build your own lists, widen your vocabularies — then give them to the kids.