Fairy Tale Game — How Do We Teach Our Child to Feel and Communicate Their Real Emotions?

While working with clients, I frequently encounter individuals who are disconnected from their own feelings, meaning they have no idea what they are genuinely feeling in a given situation.

If you find yourself fuming over a situation three days after it occurred, or realizing a week later that someone offended you, chances are you have difficulty connecting with your emotions.

This is somewhat analogous to accidentally touching the hot plate of an iron, but only feeling the pain minutes later. We’d suffer much worse burns this way than if we immediately felt the pain and quickly pulled our hand away, right?

The same goes for our emotions. We would suffer much less emotional harm if we could appropriately respond at the moment an event occurs.

For example, without anger, but assertively, we might ask a rude clerk or even our mother why they spoke to us in such a tone when we addressed them politely. To do this, however, we must recognize that we feel uncomfortable or even angry in the situation. Anger is a signal. It tells us our boundaries have been crossed and it’s time to defend them.

But if we only realize days or weeks later how hurt we were, it becomes challenging to restore our boundaries. In such belated conversations, the other person often doesn’t even recall what happened and we’ll typically hear responses like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The sting remains with us, a reminder of yet another instance when we failed to defend ourselves.

What’s worse: after many such incidents, the other person comes to believe it’s okay to cross our boundaries, and we feel that we have to tolerate it. Once a situation gets to this point, it takes much more effort to rebuild our strong defense system than if we just had to repair one breached wall after an attack.

What causes our self-defense reactions to be delayed?

Often, it’s because as children, we learned to push our needs and emotions to the background. Good children who always obeyed, remained quiet, and behaved often grow into adults disconnected from their emotions. How could they not? They became accustomed to putting others’ needs ahead of their own. To cope with emotional deprivation, a child may forget their feelings and needs and adopt the norms of others, such as their parents or teachers.

Though this behavior is convenient for parents, it is very detrimental to the child’s psyche and often results in childhood illnesses (like eczema, asthma, etc.) or the development of bad habits (like nail-biting).

So, how can we reconnect with our emotions and help our child maintain their connection to themselves?

For adults, family constellation, introspection, and many other therapies can serve as effective ways to reconnect with their emotions. However, there’s a particularly efficient practice that can help: pausing ten times a day to ask ourselves, “How do I feel?” To truly benefit from this method, one must describe their feelings in detail, not just by saying “I feel good” or “I feel bad.” Instead, it’s essential to define those feelings more precisely, using descriptors such as “I am frustrated,” “I am irritated,” “I am hurt,” “I am joyful,” “I am carefree,” or “I am over the moon”.

The main point is that we learn to notice the signals our body sends when we are angry, anxious, scared, or happy. Indeed, many who have lost touch with their emotions struggle not only with recognizing negative feelings but also with identifying positive ones, like joy.

By repeatedly experiencing the immediate recognition of relevant emotions, we will eventually find that we can identify and express our feelings in real-life situations. In doing so, we can defend ourselves assertively, not with rage or in a rude or offensive manner, but by simply speaking our truth.

Fortunately, for children, this reconnection process is much faster. To help them in this endeavor, it’s beneficial to play “fairy tale games” with them. The concept is straightforward: we sit down together and start telling them a story, which they listen to with their eyes closed. The key is to ask them to imagine themselves in the shoes of a character. As the story progresses, inquire at every turn how a given character feels, what sensation the emotion evokes in their body, and what they desire. You can use storybooks for this or even invent simple tales on the spot. It’s essential to incorporate as many emotions as possible — both positive and negative — into the game and always ask what the character desires in each situation! By doing this, we teach children not only to pay attention to and express their own feelings and desires but also to be empathetic and understand the feelings of others in different situations.

Beyond this, it’s crucial to make space for emotions and desires in the daily hustle and bustle, not just during playtime, as much as we can. This way, children come to realize that not only the emotions and desires of fairy tale characters matter but their own feelings and desires are important too, and they will be able to precisely express them. Even if life becomes more complicated when we adopt these practices and pay closer attention to our child’s increasingly well-expressed feelings, let’s not forget how much stronger, more mature, and more balanced the adult will become. This adult had the chance as a child to voice their desire for a hamster or more playtime at the playground!

– Eszter

---

Related Articles

---

Home | Notes | Articles | Eszter’s Magic | Literary Bonbons | Short Stories and Guides | Beyond the Book | EWE Issues | Archive | About