As you grow older, you begin to experience many intense emotions, which sometimes are not as good as they seem. The emotional exchanges that come with growing up provide great opportunities for children and adolescents to learn and experiment with different ways of relating to the world. For all this, it is important to teach children and adolescents to deal with conflicts.
One of the ways of life that teaches people the most lessons is through relationships. All of us parents want our children and young people to develop their minds, be independent, and be curious to find their independence.This is all part of the healthy transition into adulthood.With this healthy transition comes conflict. -which is not always healthy or easy-. As with any other difficult aspect, it is an opportunity to grow and learn new lessons.
There are ways to teach children to be strong in their relationships and as they grow up, they must learn to ‘take a step back ‘ mentally from your own point of view and looking at the situation as an observer, rather than as a participant. Research has shown that it is an effective way to deal with negative emotions and conflict.
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Learning to distance yourself emotionally
There is a recent study that assessed the importance of ‘taking a step back’ and examined the question: ‘When you imagine yourself in the middle of a fight, do you feel like you’re fighting or like you’re seeing yourself in a movie?’.
People who were able to distance themselves from the experience when they felt emotional distress differ from those who didn’t. People who stepped back from the situation:
- They think about the experience in a different way
- They are able to reflect on the situation in a different way. a to be able to understand the meaning of what has happened
- They are less likely to replay the situation in their mind over and over again (rumination is a risk factor for depression)
- They are less likely to blame other people for what happens to them
- They get angry in a healthier way and adapt to dealing positively with arguments and conflicts. The power of this strategy increases with age, the older a person is, the more effective the dilution of emotion will be, although from 10 years of age children are capable of marking emotional distance to control their emotions.
When you take a step back
Imagine you have your face pressing against a glass: it’s cold, it’s hard, it’s clear but since your face is so close to the glass you can’t see what’s there is behind him, you only feel that he is hard and cold. If you take a step or two back you will be able to see what is behind the glass, you will even be able to see things from different perspectives.When you are too close to something you lose the big picture and also the point of view of others, /strong> all conflicts are like this. But how do you teach children to do this?
In the midst of intense emotion there is a tendency to believe that others do not understand what is happening or that they are wrong. Time is important and that is why you have to leave space between the conflict and the other person to think and listen to yourself. It is necessary to make the other person see that they are not alone and that it is a win-win relationship. Empathy and assertiveness are essential for a child or adolescent to be able to start handling conflicts in a good way.