Life gives us lots of opportunity to learn how to deal with Disappointment.  From losing a soccer game, to getting a poor mark on an assignment, to a change of anticipated plans. Each experience has different levels of disappointment – some are little and you can work through them in a day or less. Others are more major and it might take a longer time to work through them.  Even though the length of time it takes to work through disappointment varies, the process is really similar for all of them.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been disappointed that my summer plans will look different than I thought they would earlier this year.  I’ve noticed that I have felt a bit grumpier than usual, and I’ve found myself a bit more focused on what I can’t do this summer. We call that “ruminating”. The dictionary defines ruminating as thinking about something repeatedly. When we ruminate on something disappointing, we can get fixed on it and it becomes unhealthy.  Rather than ruminating on something, it is healthier to process it. Processing means to purposefully deal with something.  Here are some things you can do that help to process, or deal with, disappointment:

We can’t avoid disappointment, but we can learn how to handle it better.  Sometimes we can even learn how to turn it around to something better. The well known quote, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!” is often more helpful than we think! As we wrap up for the school year, I wish you all a lovely summer – and I wish you a few months filled with relaxing and good memories.  Cheers!

Anger is often talked about as a “secondary emotion”.  This means that it is usually comes out because of a different emotion.  In the picture you will see that just below the waters’ surface are emotions like embarrassed, stress, hurt, unsure, scared etc.  There are other feelings like grief, sadness, shame and anxiety, among others, that could also be on this list. When you or someone you are close to is showing anger, try to pause, take a deep breath to calm your own response, and take a bit of a mental step back to see if there is something else going on that might be causing this reaction.

You can do this with others, but it is probably more important to start with yourself.  It takes practice, but you can do it!  Learning what triggers your own anger, is an important piece of becoming self aware, and when you are self aware, you are in the perfect place to grow in your character!

Anger itself is not a bad thing – in fact it is healthy to experience and understand why you are feeling angry.  But there are healthy and unhealthy ways to handle your anger.  Healthy ways to manage your anger are things like controlled breathing, examining your feelings, taking a timeout, distraction exercises like counting backwards from 20, journaling, exercising, etc. Unhealthy ways to deal with your anger are things like yelling, hitting others/yourself, swearing, throwing/breaking things, etc.

If you struggle with unhealthy angry outbursts, I would encourage you to talk to a trusted adult that can help you practice and work through why you feel the way you do. They can help you learn how to control your responses so that they are healthy and growing for you. As always, if you need someone to talk to, send me an email or click on the Kid’s Help Phone link to the left.