 As a parent, carer, or other supporting adult, what can you say to help to calm things down if a child is very angry or very anxious? That's what we're going to be exploring in today's episode. Let's get started. So before we go into the what to say, let's think briefly about how to say it. Now, if you've ever attended any training with me ever, you've probably heard me talk about slow, low, low before, but I'm going to tell you again because it's brilliant, she says, modestly, having created it. Slow, low, low is a way of speaking that enables us to come across as a calm adult who's in control, which is exactly what a child needs if they are in a state of overwhelm, if they're very anxious or very angry, what a child in that state needs more than anything, more than any strategy, technique, anything we can teach them is a calm adult. And what happens then is we can co-regulate our calm is catching essentially. So how do we do that when their anxiety or their anger might be kind of tripping all of our triggers as well? And we're beginning to feel those things and their anxiety or their anger might feel catching for us. So we need to calm things down. So we think about how we speak and we use our slow, low, low speaking. So it's very simple. We slow down the pace of our speech. We speak more slowly. We lower the volume. So we speak more quietly and we lower the pitch. So we speak a little bit more deeply. Now, the reason for doing this is because when we're angry, when we're anxious, we tend to speak very, very fast, quite shrill, really high pitched, and we tend to get louder and louder and louder when we're anxious and angry as well. And what we actually want to do is to do completely the opposite of that. And instead, to emulate maybe our favourite bedtime stories, we want to give someone an audible hug. So we're going to slow, low, low. And to be quite honest, you could say almost anything whilst speaking slow, low, low, and it would help because it's about the rhythm, the cadence, the feel of what you're saying rather than the actual words that will make the most difference, particularly at the beginning. If a child is overwhelmed, they're not really in a position to hear what you're saying, but they might feel how you're saying it. So we start off by thinking about how we speak. But it can be super, super helpful to have some go-to phrases to help with these situations because, bluntly, often we're panicking. We don't know what to say. We don't know what to do. We need to A, buy ourselves a bit of time while we figure out what next, and B, have something that might actually do some good. So what you can do here is you can develop some broken record phrases. Phrases that you might say again, and again, and again, and again, and again, add infinitum until such point that things begin to come. Remembering that maybe the first 10, 20, 100,000 times that you say this phrase to a child, they may not hear it. They might just feel the rhythm, the cadence, the loveliness of those words, giving them that audible hug and helping to calm them down and co-regulate. So we're going to think about the kinds of phrases, though, that you might introduce. And these are phrases you can practice. You might pick up a couple that you think, this will work for the child that I'm supporting that I care for. And I'm going to try it out. I would recommend that you practice these phrases while walking your dog, that you practice these phrases while in the shower. Practice them at times of calm until they feel completely natural and comfortable to you. So in those moments of crisis, when everything's gone a little bit haywire and your emotional triggers have been tripped, you're able to go back to that like muscle memory, make it easy for yourself. So practice makes perfect. So what kind of phrases are we going to think about? I tend to think of three different types of phrases as being super helpful here. Phrases around physiology, phrases around safety, and phrases around validation. And what we're going to do briefly is I'll talk to you a little bit about what I mean by each of those different categories. And I'll give you a few examples. But the best phrases are the ones that you come up with that you've noticed work for yourself and your child or that you've talked to your child about at a time of calm and said, hey, what's it helpful for you to hear? So use my phrases as a starting point, but run away and make it your own. Adapt it and adopt what works best in your home or your setting. So let's start with phrases that are about safety. One of the most basic fundamental things we all need is to feel safe. And until we feel safe, really nothing else can happen. That's going back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's right down there is a very, very basic need. We need to feel safe and, you know, just on a human level, we would like our children to feel safe all the time, right? So what phrases can we use to help a child to feel safe? Now, this will depend partly on the child and what might make them feel unsafe. But you can explore different things, talk to them about it, but kinds of phrases that I found to be helpful in the past are things like, I'm here. I've got you. That's a kind of phrase that says, you're not alone. Actually, you're safe. I'm in control of this situation. There's a safe adult in the room. You don't need to control this situation. I've got it. So I'm here. I've got you. This is something that can work well if you've got a child who likes to be held or perhaps touched and might like touch of a hand or an arm can make a big difference here. Just reminding them, I'm right here by your side. So I'm here. I've got you. Very, very simple phrase. It's okay. You're safe. It's just a statement of fact that sometimes children need to hear that, particularly children who are trauma experienced, children who are not used to feeling safe. It's okay. You're safe. And it might be that in their current lives, they're not always used to feeling safe. And they need to be reminded that right now you are safe. Or it might be that they've got a history of feeling unsafe. And they need to be reminded that right now you are safe. So it's okay. You're safe. And you can say that as many times as the child needs to hear it. You could say, I'm going to stay with you. This child then knows that you're there. You're with them. They do not have to manage this on their own. I'm going to stay with you. You might expand on that. I'm going to stay with you until you feel a bit better. I'm going to stay with you and make sure everything's okay. But I'm going to stay with you. The child knowing that no longer do they have to do this alone can make them feel much, much safer. Another simple one, you're going to be okay. Or it's going to be okay. Reassurance that the situation is in control. It's all going to be all right. Can be helpful for a child to hear. So you're going to be okay. It's going to be okay. Everything's going to be all right. Another phrase that I find helpful here around safety is about creating emotional safety. So we've been thinking perhaps a bit more about physical safety so far, but it's important for a child to know that it's okay to feel different things. They might have all sorts of feelings going through them if you're in this situation. So you might give them permission to cry. You might say, it's okay to cry. That's a phrase that can make a child feel safe to begin to explore and express those overwhelming feelings. A child who might not have previously felt that it was safe to cry might need that reassurance. So make it feel safe for them to go there with these feelings if they need to. Let them know that you're right there by their side, that you're not judging them, that you will help to hold and contain this situation if they do cry. And then finally, in terms of our sort of suggested safety phrases, and you'll have loads more of your own, I'm sure, you're not in trouble. And this is one that sometimes children need to hear if they're used to being in trouble. If they are a kid who have often been reprimanded or told off, either because their actions and their behavior is interpreted negatively by other adults in their life, or perhaps because they are a child who has been punished or otherwise harmed or hurt, either physically or with words, in different areas of their life. And them knowing that they're not in trouble can be really important, particularly for our younger children here. You're not in trouble. Sometimes they think that the way that they're acting right now, this anger, this anxiety that's being exhibited will mean that they're in trouble. That can make them feel very unsafe because they don't know what will happen next and they're going to get told off and what will be the consequences. Just letting them know, you're not in trouble. I'm not angry with you. It's okay. That reassurance can be super helpful. Next, we're going to move on to phrases about physiology, speaking to our child about their biology, their physiology, about what's going on in their body. Because if you just take a step back for a moment and think about this from the point of view of the child, and think about how it feels when your body does big stuff because you're feeling overwhelmed, when you're feeling anxious or angry, or you've otherwise got feelings which are kind of overtaking you. That can be kind of scary. Maybe your heart is doing things that you're not sure it should. Maybe you're sweating in strange ways. Maybe your breath has got fast and ragged. Maybe your body just doesn't feel like it kind of normally does or should. That can feel really, really strange and horrible and difficult. Particularly if you're having some sort of panic or anxiety attack that can feel like you're dying every time. No matter how many times it happens, that can feel like you're dying. Anxiety attacks, panic attacks, absolutely horrible. I've had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and every time I feel like you're dying. If you think about that from the point of view of a child who does not have my decades of experience of managing panic attacks and kind of somewhere in my head knowing I will not die, this might be newer for them. They might not know that. They might need to hear it from you, the adult that they trust. We can talk to them about what's happening in their body. We can reassure them that this will pass, that this is a normal response for their body, that their body is responding in an anxious way. That can be helpful for some children, sometimes to hear. So you might try phrases like your body is responding in an anxious way. This will work best if you've done work beforehand and at times of calm you've talked to a child about what anxiety feels like in their body. You might do sort of top to toes and be like, what does your head feel like? What does your heart feel like? How does it feel in your hands? How does it feel in your tummy? And you might explore all that with them and be really curious and say, actually yes, sometimes my body feels a bit like that too. Yes, sometimes I need the toilet suddenly when I get very anxious or I feel like I might be sick or my heart goes really, really fast or whatever it might be. You might empathize with them or tell them that, yeah, other people feel like that too because it can feel strange and unique to them and unusual and scary for that reason. But your body is responding in an anxious way. You can remind them that this isn't going to last forever. This will pass. And again, this works really well if you've done some work before with them. You might have talked to them about habituation curves. Habituation curves are about the fact that basically your body cannot maintain this level of anxiety for a really long time. This is a response designed to get you through a situation. So designed to get you away from the bear or to fight the tiger or whatever. It's not designed as a permanent state that you'll be in. And so your body's not really geared up to maintain that in just the same way that you couldn't forever run up a hill unless you trained really, really, really hard for it. And even then you'd run out of puff eventually. So you can't maintain that and your body can't maintain this anxious response either. It's quite a big deal. Your body's working really hard to maintain these levels of anxiety. And so knowing that this will pass and maybe even if you've shown them, you might have shown them like a little graph with a habituation curve of how anxiety tapers off after a while, you might even just draw that, show them, remind them, give that as a little prompt for them if you need to or draw it in the air. But just reminding them, this will pass. They need to know that this feeling, how this feels right now, which is horrible, isn't going to last forever. And you might validate how they're feeling by saying, this feels horrible, but it's going to pass. So this will pass is something really important for people to hear sometimes. This was one that I found particularly helpful when I went through a massive phase of panic attacks at one point. Just being reminded, this is going to pass. This will pass was really, really helpful to me. You can talk about the future. Let's see how things will feel in one minute. And you might use that as a kind of stopping point. You might do that if the child is able to verbalize. We might be thinking on a scale of one to 10, where are we right now? And they might be at 10 on the anxiety. Maybe in a minute, they'll be down at 9.5. And actually noticing that things are beginning to improve is something that can really help a child to begin to overcome that anxious response because they notice that things are improving, which actually gives them a little bit of confidence, which brings in a little bit of calm and control, which is a really positive virtuous cycle. So noticing that things are improving can be really helpful. So we might say, let's see how things feel in a minute. We might time it. We might actually look at our watch and say, we're going to allow a minute to pass and see how we feel or put a sand timer on to say, this is going to pass. Let's see how we feel in a minute and watch the time go by and notice those changes that are beginning to happen. We might actually articulate those changes. I can see that your breathing is starting to slow. We might notice those changes in physiology and help them to pick up on the fact that they're gaining control. We can remind them things like, your body won't feel like this forever. So that's similar to this will pass any phrase that reminds them of the temporariness of the situation that it does not have permanence is helpful. You've done this before, you can do it again. So letting a child remember that they've succeeded in the past. They've had moments like this that felt like they couldn't possibly get through them, but actually they did. They managed, they succeeded. They can do it again and that can give them that confidence to keep trying to try to keep hold of the end of the rope there and try to take control of the situation. And then very simply, your body will start to feel better soon. And again, I find it helpful to be referring to the body, to be thinking about this as a physiological thing. Your body is doing some pretty strange things right now, but it's going to improve over time. And at times I come again, we might explore with a child how brilliant our bodies are and how cool is it that our body can do that, that our heart goes really fast and our breathing changes and our digestion changes all to get us ready to deal with a really stressful situation and sure thing, if that really stressful situation was that something that was said in a maths class made you spiral into panic, then that's not ideal, right? But if it had been a situation of genuine threat and danger like we've been evolved to deal with, you'd have been really, really grateful of the ability to use your superhuman strength or speed to keep yourself safe. So physiology is a really helpful one to explore, works best when coupled with some work that has been done outside of the situation of stress, exploring it at times to calm really being curious about our body and then just using little phrases that remind us about that during these times of kind of crisis panic, high emotion. Finally, I find phrases that validate to be really helpful. So these are phrases which acknowledge that what a child is experiencing right now is okay for them to be feeling. There's all sorts of different reasons why we might need this. It might be that you're supporting a child who previously has not had much validation around their feelings, who's been not allowed to feel a certain way, either they've not allowed it themselves, other adults in their life might not have created an emotionally safe environment. They might have even been punished for expressing certain kinds of feelings. So validating the fact that it's okay for them to feel this way is important but also recognizing how they feel and helping them to recognize those emotions. So doing a bit of emotion coaching, noticing and naming the things that they're feeling can be helpful and also allowing them to realize that it's okay that they feel like this and you're there to support them and you're not judging them. That's really, really important. Children fear hugely being judged by the adults that they trust. So phrases that you can use here, some really simple ones. That must be really hard. This is a super useful phrase just to build into your day to day vocabulary anyway. This must be really hard. That sounds hard. I'm sorry, that sounds really difficult. Those sorts of phrases are really helpful when somebody tells us something really challenging, something distressing for them. Quite often people will share with us if they trust us, adults and children alike. Something really difficult and we might not be able to do anything about that situation. So I'm really tearful today because I keep on thinking about my husband and I lost him six months ago and just today I'm finding it particularly hard. Our friend in that situation does not need us to solve the situation. We can't bluntly cannot bring the husband back from the dead. Just can't do it. Nothing you can do about this at all except to be a good friend. You can't fix it. You can't change it. You might have been through something similar or know someone who has and you might have some suggestions, some advice at another time but right now when a friend says something like that they're not looking for you to go, hey you want my 10 top tips on this. What I'd suggest, no. What they want is for you to go, I'm sorry that sounds really hard. That's what they need right now and actually you'll find more and more situations in life where you might jump to advice giving when actually what somebody wants is just a little bit of validation and space and care and kindness. Do not always look to fix. Sometimes look to walk with someone in their challenges. Validate how they're feeling rather than instantly trying to change it. Also sometimes these big feelings they need to be processed. They need to be felt. Somebody needs to work through them. We shouldn't instantly always be looking to move away from them. Sometimes it's about allowing ourselves to feel those things. Anyway that's for a whole another day but the phrase that must be really hard or this sounds hard or this seems difficult. No sorts of phrases that notice this is hard. I'm sorry about that. It can be really helpful. The next thing you might do is notice the thing that's making things feel hard for them so something like I'm sorry that X is making you anxious. I'm sorry that coming into school in the morning is making you anxious. Noticing the thing that's triggered it and again when we do this and we repeat these kinds of phrases it helps the child to notice what the issue is if they haven't already. It might be that they've told us and so we're reflecting back and we're noticing what they've said and we're reflecting and that shows that we've heard but it might be that we've noticed what's going on or we've got hypothesis about it and then we can help the child to begin to unpick what's going on because until we can kind of name it and frame it we can't tame it. So noticing and validating what's going on for that child. I'm sorry that X is making you feel anxious or angry. Okay so noticing and naming it and another thing you might say let's begin to unpick your worry. So I find this a helpful one if you've got child who's very very anxious things are feeling really really difficult we're just trying to calm things down okay let's begin to unpick that and then you know we'll go on once they calm enough into thinking about talking or writing or drawing or using many different strategies to begin to explore that but letting them know this phrase okay let's begin to unpick that worry. This phrase tells them right this is this is an issue I can see this is an issue we need to do something about this let's try and understand it better I'm here we've got this let's do it together it's a really helpful thing for that child to know helps them realize that okay you see too that there's something here that needs to feel different what can we do about it. You can ask questions of the child and again you might need to ask these a lot of times before they feel ready to answer but you might ask something like do you want to talk about this would it help to talk about this these sorts of phrases ask the child for their permission for you to begin to open up the conversation when things begin to feel calm and it helps them to recognize that actually you are ready to listen when they're ready to talk and actually that's one of the phrases I use all the time as well and faced with an angry child or say I'm ready to listen when you're ready to talk it's about creating space for a child to be able to open up when they're ready anger in particular really needs to feel heard so I'm ready to listen when you're ready to talk but the question here was do you want to talk about it you might also say something like you're worried how can I help you're worried how can I help and again you might not get a response right away but this is the child knowing you've noticed you've validated how they're feeling and then you've said and what can I do about that as an adult who cares about you it's not to be worried you're angry what can I do to help with this okay so we notice and we offer our support and again we don't necessarily expect a response at the beginning well the child is very overwhelmed but we might repeat this phrase many times until they're ready to hear and engage with the phrase and then finally and crucially it's not silly if it's making you feel like this this is very important if you've got a child who's being dismissive of how they feel oh this is ridiculous everyone else can manage why am I like this this is so stupid oh don't worry you know don't don't try and help me I'm not worth it those sorts of phrases which where a child tries to minimize what's going on for them but whatever it is that has triggered this and whatever they're feeling right now if they feel horrible to the point where you want to help them then they really really do need your time need your support need some help and it really doesn't matter what the trigger was and we must hold on to that's adults no matter what the trigger or the underlying issue was for the child if it's making them feel like this it matters and it might seem to us a really small thing and it might seem trivial and it might seem silly but it's not because it's causing this response in the child and it's about their perception their response rather than our interpretation of the trigger it's their response that matters how they feel that's what we want to change no matter what the trigger was we're going to want to explore that with them help them to feel better so it's not silly if it's making you feel like this okay regardless of the trigger it's not silly if it's making you feel like this so there we go are different phrases for supporting children who might be feeling anxious angry or otherwise overwhelmed we're going to look at safety phrases that help them to feel safe we're going to look at physiology phrases that remind them what's going on with their body and the fact that this is going to feel better after a little while their body can't maintain this forever and we're going to look at phrases that validate that notice how they're feeling and tell them that that is okay and i'm with you for this and we are going to say these phrases using our slow low low voices where we slow down the tempo we lower the volume and we lower the pitch and we give them that audible hug that tells them regardless of what words we use it's okay i the supporting adult i'm calm and in control of this situation and using your slow low low voice will tell the child that even when maybe sometimes you're panicking and you don't feel that calm at all it will convey that calm and actually they will catch your calm you will catch their calm and you will begin to feel calmer it's a very very helpful technique i really hope this was helpful until next time over and out