by Tracy Mortensen | Sep 22, 2026 | ADHD, Anxiety, Children, Communication, Connection, Counselling, Education, Emotional, emotional regulation, Encouragement, Family, Forgive, Forgiveness, Guidance, Health, Mental Health, Mindfulness, Motivation, Parenting, Reflection, Resources, Safety, Self Confidence, Stress, Teens, Therapy, Tips |
When a child is struggling with big emotions, it can be tempting to immediately reach for a strategy.
“Take a deep breath.”, “Count to 10.”, “Go somewhere quiet.”, “Use your coping skills.”
These strategies can be helpful, but there is an important step that comes before them: Awareness
Before children can effectively use strategies to manage their emotions, they first need to begin understanding what they are feeling, what is happening in their body, what may have triggered the emotion, and what they need.
Think of it as: Awareness → Understanding → Strategy → Regulation
If we skip the awareness piece, we can end up asking children to use strategies without really understanding why they need them or when to use them.
The good news? Parents don’t need to have all the answers. Everyday moments can become opportunities for children to learn about their emotions. And parents don’t have to figure it all out on their own. Counselling can provide an opportunity for parents, children, and counsellors to work together as a team building understanding, discovering what works best for each child, and developing emotional skills that can be practised both in counselling and at home.
What Is Emotional Awareness?
Emotional awareness is the ability to notice and understand our emotions.
For children, this can include learning to:
- Recognize different emotions
• Put words to how they are feeling
• Notice how emotions show up in their bodies
• Understand what may have triggered a feeling
• Recognize that more than one emotion can happen at the same time
• Understand that emotions change
• Communicate what they need
For example, a child might initially say:
“I’m mad!”
With support, they may eventually recognize:
“I’m frustrated because I couldn’t do it, and now I’m embarrassed.”
That is emotional awareness in action.
How Can Parents Help Build Emotional Awareness?
Start With Noticing
Children don’t always have the words to tell us what they are feeling. Sometimes their behaviour communicates it first.
Instead of immediately trying to fix the behaviour, pause and become curious about what might be happening underneath it.
You might say
“You seem really frustrated. I wonder what happened.”
“You seem a little quiet today. I wonder if something is worrying you.”
The goal isn’t to guess exactly what your child is feeling. It’s to help them slow down and start noticing what might be happening emotionally. Behaviour can be a clue to an emotion.
Help Children Put Words to Their Feelings
Children often start with a few basic emotion words: happy, sad, mad, and scared. Over time, parents can help expand their emotional vocabulary. For example, instead of only using “mad,” children might learn words such as frustrated, annoyed, disappointed, or overwhelmed.
Instead of only using “scared,” they might learn to recognize worried, nervous, uncertain, or overwhelmed. You don’t have to quiz your child about their emotions. Simply offering different words gives them opportunities to explore what fits.
You might say:
“Do you think you’re feeling frustrated, or maybe disappointed?”
“I wonder if you’re feeling worried about what might happen.”
Children don’t have to agree with the word you suggest. The goal is to give them opportunities to explore different ways of describing their experience.
Validate the Feeling Before Trying to Solve the Problem
One of the most helpful things parents can do is acknowledge a child’s emotion before jumping into problem-solving.
Instead of: “It’s not a big deal.” Try: “I can see you’re really frustrated. That was hard.”
Instead of: “There’s nothing to worry about.” Try: “I can see you’re worried. Let’s talk about what’s making you nervous.”
Validation doesn’t mean that we agree with everything a child says or does. It simply communicates that you see the feeling and are getting curious and attempting to understand it.
This can help children become more comfortable talking about difficult emotions rather than learning that certain feelings should be hidden or avoided.
Help Children Notice Emotions in Their Bodies
Emotions aren’t just thoughts. They can also create physical sensations. Anger might show up as clenched fists, a hot face, tense muscles, or a racing heart. Anxiety might show up as a tight stomach, shaky hands, a racing heart, or wanting to avoid something.
You can also model this yourself “I’m feeling frustrated, and I notice my shoulders are tense. I’m going to take a minute.”. When parents model emotional awareness, children learn that noticing emotions is something everyone can practise, not something that only happens when a child is having a difficult time.
Remember That Emotions Are Not Good or Bad
It can be tempting to describe emotions as positive or negative. Instead, try thinking of emotions as information. Anger might tell us that something feels unfair or that a boundary has been crossed. Anxiety might tell us that something feels uncertain, unfamiliar, or important. The goal isn’t to teach children that they should never feel angry or anxious. The goal is to help them learn that they can have the feeling without it being in change of everything.
How Can Counselling Help?
Counselling can provide additional support, tools, and opportunities for children to develop emotional awareness in a way that is suited to their age and individual needs.
As I discussed in my previous blog, helping children manage big emotions isn’t just about finding the right strategy. Before children can use strategies effectively, they need to understand what is happening for them emotionally.
This is where emotional awareness becomes an important foundation.
Counselling can provide a space for children to explore their emotions, understand what they may be experiencing, and begin to recognize how emotions show up for them. Through play, art, games, activities, and conversation, children can develop a better understanding of their emotional experiences in ways that feel comfortable and meaningful to them.
Parents can also be part of this process. Counselling can provide an opportunity for parents, children, and counsellors to work together as a team building awareness, developing skills, and finding ways to support emotional development both in counselling and at home.
by Matt Hislop | Aug 25, 2026 | Anxiety, Communication, Connection, Counselling, Curiosity, Emotional, Encouragement, Family, Forgive, Forgiveness, Guidance, Health, In The Community, Mental Health, Mindfulness, Motivation, Reflection, Relationship, Relationships, Resources, Safety, Self Confidence, Stress, Therapy
Relationships matter. They give us a sense of purpose, belonging, and meaning in our lives. When our relationships are going well, they can positively influence our physiological, emotional, and social well-being. We may feel more secure, supported, seen, and heard.
When relationships become strained, however, we can experience hopelessness, feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or disconnected from one another. Couples therapy can provide an opportunity to slow things down, understand what is happening beneath the conflict, and develop new ways of connecting.
Two approaches that have significantly influenced couples therapy are Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), developed by Sue Johnson and colleagues, and the Gottman Method, developed by John and Julie Gottman. While they have different frameworks and terminology, both approaches emphasize connection, emotional responsiveness, and understanding the patterns that develop between partners.
Physiologically: Understanding Emotional Flooding
Relationship challenges can affect us physically as well as emotionally. Stress within a relationship may contribute to irritability, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, rumination, low mood, and feeling overwhelmed. When our nervous system becomes activated, it can become much harder to listen, communicate clearly, and remain connected to our partner.
The Gottmans describe one form of this intense physiological activation as emotional flooding. When someone becomes flooded, their body can enter a heightened state of arousal. Heart rate may increase, breathing can become more rapid, and it can become difficult to think clearly or remain receptive to what a partner is saying.
The Gottmans have highlighted heart rate and other physiological signs as useful indicators that someone may need a break from a difficult conversation. A heart rate around 90 beats per minute has been discussed in Gottman research as one indicator of flooding, but it is important not to treat 90 bpm as a universal clinical cutoff. People differ in their baseline heart rates and in how they experience physiological stress.
The more important skill is learning to notice when you are becoming flooded.
When this happens, it can be helpful to pause the conversation, take some time to breathe and self-soothe, and allow the nervous system to settle. Taking a break does not mean abandoning the conversation. In fact, it can be an important part of maintaining the relationship.
A helpful message might be:
“I am feeling overwhelmed right now. I care about this conversation, and I want to come back to it when I can be more present.”
This communicates both a need for space and a commitment to reconnect.
The goal is not to avoid difficult conversations. The goal is to create enough safety and regulation that both partners can remain engaged.
Emotionally: Looking Beneath the Conflict
In couples therapy, it is valuable to pay attention not only to what partners are saying but also to the emotions underneath their words and behaviours.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) places particular emphasis on helping couples identify and explore their emotional experiences and the deeper attachment needs or yearnings beneath them.
For example, a partner may say:
“You never listen to me.”
On the surface, this sounds like criticism. Beneath the criticism, however, there may be a deeper experience:
“I feel like I don’t matter to you, and I am scared that I am losing you.”
This is an important shift. Instead of focusing only on the criticism, couples can begin to explore the more vulnerable emotions and needs underneath it.
EFT often helps partners recognize emotions such as fear, sadness, shame, loneliness, and hurt. Anger can also be an important emotion in relationships. In many EFT formulations, anger can function as a secondary or protective emotion that develops in response to more vulnerable feelings such as fear, hurt, shame, or sadness. At the same time, anger can also arise directly from experiences of injustice, violation, or trauma, so it is important not to assume that every experience of anger has the same underlying emotion.
Learning to become curious about our emotions can help us understand what we are actually needing from our partner.
Instead of asking:
“Who is right?”
Couples can begin asking:
“What is happening between us?”
and
“What is each of us needing in this moment?”
This shift can create opportunities for greater empathy and emotional connection.
Socially: Looking at the Bigger Picture
Relationships do not exist in isolation. What happens in the outside world can have a significant impact on how partners relate to one another.
Work stress, parenting responsibilities, hobbies, community or service commitments, family dynamics, financial pressures, health challenges, friendships, and other life circumstances can all affect a couple’s ability to connect.
Sometimes what looks like a relationship problem is being intensified by the amount of stress each person is carrying.
Couples counselling can provide space to explore questions such as:
- What pressures are each of us experiencing outside the relationship?
- How are those pressures affecting our ability to connect?
- What support do we have from friends and family?
- Are we making enough time for our relationship?
- What activities help us experience joy and connection together?
Social support can be an important resource for couples. Healthy friendships and family relationships can provide encouragement, perspective, and opportunities for individual renewal.
It is also important for couples to make room for fun.
Relationships can easily become focused on responsibilities, conflict, finances, parenting, work, and everything that needs to get done. Spending time together doing something enjoyable can help couples remember that their relationship is more than the problems they are trying to solve.
Sometimes reconnecting starts with remembering what brought you together in the first place.
When Couples Get Caught in a Cycle
One of the central ideas in EFT is that couples can become caught in repetitive interactional cycles.
A disagreement may begin with one partner feeling disconnected and reaching out through criticism or protest. The other partner may experience this as criticism and respond by withdrawing or becoming defensive. The first partner then feels even more alone and reaches out more intensely. The second partner withdraws further.
Over time, this pattern can become familiar.
The important insight in EFT is that the cycle is the problem—not either partner.
Rather than asking, “Who started this?” couples can begin to recognize:
“This is the pattern we get caught in.”
Once couples can identify the cycle, they have an opportunity to slow it down and create a different response.
They can begin to notice:
- What happens just before the cycle starts?
- What emotions are underneath our reactions?
- What am I afraid might happen?
- What am I longing for from my partner?
- How does my response affect my partner?
- How might we respond differently next time?
Understanding the cycle can create space for new choices.
The Sound Relationship House
The Gottmans developed the Sound Relationship House, a framework for understanding and strengthening relationships.
The model takes a strengths-based approach. Rather than focusing exclusively on what is going wrong, it also asks couples to identify and build upon the things that are working.
Two particularly important pillars of the Sound Relationship House are Trust and Commitment.
Trust involves feeling that your partner is there for you, that they have your interests in mind, and that you can depend on them. Commitment involves choosing the relationship and maintaining a sense of “us,” including during difficult periods.
The Sound Relationship House also includes other relationship skills and processes that can help couples strengthen their friendship, manage conflict, support one another’s dreams, and create shared meaning.
This framework can give couples practical areas to focus on as they work toward a stronger relationship.
From Conflict to Connection
Both EFT and Gottman-informed couples therapy offer valuable ways of understanding relationship difficulties.
The Gottman approach provides couples with practical tools for strengthening friendship, managing conflict, reducing destructive patterns, and building trust and commitment.
EFT focuses strongly on emotional connection and attachment—helping partners understand the deeper emotions, fears, and longings that often drive their interactions.
Although the language and frameworks differ, both approaches encourage couples to move beyond simply trying to “win” an argument.
The deeper question becomes:
How can we understand each other and create a relationship where both partners feel safe, valued, and connected?
Recommended Reading
As a starting point, couples may find it helpful to read or listen to a relationship book together. There are many resources available, but these two are well-known, research-informed approaches to couples work and offer practical exercises as well.
- The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work— John Gottman
This book introduces the Gottmans’ research and provides practical strategies for strengthening friendship, managing conflict, and improving connection.
- Hold Me Tight— Sue Johnson
This book introduces the EFT approach and helps couples understand their emotional patterns, attachment needs, and the cycles that can create disconnection.
Both books also have workbook-style resources that couples may find useful for putting the ideas into practice.
A Final Thought
Working on a relationship can be beneficial for our overall well-being. When we invest in our relationships, we are also investing in an important part of our emotional and social health.
Couples therapy is not about creating a perfect relationship. Every couple experiences conflict, misunderstanding, and periods of disconnection. The goal is to develop greater awareness of the patterns that emerge between partners and learn how to repair, reconnect, and respond differently.
Sometimes the most meaningful change begins with something simple: slowing down enough to become curious about what is happening inside ourselves and our partner.
What if the conflict isn’t the enemy? What if it is an invitation to understand one another more deeply?
An Important Note About Safety
While couples counselling can be helpful for many relationship challenges, it is not appropriate for every situation. In relationships involving ongoing intimate-partner violence, coercive control, or other forms of abuse, joint couples counselling may not be a safe or suitable approach.
In these circumstances, individual support and specialized services may be more appropriate. Safety should always be the priority.
by John Bablitz | Jun 6, 2018 | Forgive, Forgiveness
For a long time, a friend of mine (we’ll call her “Shirley”), genuinely hated a coworker of hers. Shirley wasn’t just bothered by this coworker, she genuinely couldn’t bring herself to think about them without being filled with a bitter anger, which ruined her evening on more than one occasion.
Notice that I don’t say Shirley didn’t have a “good” reason to hate this coworker – the person had deeply hurt her, and the organization that employed them both had failed to act appropriately in this situation, which made Shirley feel invisible, unsafe, and very, very angry. She had carried this anger for over a year, and it was taking a toll on her mentally, emotionally and physically.
For most of us, there has been a person in our life against whom we’ve carried a grudge of some kind. People hurt each other – it’s the price we pay for being able to have satisfying relationships; and, regrettably, these hurts are not always resolved. Shirley had been hurt, and like most of us, the very last thing she wanted to hear from a friend was that she needed to forgive and move on (this is not great advice, but is given more commonly than one might think).
For some people “forgiveness” is a bit of a dirty word; that is, how can we forgive someone who clearly doesn’t deserve it, especially if they don’t seem to understand the pain they’ve caused – or even seem to care? A better question to ask, perhaps, is, “What is forgiveness? And why should I forgive?”
Forgiving is not the same as forgetting (nor do these two things necessarily need to come as a pair). Forgetting is putting the hurt completely out of our minds, forever. Forgiveness is much more complex. Everett Worthington is a psychologist who has devoted much of his career to studying forgiveness, and he breaks the word into two main categories: ‘decisional,’ and ‘emotional’. Decisional forgiveness involves a cognitive decision to let go of the negative feelings we hold towards the person who has hurt us, whereas emotional forgiveness takes that a step further, replacing those negative feelings with positive ones like compassion and empathy. The person we are forgiving does not even need to be part of the process. We can forgive a deceased or estranged loved one that has no chance of ever receiving or reciprocating our gesture. We can also forgive someone as part of a relational gesture, regardless of whether or not the person chooses to, or is able to receive it.
It’s also possible that we might offer emotional forgiveness and have the person that hurt us accept it with genuine humility and remorse, which for everyone I’ve ever known, is a powerful experience. There is a famous scene in Les Misérables where a priest shows kindness to Jean Valjean, a man who hours before stole thousands of dollars worth of his property and knocked him unconscious after being shown kindness and trust. Valjean is completely and utterly undeserving. This scene brought tears to my eyes; there is something about undeserved forgiveness that can break down the most hardened exterior.
Forgiveness is pretty much always hard, no matter your situation. It doesn’t always go the way we hope it might. But one thing is certain: the resentment you are carrying is most likely hurting you a lot more than it is hurting the other person.
Resentment takes a toll on us; it takes energy to harbour a grudge (like carrying around a weighted pack). We are not required to forgive, but it is healthy for us in almost every conceivable way. Research shows that it improves heart health, immune system function, your gastrointestinal system, brain functioning and perhaps biggest of all, it reduces stress. Much research suggests that it also reduces rumination, which has been reliably linked to depression, anxiety, anger-related disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and psychologically related physical disorders.
For this reason, we can choose to view forgiveness as something we are doing for ourselves, rather than the offender. We can decide to try to let go of a grudge without actually feeling any different – and that is OK.
Try this: hold your arms out in front of you, with your hands clasped tightly together, as though you were clasping your resentment between them. Hold this for a minute (Not exhausted? Try two minutes), and then let your arms drop and relax. What did you notice? This is what happens internally when we let go of a grudge – we are releasing tension. Try it while actually picturing a minor grudge you are holding, and see if it makes you feel any different towards that grudge.
Lastly, I want to acknowledge that things are not that easy. In many ways, we cannot just decide to forgive, and all hurts are definitely not created equal. However, if you recognize that you might be carrying a grudge (big or small) that is actually hurting you more than it’s helping, and you feel you can’t get over it, there are lots of options to help yourself with it:
- Try cognitively deciding you want to commit to forgiving, even if you don’t feel like it, as a gift to yourself. If you want to take this a step further, try Everett Worthington’s evidence-based REACH forgiveness worksheets (available here for free). Many people have found these exercises very helpful.
- Talk through what you are experiencing with a trained therapist. Even just putting words to your experience and having them heard and understood can be very relieving, and therapists are trained to help you recognize and navigate challenging circumstances.
- Read stories of people who have forgiven under seemingly impossible circumstances, and try to be curious about your reactions to these stories. Do you agree with them? Do they make you angry? Humbled? Chances are, reading others’ experiences with hurt and forgiveness will help you feel less alone, and even just the experience hearing those stories can shift some of the weight. If you are part of a faith community or come from a faith background, try talking to a spiritual leader about what your faith says about forgiveness, and question what you find.
Most of all, remember to give yourself some grace as you wade through this process; forgiveness is both one of the most difficult and most rewarding things a person can go through. If you have any question regards on forgiving and forgiveness, feel free to contact us.
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Resources
Akhtar & Barlow have a few good articles out. This 2018 meta-analysis provides evidence for reduced depression, stress, anger, and hostility, as well as increased positive affect, related to forgiveness:
Akhtar, S., & Barlow, J. (2018). Forgiveness therapy for the promotion of mental well-being: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 19(1), 107-122. doi:10.1177/1524838016637079
Akhtar, S., Dolan, A., & Barlow, J. (2017). Understanding the relationship between state forgiveness and psychological wellbeing: A qualitative study. Journal of Religion and Health, 56(2), 450-463. doi.org:10.1007/s10943-016-0188-9
Baldry, A. C., Cinquegrana, V., Regalia, C. & Crapolicchio, E. (2017). The complex link between forgiveness, PTSD symptoms and well-being in female victims of intimate partner stalking. Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, 9, 230-242. doi:10.1108/JACPR-08-2016-0247
Orcutt, H. K., Pickett, S. M., & Pope, E. B. (2005). Experiential avoidance and forgiveness as mediators in the relation between traumatic interpersonal events and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 24(7), 1003-1029. doi:10.1521/jscp.2005.24.7.1003
