Journaling Emotions
I don’t have much time to Steemit tonight. Instead, I am working on a journaling project for a little girl I know. This little girl was removed from her home, and is currently living with her aunt. She briefly stayed with me recently, which gave me the opportunity to see that she is a sweet soul. It is a moving experience to observe how truly good some people are, despite their difficult circumstances, and how resilient. One thing about her that stuck out was her inability to express emotion. When it came to any emotion outside of happiness, she had no voice.
I bought her a hardback sketchbook that I plan to spend the next week turning into a journal for her. My hope is that if she will use it, she can acclimate herself to expressing some of her feelings in a way that makes her feel safe. I am doing some simple sketches and entries in the beginning of the book with the prompt "Today I am feeling...". I hope my entries will give her some inspiration to fill up the rest of the book. But also, it is a way of letting her know that I care, because everybody needs somebody to care about them.
wow what a great idea, I'm going to use this in my next workshop for kids. thanks and great work. you're doing important healing for this kid. I
Following you!
This is a beautiful gift you are giving her.
I can relate to the inability to express emotion.
I didn't have words for them. When asked I'd say I didn't know and I truly didn't. I didn't have knowledge of emotion words. I was numb to many.
It took years of learning to be able to know what I was feeling.
The most helpful tool I received was a list of primary and secondary emotions.
I learned what each emotion meant (with a lot of synonyms), what they looked like to others, what it felt like in my body and what kind of reaction was typical for that emotion.
I hope she feels cared for by you.
That is a very interesting perspective. I was assuming that she just hid her emotions, rather than being numb to them, but that seems a likely scenario. Dealing with all the ups and downs of life is difficult as an adult, I can't imagine going through it as a child on my own. I was starting to wonder if this was a silly idea, but I feel a little more confident about it now :)