The fact that childhood is a happy time, unfortunately, is not the most true statement. Children often find it difficult. And to parents. Some more often, some less often. But things are far from cloudless for everyone, that’s for sure. I have been working with children for a long time, since 2003 (albeit with interruptions), and last year I began to study psychologist Violet Oaklander’s model of working with children and found so many treasures for myself as a parent and as a psychologist that I want to share. And I decided to start a section #gestalt_with_children. I hope it will be useful to you) And I want to start with a difficult topic - forbidden feelings. I want to talk not so much about intense experiences associated with dramatic events, but about the everyday emotional life of a child and family. Emotions and feelings are important: - Anger allows you to express yourself, feel and defend your boundaries, allows you to trigger changes. - Fear gives the ability to take risks into account, become sensitive to one’s capabilities and resources, take care of oneself and others. - Thanks to sadness and joy, we understand what is valuable and important to us, we learn to choose... Each of the feelings, without exception, performs an important function in life and loss one of the categories of normal and natural leads to the development of various neurotic defense mechanisms (up to somatic manifestations: asthma, VSD, enuresis, encopresis, etc.) and makes it impossible to learn how to deal with this feeling. Rarely do any parents consciously decide: “So! We cannot be angry, afraid or sad. And you can rejoice for no more than 3 minutes and quietly.” Basically, everything happens unconsciously and parents, who themselves have not been taught to feel something, cannot tolerate this feeling in the child and automatically produce prohibitive reactions (attack or rejection), gradually depriving him of the opportunity to use the resources of this or that feeling. What to do? In short :Parents - develop your own sensitivity (monitor how and what you feel? How do you deal with it? What options for expressing feelings are there, etc.) Talk about different feelings and their importance with the child (discussing examples from everyday life, cartoons and books ... How do you think he feels? How would you feel? How can he better show his feelings, etc.) Learn to accept the child’s feelings, deal with them, admitting your mistakes. In conclusion, I offer a simple exercise that I often do? I use it when working with children and parents. It helps to draw attention to some important points in the emotional life of the family and plus provides an opportunity to discuss what is happening. I suggest doing it together with the child. Take a sheet of white paper and something to draw with (pencils, markers, paints) and draw 4 taps each, from which your feelings will flow. The first tap is anger. The second is fear. The third is sadness, and the fourth is joy. Try to abstractly depict how they flow. What color and intensity are they? Something barely drips, something splashes in different directions? Maybe it’s not a liquid at all, but various objects? Trust yourself, draw freely. Don't concentrate on each other's drawings. After you finish, I suggest you think about the following: What happened? What feelings does your drawing evoke? Your child's drawing? What was more difficult to draw? Which is easier? What did you pay attention to first of all? Is there anything that surprised you in your drawing, the drawing of a child? How do you feel something? How would you like it? Which faucet needs to be repaired? Etc. discuss this together. Good luck! To be continued) PS What issues of child psychology concern you? What would you like to talk about?* Instagram is owned by Meta, which is recognized as an extremist organization in Russia.