Use of Emotion Cards with Children and Teenagers: To Help them Heal

Presenter: Dr Margot Sunderland 

This webinar is about supporting vulnerable children and teenagers to find a language for their mental states that is sophisticated enough to support the process of long-term therapeutic change. Research shows that accurately labelling your emotions in reflective process, is key for recovery from traumatic life experience. It can prevent depression, anxiety and the developing of mental health symptoms (Diamond 1988; Rieffe et al., 2012).

Most people who find it difficult to accurately name their emotions come from childhood homes where people don’t/didn’t really talk about feelings. So, they grow up with an inability to process powerful life experiences. They might use words like ‘difficult’ or ‘stressful’ or  ‘depressed’ that fail to accurately describe what they are actually feeling. As a result, unstoried emotions build up and up inside them, resulting in significant mental health problems. As Leslie Greenberg, (founder of Emotion Focused therapy) says, “Mental health problems are emotional processing problems.”

In this webinar, Margot Sunderland explains how to use the emotion cards in one-to-one talk time. She uses powerful case material as illustration throughout. You will learn how to use the cards as conversation starters to help children and teenagers to move into a deeper level of experiencing, where life events can be made sense of and feelings safely felt and worked through. For so many young people, the cards provide a vital door to becoming more engaged in and fascinated by the deeply enriching world of self-discovery.