Your family narrative

Your family has a story, a narrative. This story includes how and when the parents met, how the children came into the family (birth, adoption, foster, step…), positive times (vacations that went well, accomplishments, awards…), negative times (when someone lost a job, death of a pet, dealing with a disability, life challenges…), everyday life (favorite games, pizza night, birthdays…), core values (we worship weekly, nightly dinner together is important, we volunteer our time…), and much more.

Instead of reading or writing about other people, read, write, talk about your family. Some people write about their families to preserve family history. Some people write about their families as a way to sort out their feelings and beliefs about their past.

Another important reason to read, write, or talk about your family is to help your children. Learning about or writing about family can provide them with a background for the family’s values and it can help integrate their place in the family.

Ways to tell your family story:

• Pick a segment of your family’s history (when Grandma and Grandpa first got married, when your child joined the family, the winter we got snowed in…), pop some popcorn, and turn telling the story into a family get-together.
• Turn your child’s story into a multi-part story that you tell them over several nights as you tuck them in. Tell them about when you first saw her. Share about his early milestones. Describe what you liked about her when she was little. Talk about his accomplishments. Project into the future and share your hopes for her future.
• Create a slide presentation, gather the family around, and get everyone to share memories and stories.
• Have your child create a book of their life or the family as they know it. Have them write or type it up, and illustrate it. It can be shared with the immediate family or given to grandparents as a gift.

A family’s narrative is important to everyone. But it can be especially important for newly-adopted or foster children to hear, or when the family goes through changes, whether positive or negative. Become a family that narrates their own story as a way to celebrate, join together, and move through challenges.

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RESOURCE

You Can Write Your Family History

Emotions described in acrostic poems

Wrote poems about mad, sad, glad, scared, and ashamed

Tried this poem-writing activity with a 14-year-old boy who struggles to identify and articulate him emotions. The result was five poems written about mad, sad, glad, scared, and ashamed. Several things happened before writing the poems to help him become familiar with feelings and the bodily sensations that go along with emotions. We discussed emotions and the different ways they can impact your body: tense, tight, tears, tingly, hot, cold, etc. Then we read several children’s books about emotions. His last exercise before writing the poems was to draw stick people to depict mad, sad, glad, scared, and ashamed, with the most important aspect the facial expression.

The poetry exercise began with showing him an acrostic poem where each letter of a person’s name or a word become the first letter of a line of poetry. For example, tree, might become a poem like this:

Tree

They are big or sometimes small
Reaching always for the sky
Every kind grows in the park
Each one has leaves, a trunk, and roots.

The boy wrote one acrostic poem using his name to describe himself, then another poem using the word “rain.” Next,  I asked him to write one poem for each of the main emotion words we had discussed and that he had drawn pictures of. The result was close to astonishing! This boy who, a short time ago, described everything as being either sad or happy, and when asked how emotions felt in his body said, “Can’t feel anything,” could now distinguish nuances of emotions! When I asked him what he thought about his poems, he said, “I feel very proud!” And, he should!

Here are two examples of what he wrote:

Glad

Gives you energy
Let’s you laugh
Always makes you smile
Does not make you feel lonely.

Scared

Sometimes can make you cry
Can make you nervous
And make you tense
Reminds you of scary thoughts about it
Even can make you shake
Does not make you feel relaxed.

The process of having to think about different ways to describe an emotion helps embed it in the child’s brain. The more opportunities we give a child to articulate and talk about his or her emotions, the less potential their is for acting out those emotions inappropriately.

From nothing to love

Nothing, by Mick Inkpen, tells the story of a sad, lonely, misshapen stuffed cat. He’s left behind in an attic when the family moves out. He can’t quite remember who he is or what his name is. One of the movers shines a flashlight on him and says, “Oh, it’s nothing,” so he decides his name must be Nothing. He meets up with a mouse, a fox, and a frog, and eventually a tabby cat. Nothing cries to the cat, “I don’t know who I am!” The tabby cat befriends Nothing and takes him on an adventure. Eventually, the tabby cat takes Nothing home. Nothing finds out that he, in fact, belongs to this family. They clean him up, fix his injuries, and envelop him in love. He has a family! He’s home! He’s loved!

The story is excellent and the illustrations are exquisite. It looks very much like a young children’s book, but the message is appropriate for all ages. Recently, I gave this to a 14-year-old boy who was intrigued by the book.

Discussion or writing topics:

• How did Nothing feel in the beginning of the book? Have you ever felt like that?
• How did Nothing feel at the end of the book? What helped him feel differently?
• What are five feelings that Nothing might have had at the beginning of the book?
• What are five feelings that Nothing might have had at the end of the book?

Book info:
Nothing by Mick Inkpen. Written for young children, ages 4-8, but applicable for older children, teens, and adults. Helpful for individuals dealing with issues relating to adoption, life changes, feeling alone, worthlessness, and grief and loss.

Building a sense of self through writing

If your child is struggling due to stress, grief, behavioral issues, or big life questions, they may not be sure who they are. Sometimes it’s more than low self esteem, but a lack of self… an inability to figure out what they like, what they’re good at, or even what their favorite food is.

Help your child along. Give her or him a few questions to answer or writing prompts or drawing assignments about themselves. Don’t use these as opportunities to tell your child that their self-perceptions are incorrect or should change. Instead, thank them for sharing and suggest they tell you more, either through writing or talking. The goal is just to give them a deeper sense of who they are, a deeper sense of self, and ultimately, improved self-esteem.

Suggest one or more of the following to your child:

• Draw a picture of yourself.
• Draw a picture of you and your family.
• When it’s sunny, I like to __________.
• My favorite place to go for vacation is __________.
• I love to eat __________.
• My feet like to __________.
• I’d like to invent __________.
• If I could make a movie it would be called __________.
• I’d like to write a book about __________.
• Someday, I hope I can __________.
• Write about a time you were helpful and how it made you feel.
• Write about a time you were sad and why.
• Imagine you could go back in history. Who would you like to meet and what would you ask that person?

A child writing about himself or herself could be a one-time activity, or you could get them a journal and have them write one thing every day about themselves. Remember, the idea is not for you to try and change how they think about themselves or to dispute what they write, but rather to give them new opportunities to  think about who they are and who they would like to be, developing an improved sense of self.

RESOURCES:

Kid’s Health: Developing Your Child’s Self Esteem

Oh, The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss

Poetry for sharing emotions

Poetry provides an optional method for sharing emotions. Children and teens struggling with issues of feeling different, or being bullied, or grief and loss, or life-changing challenges need to share their emotions in order to find relief and help in moving forward. Even for kids who have never written poetry, the intrigue and challenge may encourage them to share their feelings in a new way.

In Poetry Everywhere, the author says, “It is… the nature of poetry to shake things up and engage the imagination.” So, point your children or clients towards poetry and see if you can shake out a few of their emotions, giving voice to their inner thoughts and feelings.

A simple poem format is a lune. Lunes have three words for the first line, five for the second, and three for the third. That’s it! The format is simpler than a haiku which is based on syllables. Here are a couple of examples:

Our Dog
Misty is black
and old and crinkly stiff
We love her.

Mommy
I love you
Wonderful mommy, beautiful and kind
Missing you already

Alone
I sit alone
No one comes to me
Please see me

You can have a child write three lunes about the same topic. Or, you could have them weave together several lunes into one poem. Start off with a simple, unemotional topic like a season or a place. Then give them emotion words to work with–angry, alone, lost, determined, or depressed. See what they come up with. It might just be another way to find out what’s inside and to help them let those feelings out.

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Reference: Poetry Everywhere–Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community, by Jack Collom and Sheryl Noethe, 2005.

Narrative therapy heals

Writing about difficult subjects and traumatic incidents helps people in a multitude of ways, suggests professor James W. Pennebaker at the University of Texas.  One often-repeated test was to have individuals write about a trauma or difficult situation for 15 minutes, three or four days in a row.

In more than 200 expressive writing experiments, spread over two decades, according to Pennebaker, results include positive impact on various health complaints and immune function. College students, for example, improved their adjustment to college, reduced their visits to the health center, and in some cases, improved their grades.

This writing experiment was undertaken by college students, inmates, pain suffers, medical students, engineers out of work, first-time mothers, and others. It was done in the U.S., Belgium, Mexico, and New Zealand. The results—improved mental and physical health held true.

Narrative writing seems to help organize and give meaning to emotional trauma and experiences that may be difficult or complex. It seems that the process of writing, which integrates emotions and thoughts, provides a way to summarize and then move past the event.

The stories can be either autobiographical or third person, says Pennebaker. However, just telling a story about oneself does not provide benefits. It’s the process of contemplating and creating the story that provides benefits.  So, for someone to recount a story about their childhood, based on what they’ve been told or remember, appears to have little benefit. However, if the person writes their own version of the story, connecting events, thoughts, emotions, and people, the results are positive.

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References:

Pennebaker, J.W. & Seagal, J. (1999). Forming a story: The health benefits of narrative. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 55, 1243-1254. Retrieved from http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/HomePage/Faculty/Pennebaker/Reprints/Seagal1999.pdf

Pennebaker, J.W. (2010). Expressive writing in a clinical setting. The Independent Practitioner, 30, 23-25. Retrieved from http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/pennebaker/reprints/Pennebaker_IP2010.pdf

Writing by hand is important

When having children read and then write about their books, have them write by hand. Give them, or have them pick out a journal that reflects their favorite colors or designs. Writing by hand helps improve the learning of the material.

Associate professor Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger’s Reading Centre says that the process of writing by hand strengthens the learning process. “The sensorimotor component forms an integral part of training for beginners, and in special education for people with learning difficulties. But there is little awareness and understanding of the importance of handwriting to the learning process,” says Mangen. She adds, “Our bodies are designed to interact with the world which surrounds us. We are living creatures, geared toward using physical objects — be it a book, a keyboard or a pen — to perform certain tasks.”

Read the whole article at Better Learning Through Handwriting, Science Daily, January 24, 2011.