In helping a student deal with rage, it is important to deal with any past negative emotional events that may be the cause of the rage that’s being created now.
Sometimes you or they, might not know what those things are, they might not know what their triggers have been caused by, because sometimes when traumas have occurred (particularly when they’ve occurred in childhood) those triggers might be unconscious and they might want them to remain that way. Their unconscious mind is always trying to protect them and sometimes it represses memories in order to do that. If the mind feels that they can’t handle those memories, that they can’t emotionally deal with them, it will repress those memories for them and it will represent memories for resolution only when it feels that they’re ready to be able to deal with those emotions.
So sometimes they need to deal with past negative emotional events, that they didn’t even know they had and that can sound quite complicated! On the upside, NLP can offer teachers and educational support staff ways to do this.
Our young person needs to start rehearsing the right way to enforce their boundaries. Sometimes rage shows up when we fear that we’re experiencing a boundary violation. If we think that somebody has crossed the line, they’ve pushed us too far, they’ve said too many things that perhaps they shouldn’t say. They’ve perhaps been disrespectful in some way, they need to be able to reinforce their boundaries with people before they get to the point of losing their rage and one of the ways that they can do this is by doing that kind of visual rehearsal in their mind, where they see themselves in a situation where somebody is saying the kind of stuff that pushes their buttons and they see themselves reacting to it in that new positive way. Now what this will do for them, is it will have them rehearse reacting in that new positive way in the future. So that, as and when they’re exposed to a situation like the one they’ve imagined, their brain will know instantly how to react because they’ve been practising doing it that way.
If they think how terrible it might go bad might react and how angry they might get that too, is a visual rehearsal. So, they’ll still be practising how to react for the next time around and that’s not the kind of programming they want to set up for themselves – so have them rehearse in their mind right way to behave and respond when people are aggravating them or pushing their buttons and how they can eloquently reinforce their boundaries around others.
Rage is a way of attacking. The attack is the best form of defence. What is it that they think they are being attacked for? Perhaps some unhealthy beliefs that they feel are being violated, that they are a victim of something and they need to defend themselves by attacking back.
So start to notice what unhealthy beliefs they might have and start to question them so that they can realise that some of them are absolutely ridiculous but they’re so deeply embedded and we react on them without thinking about our what they really mean and what we’re really telling ourselves meaning we forget to notice how unhealthy some of these beliefs can be and how out of date they might be as well.
People Building in an NLP and personal development training company for teachers and professionals working in education.
For more information about our courses designed to reduce stress in teachers and avoid ‘teacher burn-out’, contact us on 0345 3192 666
By Gemma Bailey
www.peoplebuilding.co.uk
