The taboo on anger in children

About one year ago, I started working more systematically with children as an educator and at the same time, I started following the NSG training program. I have been puzzled in advance, about the “ideal way” of treating children in favour of their optimal development, but especially after beginning the training, I started wondering how you can bring the Gestalt theory and practice into such a professional setting.

Being surrounded by the same children everyday, I have the chance to observe closely their development, at least as their way of making contact with their environment, is concerned. You can see parental do’s and don’ts getting adapted, how children project “negative”behaviour to other children, how contact patterns are little by little shaped, day by day, through their interaction with their parents, friends, schoolmates and teachers. Watching that development, I cannot help myself but wonder, which is the adult’s right place into this process. How should the parent and the teacher act in order to promote a healthy and adoptive development in terms of Gestalt growth?

What I find most striking and disturbing in my work with children, is how anger, aggression and aggressive behaviour is being handled from the parents and the educational environments. Naturally, the younger a child is, the less introjections has taken in, regarding what is wrong and what is right. As a result, the child acts on impulse. Pushing, grabbing, biting, hitting are just natural forms of behaviour in order to protect your area, claim ownership, express your feelings, and in general establish your physical and emotional boundaries. If that would be the unconscious perspective of the child concerning aggressive behaviour, what is the conscious perspective of the parent and the teacher? And most importantly, how does their perspective interfere with the process of a healthy development?

It is commonly acknowledged, by psychologists and therapists, that anger is the least acceptable emotion in our culture. Society shows minimal tolerance to the expression of anger, as it is regarded as something negative and unwanted. This notion is formed from the beginning of our lives. Expressing your anger physically or verbally as a child, can lead you to punishment, social exclusion and a general sense of rejection from the environment. These responses of the environment to the aggressive behaviour, lead to the creation of the taboo of anger. Anger is an almost forbidden emotion, and aggressive behaviour is labelled as bad or even catastrophic. Subsequently, children hold in their angry feelings, suppress them until they explode, turn them onto themselves until they implode, get ill through somatization processes, get withdrawn, depressed, self-destructive or physically aggressive.

The most usual cause that sends children to therapy, as reported by gestalt therapists, stems from anger management issues. Constant suppression and discarding of anger will eventually lead to dysfunctional behaviour. When these issues express themselves with symptoms like violent behaviour, parents send their children to therapy in order to “fix” them and make them behave nicely, while when children behave with symptoms as withdrawal and depression, the parents send the child to therapy again, to see “what is wrong” with them.

It is really quite surprising, how, most of the times, it doesn’t occur to the parents that what is “wrong” with their child, is actually what is wrong in their contact with the child. Many times, parents ask me in a state of painful agony whether their child has behaved nicely or has been involved into bad/ inappropriate incidents. And when the children have been caught up in a fight or in a situation where the child explicitly expressed his or her anger, the parent looks disappointed, troubled and often ashamed of this bad behaviour.

The expression of anger in healthy ways is necessary. During therapy, the child and the adult can discover several ways to express their anger in an acceptable, safe way. In gestalt play therapy for example, anger can be dealt with various techniques like punching or screaming into pillows, drawing, making forms of clay and then destroying them, talking to or through puppets and various other techniques. But for me, it is important that we, as adults, have to understand that inhibiting the expression of anger jeopardises the healthy development of our children. Treating anger as unnatural creates problems either currently to the child or to the future adult. As parents or educators, we have to first understand, accept and then teach our children that anger is a natural emotion, it is neither good nor bad and it would better be expressed somehow, before we reach the therapist’s door.

Electra Matsangou
GMO-2.