David Coleman: There’s a good reason why the Late Late Toy Show made you cry this year

Like adults, kids can bottle up feelings of stress and anxiety until they’re released in a rage or teary breakdown. But by helping them recognise their feelings, they can better manage them

Ryan Tubridy hosted The Late Late Toy Show that brought some viewers to tears. Photo: Andres Poveda

Dr David Coleman

December 02 2020 06:44 AM

Have you found yourself in tears watching the telly over the last while? I didn’t watch the Toy Show last Friday, but judging by the WhatsApp messages from friends they were in floods of tears for big chunks of the show. I have found myself crying at the Repair Shop, at the final of GBBO and on Saturday as Hrvy got emotional when chatting to his family on Strictly. As my wife will affirm, I’m not usually a man to cry much.

So what is going on that all this emotion is bubbling to the surface?

I think that when we get faced with emotionally stressful events our “go to” coping strategy is to distract ourselves away from whatever distress those events are creating. In the short-term, this can be quite useful and effective, as it allows us to continue to get by and to deal with the situations that we are in. We can use all sorts of distractions, like TV, exercise, eating, reading, listening to music, chatting to friends and so on. In moderation, all of these are healthy ways to keep the distress at bay.

If, however, we keep distracting ourselves without ever processing those feelings, we will eventually get to the point that our feelings are “bottled up”. The difficulty with bottled up feelings is that sooner or later it can feel like we have run out of storage space for all the angst, stress, distress, anxiety, hurt and so on. That is often the point at which those feelings either leak out (cue the triggers during the Late Late Toy Show), or sometimes blow out (think of rages, panic attacks or uncontrolled crying). If it’s tricky for us, then it’s bound to be tricky for our children and teenagers too.

Coronavirus and the associated restrictions imposed on our children’s and teenager’s lives may well be causing a backlog of distressing feelings. We know that they have missed out on many things, suffering the loss and disappointment inherent in that. The underlying uncertainty created by Covid-19 could have increased their anxiety or created anxiety. Because this has stretched on for so long now, many of them may be suffering the long-term, chronic, stress associated with that uncertainty. If the complicated mix of feelings that this can create has been largely unprocessed and blocked down inside, then our children and teenagers may be a tinder-box of strong emotions waiting to burst into flames.

Interesting too, when those emotions do sometimes explode out, or even leak out, they often don’t reflect the nature of the feelings that are actually inside. Often times our feelings mix together in our internal world (I imagine it to be like mixing paints such that the original colours eventually merge together to make a muddy brown or black), metamorphosing from feelings like disappointment, sadness, distress, envy, injustice into anger and/or anxiety.

David Coleman admits he got teary watching the GBBO final when Peter Sawkins (pictured) was crowned winner

It seems to me that anger is often the best and most accessible way for children and teenagers to express out the urgency, the scale and the intensity of other, more complicated or nuanced feelings. Having a major temper tantrum can often bring some relief from the pressure of other strong feelings. As a result, when they get angry with us, we might need to stop and think.

It is easy to react to their anger by becoming angry yourself, or by rushing into consequences for the behaviour that may accompany their anger. If you just react to their surface anger, however, you might miss an opportunity to get behind the angry outburst and to help them make sense of the actual feelings that are demanding to be processed.

For sure, if they are in the throes of a major outburst, you may have to wait until later, when things are calmer and they are able to think straight again after the adrenalin has faded. But when that opportunity comes to address the outburst, think about focusing less on the anger and more on the whole range of feelings that you could guess they may have. Guess, with them, about other things like loss, disappointments, worries, stresses, frustrations or sadness which may be caused directly, or indirectly by their experiences with the pandemic.

Having a chance to talk about how stressful and distressing the pandemic may be gives children the chance to connect their feelings to their experiences in a way that will allow them more likelihood of making sense of those feelings and processing them. Talking about feelings is a better long-term strategy to help children understand and de-pressurise those feelings. Instead of having lots of bottled-up feelings ready to blow, they may feel on a more even keel and be better able to cope with the stresses that life carries.

In the absence of anyone helping me to de-pressurise my feelings, I’ll just tune in to the Toy Show on the Player…that should allow them all to bubble up again, and maybe I’ll make better sense of them this time around.