Traumatic Brain Injury: Learning to Cope with Emotions for Teenagers with Feeling Buddies

This post is sponsored by Conscious Discipline as a Mama’Bassador

If you've been around here for awhile, you know my daughter's history with her traumatic brain injury. Em is an absolutely wonderful daughter and unfortunately, with her traumatic brain injury- she has explosions and she loses control of her emotions. I have gone the route of mental health support but at the end of the day, she has to learn to COPE with her emotions and how to express them in better ways than she has been.

You may recall, I shared about www.FeelingBuddies.com (here's the previous post). Feeling Buddies is an at-home self-regulation toolkit to help us, as parents, to teach our children to learn to cope, communicate and regulate their emotions.

We have been implementing the Feeling Buddies toolkit while helping Em navigate through all her emotions. The difficult part is that she is a teenager who is going through all the hormonal changes on top of being at a cognitive and emotional level that is a few years behind her physical age. That makes it hard when the only way she would express her anger and frustration was by physically and verbally lashing out. That's a HUGE issue and she can't continue like that. ESPECIALLY since she is on her way to high school and adulthood isn't that far away.

I will be 100% real here- she is entering high school as a ninth-grader next year. I have been having panic attacks over it. My personal anxiety has been running rampant because I am worried about how she will cope with this change and transitions have NEVER been easy for her. Also, she has been with the same teachers since 2nd grade. This is a HUGE change and I have been worried about getting her behavioral issues under control.

The behavioral issues are directly related to her not having self-regulation skills and learning how to cope with her emotions.

To get ready for all these major changes- we've been really working with our Feeling Buddies toolkit.

1. Listen to Your Feelings CD

Every evening after she comes home from a long day of school and her after-school Day Treatment & Training program, we listen to the "Listen to Your Feelings" CD. We pick a track based on how she felt throughout the day and how she feels when she gets home. It's been really positive in helping her explain how she feels, how she felt, and how to help understand the emotions and then how to respond to them.

2. Mini Feeling Buddies with carrying case Helping My Buddies (book)

She loves the Mini Feeling Buddies and when she needs to decompress, she grabs the book and a buddy and says "I need a break". She goes to her room and unwinds because that is HER safe place. She comes out and says "Mom! I feel better- I feel HAPPY!" while holding this lil guy