Post #2 in category. We recommend reading posts in numerical order.
Emotion is the energy, motivation, and drive in which thought, action, and interpersonal relationships take shape. Emotion directs us to move toward or away from something. Emotion is a quick response for survival. It is an internal feeling state, a disposition, and a drive to succeed.
Emotion radiates into every interaction, every communication, every effort to learn. When threats are perceived, when health, wellness, the environment and developmental systems are disrupted, emotions become disordered and dysregulated.
Parallel Assessment, Parallel Development, Synontogeny and Integrated Developmental Domains are all organizing systems. They help us to better understand and connect with the child with developmental delays. They help us to better understand this particular child’s feelings, moods and emotions. How their emotions relate to this child’s other developmental domains and in what contexts. These insights and understandings help us improve our connection with the child and support their progress.
Emotion is a dynamic network. It draws on sensorimotor input, on memory, on appraisal, on the sense of one’s own body, and on the unconscious interpretation of another person’s actions, movements, rhythms and facial expression.
The child’s “emotional functioning” at a single point in time tells us less about the child than the movement and flow of their (and our) emotional states, how quickly arousal rises and falls, how high or how low, how encompassing or how narrow, how, when and why feelings shifts when circumstances change, what helps resolve the child’s automatic negative state back to calmer, more adaptive feelings and engagement.
Emotional Flooding
A child flooded with negative affect does not simply feel bad. Their working memory struggles. Planning becomes rigid or disappears. The capacity for self-reflection, for reading another person’s intentions, for listening to explanations and suggestions is interrupted or blocked. Thinking becomes concrete, automatic, defensive. Judgment is impaired. There are difficulties making good choices.
The child is not crazy, bad, or lazy. There are many underlying causes of the child’s negative and non-adaptive emotional state, including poor health and wellness, feeling confused, stressed, frustrated, overwhelmed sensorially, cognitively, socially, physically, repeated failures, feeling criticized, bullied, devalued, and a fragmentation of self and self-concept due to underdeveloped and under-integrated developmental domain systems.
Samuel
Samuel looks terrified when he enters a room and sees a balloon. He panics and tries to escape. If blocked and prevented from leaving, he would scream, flail his arms, run wild, bang his head on a wall or on a window. His actions frightened everyone who witnessed what was happening. It was understandable that his parents made “keeping him calm” the organizing principle of his childhood.
Every utterance of difficulty or distress, every negative glance or emotional facial expression was a signal to them that Samuel needed to be saved. The world was too unpredictable. Too many triggers. Outings were restricted. Every hint of discomfort was met with rescue, “Is that too much?” “Should we leave?” “That is enough for today.” Things could be managed better in the safety of his home and the security of his own room.
Of course, the intention of all of his caregivers, teachers, and therapists was based on their empathy, concern, and protection. In the immediate situation, it worked. Samuel was calm when he sat on his couch for hours staring into space with few needs, no demands, decisions, choices or exposure.
Of course, Samuel relaxed after he escaped from some perceived threat, but over the years he became increasingly avoidant, passive, isolated, and received fewer opportunities for learning and development. He did not develop self-regulation skills and showed little interest or initiative. His default approach to life was fear and avoidance.
Over time, he became increasingly afraid of his own impulses and fear responses. Samuel tried to express to me, in his simplified language, that he was afraid of his own feelings when he was out of control.
Samuel: “Afraid, hurt me.”
Therapist: “The dog?”
Samuel: “No, running.”
Therapist: “Are you telling me you should not run?”
Samuel: “No, afraid [when, because] run.”
Samuel’s family, caregivers, teachers, and therapists shared his fears and avoidances. They became afraid to help him discover that most things in his daily life could not hurt him, and that his feelings could be tolerated and even reconstructed. They were even afraid to discuss certain topics or to use certain words that might trigger him. We all understood Samuel’s caregivers and helpers’ overwhelming need to protect a fragile person who was so frightened and out of control. But over time Samuel suffered more.
Some of the people who had a close relationship with Samuel eventually absorbed his deep-seated anxieties and began looking at the world through the same fearful lens, a sort of emotional contagion.
Constant calmness was not the answer. What was helpful was supportive, mediated, and regulated engagement with peer models he trusted and identified with. Samuel was particularly motivated by a young female volunteer who took walks with him around his neighborhood. Nothing seemed to frighten him while he was on those walks with her. Mediators and peers who were optimistic, patient, fun-loving, intuitive but relaxed, confident, and encouraging helped him gradually expand his world and build confidence during real-life activities.
Daniel’s Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology and Reuven Feuerstein’s Mediated Learning Experience suggest that emotional self-regulation is not something adults can establish through acceptance or protection alone. It emerges from dyadic relationships with people who are sensitive to the child’s signals, who communicate safety, who strengthen shared positive states while helping to reduce the negative ones.
Over time, through shared, attuned learning experiences, the child’s tolerance for differences and difficulties, even automatic biologically based survival behaviors, improves, and the child’s capacity to regulate their own emotional intensity increases.
Copyright © 2025 Shlomo Chaim
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