Make Your Emotion Color Chart
In order to handle conflict in a healthy and productive manner, it is helpful to have a visual representation of how your brain works. This activity will show you how your behavior changes depending on your brain state, using the Color Spectrum of Emotions from the **previous post**. Seeing how brain states and emotions influence behavior is helpful in navigating difficult situations with your children, as well as situations with your spouse or co-workers. You will find that your behavior is a symptom of what brain state you are in, and that knowledge can help you decide how to handle each situation.
Make Your Color Chart
In order to understand the concept of emotions on a color spectrum, here is an activity you can do. You can do this alone, with your partner, or with your children.
Take a piece of paper, and draw a line down the middle. Write the numbers 10-0 descending down the page on the left margin. Then take a red, yellow, and green colored pencil and lightly shade in the areas that represent the colors. Generally, green is from 0-4, yellow is from 4-7, and red from 7-10. Here is an example:
On the left side, you will be writing the emotions you feel, on the right side, you write the actions you do that match the emotional state.
On the green part, write down some emotions you feel when you are in a resting state. Emotions like happy, calm, peaceful, or relaxed. Then match those feelings to the actions you find yourself doing when you are in this brain state. Some examples might be singing, laughing, socializing, dancing, or reading.
Once you’ve done green, move to yellow. The emotions you would write here are ones you feel when you’re stressed out or starting to feel upset. Emotions like frustration, irritation, annoyance, and feeling bothered. Then write the actions you do that match these emotions. Do you eat more, take a nap, do retail therapy, or get a bit snippy with your loved ones?
Now, let’s talk about red. Red is when you aren’t yourself anymore, you are in survival. Your brainstem has taken over and your instincts are to fight back or flee. You could feel anger, fear, anxiety, panic, and resentment. When you are feeling red, are you lashing out, yelling, isolating yourself, having a panic attack or angrily cleaning the kitchen? You might do things you wouldn’t normally do, and looking back you might wonder how you could have said something so horrible, or done something crazy.
Apply This To Child
After seeing how your emotional states work together, you can better understand how to navigate a situation when your child starts misbehaving. That misbehavior is happening because they are not in their green state, and also because they likely are missing a skill. A child’s brain works the same way as your brain, except the emotions are more intense and the behaviors can be more extreme.
The choice you make on how to handle the situation when your child is misbehaving will either escalate the situation to red, or bring them back to green so they can learn what to do instead of misbehaving.
For example, if your child is tired and due for a nap, they are likely to be in yellow. They might be cranky, throwing things around, collapsing on the floor, or needing to be picked up. This is their way of saying “I’m in yellow, I need help”. If things go their way, they are likely to get back into green, and start playing.
However, if their nap gets prolonged, or things stop going their way, this will eventually escalate them into red and they will have a hard time coming out of it. Temper tantrums are more likely to happen, and it could get to the point where nothing is working and even putting them down for a nap is challenging. They became overtired and stuck in red, which might send you into red. It’s a difficult situation to navigate because everyone ends up in red, and everyone is feeding off of each other.
4 Steps to Handling Conflict with Your Child
Fortunately, it is easy to bring a child back down to green before things escalate. In order to bring a child back down to green just follow this simple 4 Step Process:
Identify what they are feeling
Validate and name their emotion
Deep breathe and relax
Problem solve to teach a new skill
Here is more information about the ***4 Steps to Handling It***
Apply This To Yourself
On those days where you feel on edge and can’t seem to get back to normal, understand that you are in your yellow state. Something happened to put you in yellow, and that knowledge can be used to guide how you want to proceed. Do you want to come back down to green? If so, what can you do? Can you take a walk, take a deep breath, have a nap, eat, or talk to someone? If not, do you want to escalate to red? Ask yourself in the moment “Did something happen? What can I do to get myself back in green?”
Being in yellow gives you the opportunity to choose how to handle the situation. If you can pay attention to how you are feeling, then you have the power to control yourself, which can influence how a situation plays out. Awareness is the key to making lasting changes.
Color Code in Relationships
You can even use this color code to communicate with your partner. If you find yourself fighting with your partner often, this color code will help both of you understand each other better so that you are able to de-escalate situations. You don’t know what someone else is feeling or thinking, but you do understand what yellow feels like. So, if you are starting to get in a fight with your partner, you can communicate that you are starting to feel yellow and then can use tools to de-escalate the fight and get to the point where you can solve the problem instead.
This code is really helpful in relationships where the individuals suffer from depression, anxiety, or other issues that are hard to live with. People who suffer from mental disorders typically have a hard time identifying their emotions and being able to self regulate. This is a great tool that can help, along with getting care from a licensed mental health provider and medication if necessary.
