The new academic year is underway and the summer holidays feel like a distant memory. Walking in the corridors I sense excitement and hope; the thrill of new friendships being formed and the delight of more autonomy as our pupils’ school careers progress.
Indeed, schools provide an endless source of new beginnings and endings, of transitions and adjustments which are both welcome and feared and this is something that we embrace fully at Francis Holland Regent’s Park.
In our eagerness to facilitate a smooth transition for our new pupils it can be easy to forget that angst, unease, worry and anxiety can be a perfectly functional response to something that’s unknown to us. The American philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin, a rich source of inspiration in my work, reminds us that anxiety, far from being a sign of weakness or a symptom to be eliminated, is evidence of life moving forward into unfamiliar territory.
How can we truly help our pupils through the uncertain and unfamiliar?
The first and most important step is to meet our young people where they are. This is easier said than done, we have all been there: we see a young person struggling and we want to rescue, take away the pain. When we resort to all too familiar platitudes, such as “there’s no need to worry” or “you’ll make friends eventually”, we overlook the transformative power of acknowledgement.
When we name and acknowledge a feeling rather than dismissing it or silencing it with reassurance, something in us feels understood and this in turn, allows for a subtle shift to occur. To be clear, validating the experience and the emotional weight of a worry is not the same as agreeing with the content of an anxious thought. Keeping this distinction in mind, helps to cultivate a climate that is both compassionate and steady and it helps us attend to young people’s emotional lives. Pupils don’t need adults who attempt the unrealistic goal of erasing their anxiety; they need adults who can be there with them in it.
The second step revolves around increasing young people’s capacity to tolerate anxiety. We have seen that offering reassurance, albeit a perfectly relatable activity (we are, after all, hard wired to respond to a young person’s fear and to step in), can have the unintended consequence of making the person we are trying to reassure feel as though they are not being heard.
Now, I’d like to add that in our effort to reduce distress, helping the young person avoid feared situations, indirectly, reinforces the message that they can’t cope with feeling anxious and that anxiety must be avoided at all costs. Dr Eli Liebowitz, a prominent scholar on childhood anxiety, shows us that when we supportively step back, we offer young people the opportunity to discover that they have the capacity to tolerate difficult emotional states.
His core message is that teaching our children not to fear anxiety can be achieved by calmy communicating empathy (“I understand this is difficult for you”) and confidence (“and I know that you can cope with feeling anxious”) while maintaining appropriate demands and not giving in to avoidance.
At Francis Holland Regent’s Park, we embrace this philosophy, meeting pupils where they are with openness and curiosity and conveying confidence in them so that anxiety ceases to be a problem to be eradicated, but it becomes an opportunity for long lasting change that goes beyond settling into a new school. Indeed, it has the potential of turning into a precious tool for transforming the natural worries of transition into trust in their own capacity to handle life.
Chiara Vincenti
FHRP Counsellor
