Helping Your Child With Their Anger and Aggression in the Play Therapy Room

Anger is a normal human emotion that we all experience sometimes when our sense of safety is compromised or when our ideas about ourself, others or the world don’t align with our reality, real or perceived. Anger arises in your child when their body is saying “No!” to something. ‘No’ to something scary. ‘No’ to something they don’t want. ‘No’ to an unwanted change they have no control over. ‘No’ to losing a loved one. Just ‘no’.

Some children have higher levels of aggression because their sense of safety has been compromised a great deal or perhaps because they have experienced a lot of big changes in their life and their reality does not match up with how they want it to be. Aggression in your child can show up in behaviours expressed inwardly such as self-harm and self-criticism or outwardly such as hitting, kicking, punching, biting, yelling, tantrums, destroying property and slamming doors.

Many of us were raised to believe that anger is not ok so when our child becomes aggressive, many well intending parents quickly try to stop their child’s anger or punish them for it. However, it is true that whatever we suppress, we eventually express. Children who are repeatedly taught that their anger is bad and that they need to suppress their anger, learn to ignore their natural instincts in protecting themselves when their personal boundaries are being violated or ignore the need to protect others when they witness social injustice. This can be devastating for the child because they learn to no longer trust their inner compass, their innate instincts when they feel a big ‘NO’ arising in their body, they disconnect from the wisdom their body is communicating to them and they develop a sense of shame and guilt whenever they feel angry. If your child displays a lot of aggression, play therapy can help them.

As usual, bear with me while I talk a little about the brain to help you understand your child’s aggressive behaviour. Your child receives millions upon millions of pieces of information every single second! Even though they are only consciously aware of a very small percentage of the stimuli around them, their brain and body are still very busy having to process large amounts of information entering through their system via their senses of smell, touch, sound, sight and taste. Their brain is perfectly designed to scan for and detect threats. It wants to know if the information coming in is familiar and safe, familiar and unsafe or unknown, therefore needs to work harder to investigate if it is a threat or not. The brain is ready to say ‘No!’ and ready to kick-start a protective response if it needs to.

The brain is not just scanning for threats to their physical body but also threats to their emotional, social and psychological wellbeing. If they have been exposed to sexual abuse, either witnessed or personally experienced, their brains could also be scanning for threats that are sexual in nature too. Their brain may also scan for potential threats to loved ones, particularly if they live in families where domestic violence takes place. Once the brain has detected a threat, it sounds the alarm to the nervous system to be alert and ready to protect itself using one of the fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses. I am not going to discuss all of the nervous system responses in this blog article. We are just going to look at the fight response. The good news is, if your child’s brain detects a real or perceived threat and activates the fight response, it means your child has hope and some self-determination that they can overcome the threat by fighting back rather than feeling helpless. They are honouring their innate instincts and impulses to fight for their safety or their desires and they are also demonstrating that they have enough self-esteem to honour their boundaries of what is ok and not ok with them. 

Children who have experienced repeated trauma, neglect and/or abuse are often much more vigilant and their nervous systems are more dysregulated because their brains have frequently detected and have had to regularly sound the alarms due to real or perceived threats, experienced and/or witnessed by the child. The result is that over time, their nervous system sounds the alarm more than what the child actually needs. Their nervous system becomes dysregulated. The goal of addressing hyperaroused aggression in play therapy is to use the safe environment of the play room, with the support of a therapist, to help the child learn to regulate their emotions and soothe their nervous system.

So what does your child being regulated look like? No, it doesn’t mean your child should be super zen and calm all the time nor does it mean that they should learn to stop their anger in its tracks when it starts to rise in order to not ‘misbehave’. When they are regulating their emotions, it means they are mindfully aware that they are experiencing anger in their body, they are present with it and can consciously choose how they are going to behave. It is the idea that we guide them to connect back in with their body, to notice the sensations in their body when ager arises, possible muscle tension, rapid breathing, felt heat, etc., rather than focussing on the stimuli outside of them – other people, situations, events, objects, etc. This helps them discover that their power in feeling safe often comes from mastering their own internal experience rather than resisting their external experience. 

 Know that your child learning to regulate their emotions, especially big felt ones such as anger, is not a linear process. Even after therapy has concluded, there will be many times that your child can regulate and there will be many times that they cannot regulate. We are all only human after all and our children need to know that it is ok if they don’t get it right today, they can always try again tomorrow.