Your child has entered the ‘fight’ mode of a fear response. It’s fight, flight or freeze and your brave soldier is choosing to fight his way through this.
The amygdala has responded by pumping hormones through his body and that instinctual response is an angry, fighting one for him. Slow your child down. Ask him to count backwards from 10 or choose another grounding technique to help bring him back into the room. Behind all that anger is fear and sadness and maybe something entirely different like shame and guilt. In order to work through this, you need to tap into what is behind his anger. Ask him how angry he is on a scale of 1 – 10, and ask him to explain it, by finishing this sentence: “I feel angry because…” Then ask him how scared he is on a scale of 1 – 10, and again to finish the sentence, “I feel scared/sad/afraid because…”
After talking about it, scale him again by taking his “emotional temperature” to see if talking helped. Check in to see if talking about his feelings helped him feel less angry and less scared/sad/afraid.
