he children like the materials, and respond to them well. They also love the stories. Myself, as always, I particularly appreciate the drawings. We have added to the emotion of feeling bad about yourself, because it is more common for the children I have worked with to be feeling bad for other reasons than low self esteem. Sometimes we feel really 'bad' (more like feeling ill - ‘sickened’ !!!) because we have done an awful thing, acting unthinkingly. Sso that we have hurt someone else's feelings or lost their trust in us.
We don't find it quite appropriate to encourage ourselves to feel good about ourselves in those circumstances - because our 'high' opinion of ourselves makes us feel disappointment in how we behaved. We want to hold ourselves to a higher standard than that.
In our language, we want to return to being our Better Self. We know we can! So "restorative justice" is what we want to DO. We want to feel better about ourselves, yes - but even more than that, we want to make up for what we did, we want to make the other person or people feel better, feel OK. We want to heal harm, restore trust, and have EVERYONE feeling better.
We love doing "restitution" - fixing what went a bit wrong back there.
We also have a song that we sing: "May we be filled with loving kindness, May all be well, May we be peaceful and at ease, May we be happy." That's the last verse - before that, we replace the "we" with “May you be - - -,” singing to the person we harmed in some way, then we sing to ourselves using "May I be - - -". This helps us feel not so bad about what we went and did back then, when we felt tired, impatient, frustrated, or simply mean-mindedly cross! - or any of the feelings you deal with so well. We need to be “understanding’ about ourselves and each other. We are growing to understand that feelings come unexpectedly, but feelings can change and be gone too.
[All this arises from me having previously used feelings I called "Mad, Bad, Sad or Glad" - for ease of them writing them! We used to check in on how much of each of those we're feeling right now, or had coursing through us when an incident occurred earlier in the day. I saw that feeling Bad is a strong feeling to deal with. They don't think it is low self esteem, So - more like high self esteem! They feel Bad that they have let themselves down, is what I'd describe it as.
Sorry my review is so LONG!
