Emotional Outburst: Temper Tantrums

GARCIA, Jamie Nerlissa

Psych 101 - 2nd Semester 2011-

2012

WHAT IS A TEMPER

TANTRUM?

Tantrum is defined as:

emotional “explosions” designed to express extreme personal displeasure.

A behavior usually associated with emotional distress.

a behavior that attempts to manipulate others towards a desired end.

CAUSES OF TANTRUMS:

Emotional Maturity Emotional InsecurityUnforgivenessPersonalityStressSelfishness

Emotional Immaturity

• EMOTIONAL IMMATURITY. Adult tantrums can be due to emotional immaturity.

- part of growing up is developing to skills to deal with disappointments.

Emotional Immaturity

 By the end of the teen years the skills should be in place.

INSECURITY

EMOTIONAL INSECURITY. Emotional insecurity in adulthood can prompt tantrums. Emotional insecurity produces frustration with life. Little is needed in the way of additional frustration or disappointment to spark and emotional outburst.

UNFORGIVENESS

UNFORGIVENESS. Unforgiveness motivates adult tantrums because the person feels they are already the victims of injustice. The otherwise minor setbacks of the day can cause lingering feelings of being treated unjustly by others to transition into anger.

PERSONALITY PERSONALITY. Adult

tantrums can be related to personality traits. The five factor model of personality includes a dimension labeled “neuroticism” that includes characteristics associated with tantrum-like acting out. High neuroticism could cause people to have a tendency towards emotional outbursts.

Five Factor Model of Personality

SSTRESS

STRESS. Stress is the inability to manage the demands of two or more priorities in life or due to our inability to successfully resolve inconsistencies between two or more demands on us.

Stress has our emotional tanks already in a boiling state and little more is needed for stress to manifest in generalized anger. 

SELFISHNESS

• SELFISHNESS. A final possible cause of adult tantrums is selfishness. Children have tantrums because something or someone is preventing them from getting what they want.

Adults can be the same way. The tragedy with selfish adults is they never gain enough to cease being selfish. Overcoming selfishness requires that adults develop the skills of saying “no!” to what they want and learning to see through the eyes of others.

How do we overcome tantrums?

Guidance and Counseling

• Guidance and Counseling is provided in almost all schools, may it be tertiary, secondary or primary schools.

• Seeking professional help is useful especially when tantrums severely affect your life.

Purposes of GUIDANCE (Carl Rogers)

The purpose of most of the

helping professions is

to enhance personal

development, the

psychological growth a socialized

maturity, of its clients.

The individual who

understands himself and his

world will become a more effective, more productive and

happier human.

The individual

will become more fully

functioning as a person.

The individual achieves greater

awareness of who he is and

who he can become.

 

BRAIN PHYSIOLOGY

Why learn about your brain’s physiology?

Learning how

your brain works is an important aspect of emotional control.

Personal growth and evolution is mostly a matter of exerting more control over our reflexes.

Once you realize that emotions are largely an automatic function of the human brain, it is much easier to learn how to begin controlling them.

Automatic thoughts

• In many instances our negative emotional responses are directly preceded by automatic thoughts. These automatic thoughts remain hidden for most people. Unless you train yourself to look for these thoughts, you will probably be unaware of them.

Identification

When we identify ourselves with our negative emotional states, it is difficult to control them. By identifying with our negative emotions, we open up the possibility (and likelihood) that we will become dominated by them. Emotional control is essentially a matter of disidentifying with or detaching ourselves from our negative emotions.

Emotional control techniques and

therapies

Emotional control techniques and therapies:

•  Freeze-framing is a simple yet powerful technique for disengaging from negative emotions. When you freeze-frame, you shift out of gear and into neutral.

• Thought Field therapy enables you to access the deepest, most fundamental underlying cause of all negative emotions. Major debilitating emotions such as depression, anxiety and phobias can be quickly eliminated by correcting the problem at the fundamental level.

• Idenics is a self-development technology which enables you to rid yourself of unwanted mental or emotional conditions.

Freeze-framing

• Freeze-framing is essentially a tool for handling stress. Most of us find ourselves automatically slipping into various emotional responses when we are under pressure, and in doing so, we loose our ability to keep a level-headed perspective. When we freeze-frame, we shift ourselves into neutral; we maintain a high level of clarity and insight even when we are in the middle of the stressful moment.

Thought Field Therapy

• Dr. Roger Callahan has pioneered a remarkable form of psychotherapy called "Thought Field Therapy™." Originally Dr. Callahan had developed thought field therapy to help his clients eliminate their fears and phobias. 

• The implications of thought field therapy are profound. We still have not acquired the knack of eliminating to any significant degree, the negativity in our lives. We still manage to get ourselves tangled up in problems and negativities which have the potential to more or less destroy our lives. And the realistic, yet sad, fact is that most of it is completely unnecessary. Humans have got to reach a point in their development where such things as depression, anxiety, addictions, obsessions, etc., are laughable absurdities.

Idenics

• The basic working idea behind Idenics is that we tend to get stuck in various unwanted mental or emotional conditions; we automatically slip into certain perspectives and response patterns which at one time may have been quite useful, but now cause us trouble, limit us or hold us back. The problem is not so much the perspective itself as the fact that we seem to be stuck in it and unable to see beyond it.

•  It offered a set of alternative viewpoints with respect to coping with deeper ‘unwanted conditions.

• Provides a functional methodology for value enhancement and clarification.

References

• Villar, I. (2007). Implementing a Comprehensive Guidance and Counseling Program in the Philippines. Philippines: Aligned Transformations Publications.

• http://healing.about.com/od/emotion/a/validatefeeling.htm

• http://www.helium.com/items/1753700-adult-temper-tantrums

• http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl12.shtml