To feel or not to feel -- that's the coping question.

In our society children are sometimes encouraged by parents and educators to "toughen up" and stop being so sensitive when their feelings are hurt by what others do or say to upset them. Of course we want our children or those kids in our care to be strong and able to weather daily upsets and stress. But the question is whether "toughening up" or developing emotional coping skills are better long term strategies to deal with stress without suffering the serious side effects from our course of action.

Neuroscientists and emotional health professional tell us that emotional pain is real and registers deep within our emotional and reptilian coping brains. (See Coping Skills for Kids website "Coping Brain" section.) What happens when we "toughen up" so we ignore and don't attend to pain arising from emotionally wounding experiences? In effect we are signaling our brain to not deal with our real feelings. Our brain comes with strong instincts to avoid pain of any kind. However, because physical and emotional pain register in the same location of our brain, we can convince the brain to "pretend" that emotional pain isn't real. And in the short run that brain disconnect often does work. Our brain even blocks physical pain the instant we're hurt by a serious accident. This instinctive brain response protects us by putting us into a state of shock that masks the pain of our injury until we surivive the crisis. It's only after the shock wears off that we truly begin to experience our pain and fear for our life.

But what happens when we choose to desensitize our awareness of emotional brain pain when we're stressed and upset? We cam temporarily avoid the emotional truth and not actually feel anything when we're emotionally wounded. But if we adopt this way of avoiding pain we may later pay a big price for this false sense of security. In the process we may sacrifice our ability to access positive feelings of love, joy and connectedness with others. A major indicator that we are emotionally healthy is the ability to employ healthy and effective coping skills that allow us to "own" and get over our pain without losing positive feelings about ourself and others. We may convince neocortex and emotional coping brains to ignore emotional pain impulses, but painful experiences are often stored so deeply unless we directly deal with them they may never leave us. The danger then is feeling tormented by the very experience we never learned to honestly deal with in the first place.

Some kids and adults try to convince themselves that "I don't care," but functional brain imaging (fMRI) scans actually show that our emotional and survival (reptilian) instinctive brains still remember that the pain is still there. Emotional brain is involved with our long term memory. The more we learn about our brain we realize it is programmed to avoid danger and painful experiences. If we choose to cope with distressing experiences and emotional wounds by pretending they don't exist, we may get some temporary relief. But often repeated use of the "toughen up" coping strategy can impair the human capability of experiencing real love or deep emotional connection with others. Whenever you hear a defiant kid say "I don't care," think of it as code for "I don't feel." Kids may not realize the consequences of choosing to not recognize or feel their pain. But they need to understand that our decision to not feel can lead to a lifetime of troublesome coping patterns: aggression, depression, and high risk behavior including alcohol or drug abuse. Those who choose not to feel (or care) take a high risk coping road that may quell emotional pain they cannot deal with, but leave them with with an emotional disability.