You shriek in outrage, throw the toy that you are holding and start to wail.

“You’re angry.” I say.

You stay within reach, but do not reach out. You process your feelings. If I reach for you right now you will stomp away from me and scream even louder.

This is your storm. Your thunder. Your feelings in full force. The gale that passes through you.

You OWN these feelings. They are yours. They will not be taken from you before you are done with them. You will not be jollied from this, and attempts at jollying you out of your “mood”?

Oh dear. No. You’ve never been a child to distract. I understand. You are upset, and even the thing that you wanted at the beginning is a distraction from the things that you feel.

You pass through them, unreachable in your explosion. Then, as quickly as it began you shriek an ear-piercing shriek and walk over to me, laying your head against my shoulder.

I am not “ignoring” your tantrum to show you that it doesn’t matter. I am not distracting you from your feelings to try and get you to stop crying.

Your feelings are not mine to fix or to own. They are yours.

In this moment I am there for you, for whatever support you need from me. But this is your journey. Your thunderstorm. Your blizzard. Your tornado and your hurricane. Your feelings to understand, to feel, to explore, to harness, to learn to hold and control.

I am not afraid of them. You are small and can do me no harm.
I am not angry at them. I do not see them as manipulative.

I have empathy, for I have those strong feelings too. I’ve learned to control them now as an adult. How must those things feel to you? To hold such bigness in the smallness of your being?

When you come close again, I can apologize if I have treated you unfairly. I can let you know that I understand what you felt. I can hold you close and let you know that no matter what I am here. I can help you put words to the things that you experienced, and I can help you learn that those big things are not as scary as they feel in the moment.

Part of how I will help you do that is simply by staying as calm as you will eventually learn to be. This, child, is what 34 years of practice looks like. And this is where you will grow to be.