Mr. Rogers teaches us what to do with “the mad”

DBT Fort Lauderdale what to do with the mad by Mr. Rogers

I was going to post another video today about anxiety and breathing. But in the wake of the MSD/Parkland shootings I just couldn’t. I’m having a hard time marketing at all. For those of you not local to South Florida, MSD is a school about 30 minutes away from me. My daughter, the blue-haired teen, is in high school and personally knows kids who lost friends. I have friends who I have known for years and years, our babies grew up together, who are holding their friends who lost children. The magnet coordinator at her school was married to the coach who gave his life saving teenagers, saving children.

I did a whole podcast on this and it’s about a week and a half after the shootings that I’m writing this and still can’t do it without crying. I know a lot of teachers from teaching prenatal yoga for 15+ years. They were in every class I taught. And they are distraught and angry and scared. None of them want to be armed, by the way. No one I know personally. Maybe someone somewhere else, but no one I know in the 7th largest school system in the nation wants to be armed as a teacher.

Instead, I thought I would post Mr. Roger’s testimony before the senate that he made in 1969. He talks about how he address a question he got from a child about what to do about “the mad” that’s inside him. If we all knew this. If all of our children knew this! If we all learned emotional regulation – what to do with our feelings without taking them out on other people, what to do with “the mad” – from our parents, from our teachers, from our friends, from our partners and loved ones, from our grandparents and extended family, even from, yes, television.

If you don’t know what to do with your own mad, if you “go off” on your loved ones or others, if you can’t contain yourself in public and yell at office staff (like a doctor’s waiting room), if you feel violent a lot of the time, seriously, give me a call. This isn’t marketing. It’s just plain one human (me) wanting to help another human (you) figure out what to do with their mad before they cause more destruction in their private and public life. We therapists have tools that have been researched and tested out the wazoooo that can help you with that!