I am a longtime RC family worker. I have a twelve-year-old daughter who has had a lot of big sessions. She had a long and difficult birth. There were many big challenges in her first six years. The hard raging sessions she was able to have were invaluable. I’ve found that the more a young person can access fury and get it out with the loving attention of a trusted and dependable ally at her side—instead of keeping that material [distress] inside and pointed at herself—the better. I call this bringing a limit.

We need to have enough attention that we can step in before objects get thrown. We can interrupt at the moment a young person is about to do damage—bite, kick, throw something. In our own sessions we can work on how hard it is to pay attention at that moment. We can build enough attention to notice when a young person is about to head into fury and can no longer track what she is doing, when she is lost in big hard feelings she is desperate to get out. We need to be able to notice that. 

When she is about to “launch,” we can step in and warmly, lovingly, firmly bring a gentle limit. We can say something like, “I can’t let you throw that (hurt me, break that), but I am going to stay close with you no matter what. I want you to get all the hard feelings out, but I can’t let you hurt me or the house.” You can pull her in close and gently stop her from going through with the motion. If you have enough attention, it can sometimes interrupt the material [distress] enough that the crying can come. Interrupting my daughter’s kick or punch would sometimes lead to more attempts to hurt me, but if I could be active and engaged enough by wrestling and connecting with her, she could sometimes burst into tears and have a big cry.

I don’t think setting limits works with young people. It is different from bringing a limit, described above. Very young ones, in particular, lack the judgment to think something through in the moment of fury. They don’t ”want” to break anything or hurt you, their minds are just consumed by a flash of rage they are trying to offload in the best way they can figure out; they have stopped thinking clearly.

I think setting a limit can register as a punishment. It can leave a young person stuffing down hard feelings, feeling disconnected, and feeling bad about having the hard feelings and showing them. In my experience, setting limits when a child has lost her ability to think rationally is about where the adult has lost attention and just wants a session to stop. 

I think our children want us to push up against our limits—they have to contend with our material all the time. They often choose the moments when things are most pressed and feel hardest for us. This offers us the opportunity to try to function past where it feels like our minds can go. This is really hard, but what an invitation—to go against where we feel most limited and try for more! The sessions we have after pushing ourselves in this way point us to the hardest places in our childhoods.