Every child’s emotional journey is unique, but for those facing stress or dysregulation, navigating their feelings can be overwhelming. If you’re a parent, caregiver, educator, or ELSA practitioner, you’ve likely witnessed the challenges that arise when a child struggles to manage big emotions. Traditional methods can feel ineffective, leaving both adults and children feeling frustrated and disconnected.
The BOUNCE Practitioner Approach offers a transformative, trauma-informed framework to guide children through their emotional journey, helping them navigate the six stages of emotional transformation. This journey, grounded in creative, sensory, and restorative practices, is designed to meet the child where they are and guide them toward emotional balance and build internal capacity.
The Six Stages of Emotional Transformation
- Avoidance
In this stage, the child may shut down or avoid difficult emotions entirely. They may appear disconnected or deflect attention away from their feelings. This is their way of protecting themselves from pain or overwhelm.
BOUNCE Interventions: Sensory activities like bilateral art or drumming can gently help children reconnect with their feelings without overwhelming them.
- Surrender
When avoidance no longer works, children may start to experience emotional overwhelm. They may cry, lash out, or express frustration as their emotions rise to the surface. The Surrender stage can be a breakthrough moment, though it often feels chaotic.
BOUNCE Interventions: Gentle, grounding activities like mindfulness, tapping, or sensory play can help children manage this flood of emotions and begin to process them safely.
- Dismantling
Old coping mechanisms no longer serve them, and children may experience confusion or frustration. Their emotional patterns are being dismantled, and they are learning to cope with their feelings in new ways.
BOUNCE Interventions: Tools like comic strip conversations, Parts-based work, ScribbleSquish, and sensory story massage can help children understand and organise their emotions in a new, empowering way.
- Loss of Identity
As old emotional patterns break down, children may experience a sense of uncertainty about who they are without their former coping strategies. This can be a vulnerable time as they search for new ways to define themselves.
BOUNCE Interventions: Creative practices like the Tree of Life activity or E-Art journaling provide a safe space for children to explore their identity and begin to rebuild a positive sense of self.
- Rebirth
During this stage, children start to rebuild, using new emotional tools and strategies. This is a time of growth and self-discovery as they begin to regain confidence and control over their emotional world.
BOUNCE Interventions: Integrating solution circles or restorative yoga can reinforce their newfound sense of empowerment and self-awareness, helping them solidify healthy emotional habits.
- A New Way
Finally, the child has emerged from the transformative regulated process with a new capacity to deal with their emotions. They are better equipped to face challenges, manage stress, and express their feelings in a balanced way.
Why the BOUNCE Approach Works
Unlike traditional approaches that often focus on behaviour modification, the BOUNCE Approach goes deeper by addressing the root of the child’s emotional dysregulation. It helps them rebuild their sense of self through a supportive, creative, and sensory-rich environment. Using interventions like bilateral art, mindfulness, sensory circuits, and restorative practices, children are guided through each emotional stage at their own pace.
The BOUNCE Approach doesn’t just help children manage their emotions – it transforms the way they understand and relate to themselves, empowering them with tools they can use throughout their lives.
Become a BOUNCE Practitioner
If you work with children who are struggling with emotional dysregulation – whether you’re a parent, teacher, ELSA practitioner, or caregiver – the BOUNCE Practitioner Training Course is for you.
This comprehensive training will teach you how to:
- Understand and identify the six stages of emotional transformation.
- Assess emotional and sensory needs with confidence.
- Design individualised intervention plans that use creative, sensory, and restorative practices.
- Help children rebuild their emotional identity and empower them to thrive.
- Collaborate with families and professionals to provide holistic support.
The BOUNCE Approach offers a step-by-step process to support children through their emotional journey, and our training will give you the tools and confidence to make a lasting impact in their lives.
What Interventions are Included?
The training covers interventions to use at each stage of the process:
- Bilateral Art and Interoceptive Music
- Drumming
- ScribbleSquish
- Tree of Life
- Grounding
- Self-Regulation Strategies
Interested in becoming a BOUNCE Practitioner? Then click here