Monster Management: Role Playing for Emotional Intelligence in the School Counselling Setting
Personifying Worry
As children return to school, many are struggling with worries big and small. Separation anxiety, academic pressure, or social stress can snowball if not addressed sensitively. Counsellors play a vital role in ensuring schools support students’ emotional learning and regulation capacity alongside academic skills. Visualisation exercises like “Tug-of-War With the Anxiety Monster” use imagination to externalise and gain perspective over common childhood anxieties.
Learning to Let Go of the Rope
This activity invites students to depict anxiety as a “monster” then engage in an imaginary tug-of-war. Initially, the monster overpowers them, but eventually, students purposefully drop the rope, symbolically refusing to engage in anxiety. This denies power to the monster, communicates self-efficacy over emotions, and builds resilience. The simple ritual of physically miming letting go of an imaginary rope makes abstract concepts like “not feeding worries” more concrete for children.
Counsellors guide students in processing reflections afterwards - “What did it feel like to keep holding on? What happened when you let go?” Children gain awareness of self-talk and patterns when anxiety persists. Personifying inner turmoil externalises and separates a child’s identity from intense emotions. This paradigm shift empowers self-regulation.
Adaptable Across Ages
While tug-of-war requires some basic vocabulary, it adapts across ages. For young children, counsellors sticking out their tongues or growling, elicits giggles about the “silly monster.” Junior School aged children might brainstorm strategies to restrain monsters, then discuss futility and self-compassion. Middle years students appreciate relating monsters to social stress and perfectionism. Teens engage deeply in sharing private battles. Throughout, the experiential nature of physicalising internal struggles stuck in children’s minds may sometimes help more than talking alone.
Empowering Children
Visualisation and metaphor build emotional intelligence, constructive coping, and growth mindsets. Infusing play invites vulnerability to speak about monsters they battle alone. Externalising through imagination and physical activity makes counselling sessions more dynamic while imparting lasting skills.
Most powerfully, gently wrestling inner demons in a counsellor’s safe space breeds courage to face real-world anxiety-provoking situations. Rehearsing self-regulation strategies with guidance builds confidence and resilience students carry into their days. They learn they can drop imaginary ropes—and refuse to engage genuine worries. The monsters lose their grip.