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The new school term is well underway. The uniform is still pristine, timetables are becoming more familiar, and the anticipation surrounding the first day has largely passed.
For many children, things have settled remarkably quickly. For others, this is precisely the point when difficulties begin to emerge. Perhaps a child who seemed reasonably happy about returning to school has started complaining of a stomach ache on Sunday evenings. Another may dread a particular lesson, become unusually quiet at breakfast, or repeatedly talk about something that happened with another child.
A difficult goodbye at the school gate may still be difficult. A child who was initially enthusiastic may now be saying they do not want to go. This is not necessarily evidence that the return to school has gone wrong. In fact, the first few weeks of term can give parents, teachers and pastoral staff much more useful information than the weeks leading up to it.
Before school begins, everybody is dealing largely with anticipation. Once the child is back, we can begin to see what triggers the unwanted emotional response. And that gives us something much more specific to work with.
Children do not necessarily leave last term’s emotional experiences behind simply because a new term has begun. Perhaps a child was mocked after getting an answer wrong. Maybe they struggled with a particular subject, had friendship difficulties, felt sick at school or found separation from a parent particularly difficult. Perhaps nothing dramatic happened at all. Repeated discomfort may have made certain parts of school life trigger an unwanted emotional response. The original situation does not necessarily need to happen again for the feeling to return.
Walking through the same gate, seeing a particular child, being asked to read aloud, changing for PE or simply realising on Sunday afternoon that Monday morning is approaching may be enough to trigger it.
This is an important distinction. Rather than asking the very broad question, “Why is this child anxious about school?”, it can be much more useful to ask: What, specifically, seems to set the feeling off?
“School anxiety” may actually be several different things. School anxiety is a useful description, but it is a very large umbrella. Two children who both say they feel anxious about school may be responding to completely different things. For one child, the difficult moment is separating from a parent. For another, it is walking into the classroom alone. Another child may worry about being asked a question, getting something wrong, where they will sit at lunchtime, or encountering a particular pupil.
Several separate triggers may also occur within the same child’s school day. That is why being specific matters: “I hate school” does not tell us much. “I get that horrible feeling when I think about maths” tells us more.
“I feel sick when I imagine being asked a maths question in front of everyone” gives us something much clearer. Instead of trying to change how a child feels about the enormous concept of “school”, we can start by identifying the particular thought, memory, or situation tied to the unwanted emotional response.
Adults naturally want to make children feel better. A child says, “Nobody will talk to me,” and our instinct is to reply, “Of course they will.” They say, “I’m going to get it wrong,” and we tell them, “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.” The intention is kind, but reassurance can inadvertently turn into a debate. The child starts finding evidence that the adult is wrong and that the feared outcome could really happen.
Instead, try curiosity before reassurance.
“What happens inside when you think about that?” “What part of tomorrow feels the worst?” “What do you notice when you picture walking into the classroom?” “What feeling comes up when you think about seeing that person?” A teacher, parent or pastoral professional does not need to agree that the feared event will happen. The purpose is simply to understand what is triggering the emotional response.
Adults sometimes assume that helping a child means persuading them to explain everything.
What happened? Who said what? When did it start? Why didn’t you tell anyone? What do you think it means? There are obviously circumstances where adults need more information.
Bullying, safeguarding concerns and genuine problems within the child’s environment need appropriate investigation and action. But when working with an unwanted emotional response itself, the child does not necessarily need to provide a detailed account of everything behind it. “I get a horrible feeling when I think about going into that lesson” may be enough to identify something they want to change.
This is an important element of the Orpheus approach. The child can work with an unwanted emotional response without necessarily disclosing all the content behind it. For some children and young people, particularly those who are private, embarrassed or simply tired of explaining themselves, that can matter enormously.
When a child knows school does not feel right but cannot immediately identify why, a simple exercise can help.
Ask them, without overthinking it, to name five things about school that are bothering them right now.
They might name going through the gate, maths, seeing a particular group at lunchtime, changing for PE, or being asked questions in class. Now make anything broad more specific.
“Maths” might actually mean worrying about being asked to answer a question in front of everybody. “Lunchtime” might mean not knowing where to sit. “PE” might mean embarrassment about getting changed.
Next, give each one a simple SUDS score from 0 to 10, where 0 represents no emotional discomfort, and 10 represents the strongest emotional discomfort the child can imagine.
You don’t need to agonise over the number. It is simply a snapshot of how strong the feeling seems at that moment.
You now have something far more useful than “school makes me anxious”.
The Orpheus Decoupling Process is designed to work with automatic unwanted emotional responses to thoughts or memories that trigger them. At Level 1, the Negative Emotion Destroyer tracks work with unwanted emotional responses related to past, present, or anticipated future situations.
The aim is not to persuade the child that they should not feel anxious, embarrassed, angry, frightened or upset. Nor is it about convincing them that the situation does not matter. Instead, the process works with the emotional load associated with the thought or memory triggering the feeling.
For a child, the target might therefore be the anxiety they feel when they picture walking through the school gate, the embarrassment attached to something that happened in class, the anger toward another pupil, or the dread about a particular lesson. The important thing is to work with one specific unwanted emotional response at a time. Notice what changes rather than testing the child.
Before using the appropriate Orpheus process, the child can notice the intensity of the feeling and give it a rough SUDS score. Afterwards, notice it again.
Perhaps the child can still think about the situation, but it no longer has the same emotional pull. Maybe their body does not react as strongly. The memory may feel less immediate, or the original feeling may be harder to summon.
Sometimes the most useful evidence appears later, when the child encounters the real situation. They walk through the school gate and only afterwards realise they did not have their usual stomach ache. They see another pupil without experiencing the familiar rush of anxiety. They get something wrong in class and recover from the embarrassment more quickly.
Try to notice rather than test. Repeatedly asking, “Are you anxious now?” or “Has it worked?” can pull the child’s attention right back to the very response you are trying to reduce. When school anxiety appears as a physical symptom, children do not always announce, “I am anxious.” An unwanted emotional response can show up as nausea, a stomach ache, a headache, shakiness, a racing heart, dizziness, or an urgent need to go to the toilet. The physical sensation is real.
Don’t automatically assume physical symptoms are psychological. New, severe, persistent or concerning symptoms require appropriate medical attention. However, when a familiar physical response repeatedly appears around a particular school situation, it can be useful to explore what seems to trigger it.
A second emotional response may even develop around the physical sensation itself. A child who once felt sick in class may begin worrying about feeling sick again. “What if I feel sick in class?” gives us a much more specific focus than “I don’t want to go to school.”
For some children, Monday begins on Sunday afternoon.
They become quieter or more irritable. Their stomach starts hurting. They cannot settle. They repeatedly ask questions about the following day, or their mood changes as the weekend draws to a close.
Rather than treating this as one large problem called “school anxiety”, explore what happens when the child realises school is getting closer. What are they picturing? What thought comes into their mind? What feeling accompanies it?
Sunday afternoon may also be a much better time to work with an unwanted emotional response than 8.20 on Monday morning, when the child needs to leave and everybody is under pressure.
For some children, lessons barely feature in their worries about school. What matters is who will talk to them, where they will sit, whether friendship groups have changed and whether they still belong. These concerns should not be dismissed as playground drama. “I will have nobody to sit with at lunch” provides a clearer focus than “I hate school”. At the same time, adults must distinguish between an unwanted emotional response and a real problem requiring practical intervention.
Orpheus is not a substitute for addressing bullying, exclusion, or safeguarding concerns. Reducing a child’s emotional response must never become a way to teach them to tolerate something the adults around them should be addressing.
For another child, school may have become somewhere they expect to be measured and found wanting. Reading aloud, being asked a question, handing back homework, receiving a test result or simply not understanding something immediately can carry a surprising amount of emotional intensity. Ask what feels so bad about getting something wrong. “Everyone will laugh at me” is different from “My teacher will be disappointed in me”. Both are different again from: “It proves I’m stupid.”
That final statement takes us towards something else Orpheus can work with: a belief. Level 2: when there is a belief underneath the feeling.
Orpheus Level 2 works with beliefs and patterns using the Creator and Eraser tracks. A child or young person may carry beliefs such as “I won’t cope”, “I’m stupid”, “Nobody likes me”, “Everyone is better than me”, “I always get things wrong”, or “Something bad will happen”. These are different from the immediate unwanted emotion of anxiety, embarrassment, anger or dread. It can therefore be useful to work with the unwanted emotional response first and then notice what remains.
Sometimes, when the intensity of the emotion changes, the belief no longer feels nearly as convincing. At other times, the belief becomes clearer and can be worked with separately using the appropriate Level 2 process.
A difficult school experience does not affect only the child.
If the previous term involved tears, school refusal, repeated telephone calls from school or stressful mornings, a parent may enter the new term already anticipating the same pattern.
Children can be remarkably sensitive to this. A parent may say, “Everything’s fine,” while their face, voice and behaviour communicate that they are waiting for disaster. Parents who use Orpheus can therefore look at their own unwanted emotional responses separately. What happens inside when your child says their stomach hurts? What do you feel when the school’s number appears on your phone? What happens when you think about Monday morning?
Are you responding only to what is happening today, or has today’s situation triggered an emotional response associated with what happened before? This is not about blaming parents for children’s anxiety. It is simply recognising that adults have automatic emotional responses too.
The first few weeks of term can reveal patterns that were impossible to see during the holidays. A child may regularly become distressed before the same lesson. Another may repeatedly visit the medical room at a particular time of day. Someone who appears settled in class may become anxious around lunchtime, PE, reading aloud or going home.
Teachers, SENCOs, pastoral staff and other adults in school can sometimes see patterns that are much harder for families to identify. The question does not always need to be, “What is wrong?” Sometimes a more useful question is: “What happened immediately before this feeling appeared?”
That shift from looking for a large explanation to identifying a specific trigger can make an apparently overwhelming problem much more manageable.
Orpheus can be particularly relevant to educational settings because working with an unwanted emotional response does not necessarily require a child or young person to disclose the full story behind it.
That does not remove normal safeguarding responsibilities. If a disclosure is made, or there are reasons to believe a child may be at risk, the school’s usual safeguarding procedures remain essential.
But not every unwanted emotion requires a child to tell a member of staff everything that has happened before they can start working with how they feel. A child may know, “I get that horrible feeling before this lesson,” or, “I feel panicky when I think about going into the dining room.” That can provide a starting point.
For schools considering emotional wellbeing provision, this distinction is significant. A practical emotional self-help tool should complement the work of pastoral and safeguarding teams, not ask school staff to become therapists. Do not turn emotional wellbeing into more homework. Whether Orpheus is being used at home or within an appropriate school setting, it should not become another thing a child is nagged to do.
The objective is not to produce children who are constantly monitoring their mental health. Offer the tool when the child wants help with something specific. “You seem to be getting that horrible feeling again when you think about tomorrow. Would you like to work on it?” That is very different from: “Go and do your Orpheus.” Once the work is done, allow the child’s attention to return to living their life.
Adults can miss progress because they are waiting for a dramatic announcement that the child now loves school. That may never happen.
A child may still prefer being at home but no longer feel sick every morning. They might dislike a particular lesson without spending the whole weekend dreading it. They may remember an embarrassing incident without experiencing the same rush of emotion. Perhaps they walk through the gate without repeatedly looking back for reassurance. They may recover more quickly when something goes wrong.
Or they may simply stop talking about something that previously occupied a great deal of emotional space. The useful question is not whether the child now has the “correct” emotion. It is whether the unwanted emotional response still has the same intensity, frequency and influence over what they do.
Orpheus is not a substitute for medical care, safeguarding, educational support or appropriate professional assessment.
If a child is being bullied, the bullying needs to be addressed. If a child is unsafe, the safety issue needs to be addressed. Learning differences, sensory needs or additional needs may require appropriate assessment, adjustments and support from school.
Persistent physical symptoms, severe emotional distress, concerns about self-harm, significant deterioration in functioning or prolonged difficulties attending school require appropriate professional support.
Emotional processing must sit alongside reality rather than being used to explain reality away. Sometimes an automatic unwanted emotional response is being triggered by an association with something that happened before.
Sometimes a child’s response is accurately telling the adults around them that something happening now needs to change. We need to remain open to both possibilities. The first few weeks of school give us useful information.
Real school life has begun. Children now know who teaches them, where they sit, what lunchtime feels like, how friendships are settling and which parts of the school day feel comfortable or difficult.
A new seating plan, one awkward classroom moment, homework, a difficult goodbye or a friendship wobble can reveal something nobody could have predicted during the holidays. That is information we can use. Notice what happened. Identify what triggered the unwanted emotional response. Where possible, distinguish the feeling from any underlying belief and work with one specific thing at a time.
Then allow the child to return their attention to living their life rather than constantly checking whether they are anxious.
The aim is not to create a child who never experiences difficult feelings about school. School, like the rest of life, will contain disappointment, nerves, mistakes, difficult people and days when staying at home seems infinitely preferable.
A more useful aim is to help children recognise when an automatic, unwanted emotional response gets in the way of dealing with what is actually happening now. That is where Orpheus can become a practical emotional self-help tool rather than another piece of homework.
If you are a headteacher, SENCO, pastoral lead, designated safeguarding lead or responsible for pupil wellbeing and would like to explore how Orpheus could be incorporated into your school’s emotional wellbeing provision, please get in touch with Orpheus Mind Technologies to find out more about the school’s programme.
Important note: This article is for educational purposes. Orpheus is an adult-supervised emotional self-help tool and should be used in accordance with its current age guidance, instructions, and safeguarding procedures. It does not replace appropriate medical, psychological, educational or safeguarding support.
