I have had a lot of trauma growing up in a few different areas of my life. Every situation taught me something new. For this essay, I am specifically going to talk about the situations with my sister. When I was younger, probably elementary aged, my sister struggled a lot with her mental health. Although she is doing much better now, it still caused a lot of damage to my emotional wellbeing. My sister used to be very emotionally and physically harmful towards my parents. I didn’t realize it when I was younger, but how my parents chose to handle it taught me a lot. My parents would do their best to de-escalate situations that my sister would create. They would try and get my sister to articulate the emotions she was feeling, and why they were happening. My sister being young and mentally ill, didn’t always understand what she was going through so this didn’t always work. It did help me understand that listening can get you quite far in a situation. My parent’s interventions taught me to be more in tune with how I was feeling and to be more considerate of how others were feeling as well. Though that has made me a free therapist to more than one friend, it continues to help me become an amazing teacher. I work with children of varied ages, some of which are still navigating understanding their emotions. I have one particular situation that will always stick with me. There was a child in my swim class around three to four years old who screamed and cried with each lesson. He was in another teacher's class at the time and this day I actually had some spare time so I took him for a one on one lesson. We spent fifteen minutes where I just held him and we took turns taking big deep breaths. Once I got him to calm down, we talked about how he was feeling. He ended up being able to verbalize that he was scared. Knowing that, I was able to find different ways we could learn things together and created games where he would feel comfortable. By the end of the lesson he had no more tears and we learned that taking deep breaths and expressing our feelings will get us a lot farther than screaming and crying. He was a very sweet child and that situation really reminds me that compassion and time will get you so far with children. Instead of forcing a scared child to do what I am paid to teach him, I got a scared child to talk me through his emotions. We worked together to make the pool fun which decreased his anxiety significantly. I really look forward to being able to expand my knowledge and skills with children as I continue my education at the University of Maine this fall. Emotional identification and regulation continues to be a lesson I use daily. Though I am forever impacted by my sister’s actions, I have learned to turn parts of it into something positive.