Counselling Ideas: Angry Octopus by Lori Lite

When I work with younger children, roughly ages three through eight, one book I keep coming back to is Lori Lite's Angry Octopus. It's a short relaxation story, and it does a lot in very few pages.

My habit is to read it aloud and have the child try each exercise right there with me as the story moves along. Kids being kids, I sometimes get stopped mid-page by a question that has nothing to do with the point: how does an octopus breathe down there anyway? I don't rush past that. Those questions usually open into a good back-and-forth about breathing itself, and about why slowing down helps us take hold of what we're thinking and feeling.

From there we tend to drift into real life. We'll name situations that make the child angry, and we'll turn over the difference between showing frustration in a way that's honest and firm versus letting it spill out in ways that wreck things or hurt people.

To close, I usually hand over a simple worksheet and ask them to keep practising the relaxation exercise on their own over the coming week.

Part of why one child needs the octopus story and another barely does comes down to temperament, the early shape of what later settles into adult personality. The Big Five, or OCEAN, is the model psychologists use to describe those stable differences, including how strongly someone feels and reacts to frustration. For the background, here is a primer on the OCEAN personality test and the five traits it measures.