After this activity, students will be able to:

• State how emotional pain differs from physical pain
• List three behaviors that can threaten someone's emotional safety

Teacher:

For the warm-up I asked you to select which behaviors you think are examples of emotionally, rather than physically, harmful behaviors.

Before we go through the list together, let's look at the reality of emotional pain. We all have a pretty good idea about what physical pain is. But what is emotional pain and how does it differ and how is it similar to physical pain?

• Emotional pain is invisible.
• Emotional pain is inflicted through gossiping, rumor spreading, ridiculing, and similar things. Sometimes those things can happen on social media.
• Consequences of emotional pain can be as severe as the consequences of physical pain

Now that we've discussed the difference between physical pain and emotional pain, how would you define emotional safety?

Teacher and students work together on a definitions of emotional safety, e.g.: Emotional safety means feeling accepted by others, feeling it's safe to be ourselves, and feeling safe to share our thoughts and to interact with others.

Let's talk about how some of the behaviors you circled on the handout threaten people's emotional safety. Pick a behavior you circled and talk about how it threatens emotional safety.

If your emotional safety were threatened by any of these behaviors, how would it affect you? ( e.g. hate school, avoid going, miss classes, do badly on tests, feel awful):

Video (3 min):

Now let's take a look at the video to see how they talk about emotional safety.

What thoughts do you have about this video? Are they right or wrong? Do you think this is relevant for our school?

Wrap up:

Today we learned about the concepts of emotional safety as well as emotional abuse, and why it is important to feel emotionally safe at school. Remember, it is your right to feel safe at school.

You can use the AVOCATR APP to report issues related to your emotional as well as physical safety, or you can directly talk to an adult you trust in the building.

The ADVOCTR APP is a quick and confidential way to share with school administrators when things are happening that are harming your safety at school and you want help to resolve the issues.

• Emotional pain.
• Emotional safety.
• Emotional harm.