By: Wayne Head
About 20 years ago, I came up with a simple concept to help children deal with the mean and rude statements that others would tell them. In my work, I teach as a mental health counselor for the Clovis Municipal Schools, I found that telling children to ignore others was not enough. Telling them that “sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me” also did not go far enough. So, I came up with the concept of hot rocks.
I tell the children, imagine that I have a campfire going here in the office, then I briefly discuss why this would be a bad idea if we really did have a campfire in the school. In this campfire, I will put three softball-sized rocks, and then I will build up the fire again and let it go for an hour. I explain that the rocks will then look like pieces of lava. They will be red-hot radiating heat off their surfaces. Now, if I were to pick up one of these rocks with a pitchfork and throw it towards you, would you catch it? No, you would move out of the way. You would not let this super-heated rock touch your body. If this rock were to touch you it would burn, hurt and maybe leave a scar. There is no good reason to try to catch this hot rock. The mean and rude things that people say to you are hot rocks made of words.
What do we do with these hot rocks? We catch them. We even throw them ourselves. We throw them to get back at the other person. “Oh yeah, you’re stupid too.” We try to control the other person. “Stop talking about my hair or I’ll get you.” Finally, we often catch hot rocks to show them to someone else. “You’ll never believe what she called me.” We also catch hot rocks when our friends tell us what the other person has said about us. “Then he said that you were a scruffy-looking nerf herder.”
The last category of hot rocks are the mean and rude statements that others have said about us that we have internalized. This happens when we call ourselves stupid, clumsy, foolish and so on. We use the hot rocks as a definition of ourselves without realizing that we have done so. We need to look at these hot rocks and reject them. The trick of hot rocks is that they are lies, or exaggerations of facts. Catching these lies or exaggerations makes no sense. Let them go and refuse to let them burn you, hurt you or scar you.
Years ago, I had a distant relative that I did not know, but we had been conversing for years before on the phone. In the first two meetings that we had in restaurants in Albuquerque, I noticed her being rude to the wait staff. At the end of the meal, she would ask if I had seen how rude the waitress had been. I remember thinking how rude she had been to the waitress. She asked what she could do about these rude wait staff, and I introduced her to the concept of hot rocks. She turned the concept into the statement that if someone drops an offense don’t pick it up. She wrote this on an index card and taped it to her bathroom mirror. This way she would see the admonition and read it several times a day. Within a week, she was calling me saying that the wait staff at restaurants were becoming more friendly and courteous. I congratulated her on this change.
Hot rocks is a simple concept, but it helps children stop their thoughts, helps them deal with the verbal assaults of others, and avoids them engaging in exchanging rude or upsetting statements. Often, the other person stops engaging in rude behavior with the student, as they experience no engaging response to their verbal attacks.
