When the Glitter Won’t Settle: Supporting Young People with Additional Needs Through Big Feelings and Transitions
- 11 April 2026
This is the second in a series of blogs on navigating adolescent transitions. If you haven’t read Part 1 — Allowing the Glitter Jar to Settle — it’s worth starting there for the psychological context that underpins everything that follows.
In Part 1, we explored why transitions shake the emotional jar — and why our most important job as adults is often simply to hold it steady and wait for the glitter to settle. We talked about the teenage brain, about anxiety and friendship, about the power of calm, curious presence over reactive problem-solving.
But for some young people, the glitter settles differently. Or more slowly. Or in ways that can look, from the outside, quite confusing.
For neurodiverse young people, and for children and adolescents with additional needs, the experience of big feelings during times of transition can be qualitatively different — not just more intense, but different in kind. The triggers may be less obvious. The expression may be unexpected. And the gap between what adults see on the outside and what is actually happening on the inside can be wider still.
This blog is for anyone supporting those young people — as a parent, carer, teacher, or practitioner. It is built around four core strategies, grounded in what we know about emotional development, neurodiversity, and the particular challenges that transitions bring.
What You Might Be Seeing — and What It Might Actually Mean
Before we get to the strategies, it is worth pausing on this: for young people with additional needs, the outward expression of emotional distress can look very different from what we might expect.
Restlessness. Seeking reassurance repeatedly. Withdrawal. Attempts to control others or the environment. Meltdown. Defiance. What gets labelled as “challenging behaviour.” These are not random. They are communication. They are the outside of an inside experience thatthe young person may not have the words — or even the internal awareness — to express in any other way.
When behaviour is unexpected, or doesn’t quite make sense, curiosity is always the better starting point than consequence. What might be going on? What is this young person trying to tell me? This is detective work, and crucially, it is detective work best done together with the young person — because often, they don’t fully understand it either.
Triggers may also be different. Picking up on the distress of others in a room. Difficulties tolerating uncertainty or adapting to changes in routine. Confusion about social dynamics and friendship. Sensory overwhelm that has been quietly accumulating all day before finally spilling over at home — the place where it feels safe enough to fall apart. None of this is wilful. All of it makes sense, once you know what you are looking for.
Strategy 1: Validating Feelings — Especially When the Behaviour Is Big
The starting point for everything else is this: feelings are okay. All of them. However large, however inconvenient, however bewildering to everyone in the room. 7
For young people generally, we can fall into the trap of trying to smooth feelings away — convincing a child that something is “not a big deal,” or that they shouldn’t worry, or that it will all be fine. The intention is kind. The impact, however, is often to leave the young person feeling unheard, or worse, ashamed of having felt what they felt in the first place. What they need to hear instead sounds more like: that sounds really tough. I can understand why you’re feeling left out. Simple. Direct. Without minimising.
For young people with additional needs, this matters even more — and it is also harder, particularly when the feeling is expressing itself through behaviour that is difficult to be around. Validating the feeling of a young person who is in the middle of a meltdown requires us to separate what we see from what we understand. The behaviour may be dysregulated; the feeling underneath it is valid. These two things can be true at the same time.
The principle here is what is sometimes called holding both/and. You can accept a young person’s emotional experience fully and completely, and still, when the moment is right and the glitter has begun to settle, support them to look at things from a different angle. You do not have to choose between empathy and perspective. In fact, empathy almost always has to come first before perspective becomes possible at all.
A note on meltdown specifically: in the moment, the most helpful things are to validate the feeling, confirm that it will pass, reduce demands and keep others at a calm distance, and offer a simple regulating activity if the young person is able to engage with one. What is rarely helpful — and often significantly worsens things — is reasoning, interrogating what happened, or focusing on consequences. The glitter is fully airborne. There is no prefrontal cortex available for that conversation. It has to wait.
Strategy 2: Figuring Out What the Feeling Actually Is
For many young people, particularly those with autism, ADHD, or other neurodevelopmental profiles, one of the most significant challenges is not the feeling itself — it is identifying the feeling in the first place.
Alexithymia — a reduced ability to identify and describe internal emotional states — is far more common among neurodiverse young people than is often recognised. It is not that the feeling is absent. It is that the pathway between feeling something and knowing what that something is, and finding words for it, may be less well developed or more difficult to access. The young person is not being evasive when they say “I don’t know.” They genuinely may not know.
This is where creative and multimodal approaches to emotional identification become so valuable. The feelings wheel — a visual tool that maps emotions from their most basic forms outward into increasing nuance and complexity — can give young people a language they did not previously have. Song lyrics, poems, and books can do the same: sometimes a young person recognises their own experience in a line of music long before they can name it themselves. Drawing feelings, rather than describing them, can bypass the verbal bottleneck entirely. Physical trackers — even something as simple as a Fitbit — can help young people notice that their heart rate is rising before they are consciously aware of feeling anything at all.
Modelling is also powerful. When adults name their own emotions openly and matter-offactly — I’m feeling a bit frustrated right now because I can’t find my keys, let me just take a breath — they are teaching a skill through demonstration rather than instruction. For young people who learn through observation and pattern, this kind of incidental modelling can be more effective than any worksheet.
Strategy 3: Understanding How Big Feelings Grow — and Catching Them Earlier
Once a young person has some sense of what they are feeling, the next piece is understanding how feelings escalate — how a small worry grows into a wave, or how a moment of frustration becomes something that takes over the whole system.
The upstairs and downstairs brain framework — where the emotional, reactive downstairs brain and the reasoning, regulated upstairs brain are understood as in relationship with each other — gives young people a way to understand their own experience that is both accurate and non-shaming. When the downstairs brain is activated, the upstairs brain goes offline. This is not a character flaw. It is biology.
Tools like the Zones of Regulation and the Incredible Five Point Scale build on this understanding by giving young people a concrete, visual way to track where they are emotionally at any given moment — and, crucially, to notice when they are beginning to move from a manageable zone toward an overwhelming one. The earlier a young person can recognise that they are heading toward a red zone, or a five on the scale, the more options are available. Intervention at a two or three is entirely different from intervention at a five.
If these tools are being used in school, it is enormously helpful for home and school to use the same language. Consistency of framework across contexts significantly reduces the cognitive load for the young person and makes it easier for them to generalise the skill.
For young people who experience difficulties with impulsivity — which is common in ADHD and also during adolescence more generally — this kind of early-warning awareness work is particularly valuable. The Stop, Drop and Breathe approach offers a simple, embodied pause before reaction: a chance for the upstairs brain to come back online before the glitter takes over completely.
It is also worth thinking carefully about what precedes emotional escalation, particularly in the context of secondary school. The concept of energy accounting is a useful one here. Every day, a young person has a certain amount of emotional and sensory energy in their metaphorical battery. Navigating a busy school environment, managing sensory input, sustaining social interactions, masking, concentrating — all of these draw down the battery. If a young person arrives home and falls apart, it may not be because of what happened in the last ten minutes. It may be because the battery has been running on empty since lunchtime, and home is the first place it felt safe enough to stop pretending otherwise.
Thinking about energy accounting — what fills the battery and what drains it, and how to build in regular recharging — is an important part of preventing the kind of burnout that presents, from the outside, as meltdown or crisis.
Practically, this might mean: time alone after school before any demands are made. A sensory decompression activity. Time in nature, with animals, or in whatever environment that particular young person finds genuinely restorative. It is not a reward for good behaviour. It is maintenance. It is what keeps the system running.
Strategy 4: Externalising the Problem — Separating the Young Person from Their Feelings
One of the most transformative ideas in working with young people who experience intense emotions — particularly anger, anxiety, and frustration — is the principle of externalisation. Put simply: the problem is the problem. The young person is not the problem.
Young people, particularly those with additional needs, often carry an enormous burden of shame around their emotional and behavioural responses. They have frequently been in trouble, misunderstood, labelled, or made to feel that something is fundamentally wrong with them. This shame does not reduce the behaviour — it compounds it. Shame, layered on top of an already dysregulated nervous system, makes everything harder.
Externalising the problem means helping the young person to locate the difficulty outside of their core identity. Instead of “I am an angry person,” we move toward “there’s this thing — the anger — and sometimes it gets really big and takes over.” The anger, or the anxiety, becomes something that can be looked at, named, drawn, given a character, even given a name. What are its tactics? What does it want? When does it tend to show up? What helps when it arrives?
Some young people, when they feel safe enough, want to unite against the problem — to work together to outwit the anger or shrink the anxiety. Others, particularly those whose emotions have served an important protective function, prefer to befriend it — to understand the anxiety’s good intentions, even while finding ways to turn down its volume. Both approaches are valid. The young person’s lead matters.
This is not about bypassing accountability. A young person can understand that the anger is not who they are, and still take responsibility for the impact of their actions when the moment is right and the glitter has settled. In fact, that kind of accountable reflection is far more likely to happen when shame is not in the room.
A Final Word on Anxiety and Anger
It is worth naming explicitly something that often gets missed: anxiety is frequently masked by anger.
The young person who explodes, who rages, who pushes back hard — may be doing so from a place of profound fear or uncertainty. Anger is louder and, in some ways, feels less vulnerable. It keeps people at a distance. It gives the illusion of control when everything else feels out of control. For young people navigating the uncertainty of transition, this is particularly common.
It is also worth asking ourselves honestly: what do our child’s or young person’s big emotions awaken in us? Because our own nervous systems respond to theirs. If anger makes us anxious, or big feelings make us shut down, or distress makes us want to fix things immediately, those are our patterns — and they are worth noticing. The adult who can sit with their own discomfort long enough to stay present and curious is the adult best placed to help.
Allow the emotional moments to happen. Emotions need to be felt before they can move through. The glitter has to swirl before it can settle. And in the settling — with patience, with warmth, with the kind of steady presence that says I am not going anywhere — something shifts.
Not just for the young person. For all of us.
Hannah Abrahams
Educational and Child Psychologist
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