As I continue to struggle with what part of my childrens' journey is appropriate to share here, I realize there is one person's journey I have full liberty to share. Mine. Is being so vulnerable to the world wise? That too is completely in my power to decide. I've come to the conclusion along with Brene Brown, that our lives depend on connection and connection requires us to be vulnerable. I also have come to learn far from feeling the need to restrain my emotions lest society write me off as a hysterical female, it is part of my feminist journey to embrace my emotions as who I am. My emotions are not my weakness, they are just as much the "real me" as my rational self. Empathy is what I hope to offer.
I've also realized this is something I do have to offer others who find themselves in similar trenches. It took me 4 years into my journey to even learn that others struggle as much as I do. I suffered so much guilt for so long that I was doing it wrong, and therefore that's why my children weren't healed yet. If I could just stop yelling and be zen all the time, they would heal. If I could just get the right time out sequence and cutting edge reward and consequence systems down my children would thrive. That if I could just be more firm my children would cease to react to me. That if I could just be less uptight everything would flow better. So many people told me that, "all kids do that" (I guess even the physical attacks and threats to kill) that maybe they were right. So it must be me. I must be flawed. I must be weak. I just needed to pull myself up by my bootstraps. I just needed to work harder and do a better job. Why was I caving into panic attacks? Why was I breaking down in sobs on a regular basis? It took me a full year to realize what I was sinking into was depression and anxiety. It took me a full year to seek professional help, another 6 months to seek psychiatric treatment, and another couple years to find enough resources that linked me to enough people that proved to me I wasn't alone.
Still, I don't see enough resources addressing exactly what its like on a daily basis to struggle with the basics of therapeutic parenting. When the disregulation, acting out and demands from not one but three children are constant, how do you use any of these tools when you can barely breathe and keep everyone safe?
I only recently realized that when I get knots in my stomach driving to pick my children up from school, when my neck tenses when I sense an outburst building, when my breathing gets shallow trying to manage so many behaviors, when my upper lip gets numb and sweaty, that these are physiological symptoms of fight and flight. Many days I do manage to meet my children with calm and empathy, but on days I am really struggling myself with something entirely unrelated to them, it is very difficult to regulate myself to respond in a connected way.
After several weeks of the doing the best myself I have done since our children entered our lives 5 years ago, I have been struggling again with depression and anxiety for the past few weeks. I was on a high, now I'm on a low. I recognize the trigger is our epic house hunt, escrow, packing, move, unpacking, and putting down our roots. I recognize moving is a major life stressor...along with divorce and job loss. This has taken the form of a lot of irritability, yelling, time in my room sobbing, and having a difficult time with therapeutic parenting.
Why be so vulnerable? Because, I'm learning that it's precisely in my own struggle that I can connect in empathy with my children's struggle.
I not only realize this move is big, but I am validating myself that it is hard and my feelings matter. This allows me to empathize that my childrens' journey is huge, and helps me find it in myself to validate their big feelings. I am also learning to vocalize exactly what I'm feeling and exactly what I need and want, and discover how that alleviates some of my symptoms and helps me feel better. My depression is often my feelings of isolation or hopelessness about a specific situation, and my anxiety is often holding back my true feelings about something important to me. This shows me the value of coaching my children to find their voice to express what they are feeling, need and even just want...as it will alleviate some of the trying to work itself out in behaviors.
My amazing husband is supporting me in this time by just sitting and being with me when I'm hurting, as well as meeting the practical need of taking the kids off my hands for long stretches on the weekends. The way this makes me feel loved and validated breathes life into me that I *can* cope, heal and even thrive. This in turn enables me to just sit with my children when they hurt, even if and especially if it looks like anger, because I know from the experience of someone doing this for me the priceless value of this. I also know the value of just meeting a need (such as just making my child's bed for them during a meltdown, or just feeding them through nasty insults) rather than lecture or consequence the behavior, because my husband did this for me when I was irritable and "hysterical" without lecturing me. Will I now take advantage of him and behave this way all the time to get my needs met? No, my needs ARE met by love shown, and when I feel better I do better. It is the same with my children.
When I am tired, hungry, thirsty or need to use the restroom...everything is that much harder to deal with and I am that much more easily triggered. It is the same with my children. The more I learn to recognize my own body's cues and self care, the better I can recognize my childrens' cues for their basic needs that they don't even recognize themselves at the ages of 7, 8 and 9 and meet them. I can then begin to teach them to do the same for themselves.
When it's all too much I can model using my voice to say how I feel, take a break in my room, chew some gum, etc. The more genuinely I self-care the better I can model self-regulation, and know the value of this over merely consequencing behaviors.
Therapy for adults focuses on coaching them to manage their own triggers, yet somehow traditional therapy for children also adds consequencing behaviors arising from those same triggers. Could you imagine consequencing an adult for a PTSD flashback with earning no treat for the night? Yet that is exactly the paradigm of traditional behavioral based therapy and traditional parenting on children with trauma. Wouldn't you simply be there for your adult loved one and find some way to connect and remind them they are safe and loved? Would you worry that would cause them to "chose" to "behave" that way again to "seek attention"? No, you know an adult who suffers PTSD cannot control their flashbacks. Neither can a child control the trauma emulating from their body. The ONLY way to begin to heal is to begin to feel safe, heard, cared for and loved. In the case of a lifetime struggling with PTSD, it is the only humane response.
The best way I am finding to provide this is experience it myself. Pain and all. Empathy. I've been there. I'm here with you. You don't have to earn your treat...we share a treat every night because life is hard and we all need a little sweetness to soften it. After all, I delve into chocolate not because I've earned it by being perfect all day...but because I had a really hard day and it is comforting.
So with that I'll invite you into my world through a mini-series on how empathy and not perfection is the stuff of therapeutic parenting. Not because I get it right most of the time, but because I *do* struggle most of the time. My children and I. Therapeutic parenting isn't a method you do to your children to control them. It is you and your children struggling side by side to heal.
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Sunday, May 8, 2016
On Sitting with Pain on Mother's Day and Every Day
After contemplating starting a new blog for a couple of years, I've decided to go live on Mother's Day 2016.
Some of you may recall the blog I started six years ago when we were in process to foster and adopt, before we had met our children. I poured so much expectancy into this online journal of sorts, hoping to inspire others to foster and adopt. What has followed in the last six years resulted in me deleting that blog shortly after our childrens' lives crashed into ours. Though it came from raw emotion and the only truth I knew at the time, the last six years have been a painful yet freeing journey in discovering and facing the privilege and saviorism that was my truth. I thought I was following God's call to adopt. Now I no longer believe in a literal deity, and know from experience and the truths voiced by adoptees and first parents that foster care and adoption are complex realities inseparable from privilege. I've also come to respect the privacy and autonomy of adoptees and my own children over the perceived need or right of adoptive parents to over-share in the name of venting or even educating. You will not see photos of my children, nor will I disclose names or any other identifying information. I will be careful to express my truths and educate in light of the fact that my children will have access to what I've written for all the world to see, so I will do so with respect. My relationship with them is more important than anything I could possibly have to say to anyone else for any reason. Furthermore, I reserve the right to remove this blog should I feel I need to be more vigilent in protecting that. However at the end of the day I've come to the realization that I do own my experiences and have the right to express my truth, and in so doing my heart is to raise awareness. I raise awareness not to vent for the sake of venting, but in hopes to be part of the growing body of research that I have to stand in hope will one day translate in real help for families like ours. Real attachment trauma informed mental health support which is currently so scarce, real awareness from society including family and friends, as well as real support and empathy for others who are in the trenches. Empathy is the connection that holds the most hope in healing Developmental Trauma.
So why did I chose Mother's Day 2016 to go live?
Because, today I learned how to sit in empathy with my own pain.
Five years into parenting my children, I had been doing better the past couple months than I had since before they came into our lives. I thought I had processed this day enough. The expectations. The grief. The acceptance. Then one child yelled at me to "shut-up" over something seemingly insignificant, then another threw something at my head over something else even more seemingly insignificant. The progress I have come to measure despite invalidation is that child #1 only yelled at me to shut-up and neither threatened to kill me nor physically attacked me, and child #2 only threw a balloon at my head instead of a hard toy to show me their intended malice. Yes, this is progress, and those living in these trenches know what I'm talking about. Still, I decided then and there that I strive to meet my childrens' behavior with emapthy 364 days per year, but today I was going to meet my own needs with empathy. I usually would try to connect and correct, but today I calmly said while walking away, "it's ok to be upset. It is NOT ok to tell me to shut up or throw things at me." When I retreated to my room, my amazing husband offered to take the kids to the zoo to give me a break today. I burst into tears. I thought I was ok, but I clearly needed respite. I know mother's day is a triggering time for children with attachment trauma. I know their behavior comes from deep pain. I am acutely aware today of all they have lost and that I am all they have now. However today, *I* needed to be taken care of to be ok.
So as soon as my husband and children left, I allowed myself to cuddle with Pup-Pup and bawl for 30 minutes. In my journey of self discovery and situational depression, I previously would have heaped guilt on top of my grief. Guilt that I can't make it all better. Guilt that I can't do it all, and effortlessly, without emotion. Guilt that how dare I have needs. Now though, thanks to an amazing therapist who is a parent to an adult adoptee, a spouse who has stuck by my side, and my virtual "trauma mama" community, I instead met myself with empathy.
For the first time I realized that I NEEDED to sit with my own pain, and meet it with empathy. What I was feeling was real, and valid. This is hard. There are no easy answers. There is often no fixing this, there is only bearing it. There is only so much deep breathing, self care and pleasure to be had before you have to simply sit with the pain and let it out. There is no going around, or over, there is only going through. After 30 minutes of letting myself feel with my faithful furry friend by my side, I felt a burden lifted off my shoulders. Not that I won't feel any more pain, or that my children will be magically cured of Developmental Trauma or that others will suddenly understand and be supportive, but that this was a necessary healing and filling experience that will allow me to better empathize with my children. It's only in sitting with my own pain that I can sit with theirs.
Ok, class.
What did we learn from the movie Frozen, "conceal, don't feel" right? No, doing so only made it worse.
What did we learn from Inside Out? Joy cannot conquer all. Pain can only be released by sitting with Sadness.
So now that I've learned how to sit with my own pain, I can better take a deep breath and find the empathy to sit with my childrens' pain. The difficult part is that it's one thing to sit with pain that looks like sadness and textbook anxiety, but it's another thing to sit with pain that takes the form of rage, defiance, disrespect, aggression, obsessiveness, jealousy, stealing, lying, regression and plain obnoxiousness. However, I know now beyond a shadow of a doubt and even though I'm human and often meet these expressions of pain with exasperation (aka yelling), it is in fact pain and I'm striving to meet it as such. I've already witnessed in amazement the breakthroughs where nothing else in five years has worked. Not the best reward and consequence systems, token economies, 123s, or rigid time out sequences. It's when I simply sit with a raging child in empathy that a storm that use to rage for 45 minutes dies down in 5 minutes. Then in this year alone have come the breakthroughs of reduced aggression, and moments we'd never previously experienced such as unsolicited notes of apology and love. We still live with a tremendous amount of disregulation, but what this blog won't turn into is a daily vent of all of my childrens' behaviors. As my blog unfolds though I will be talking more about each point in the acronym SPACE: Safety, Support, Structure, Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy that has shifted my paradigm. I attribute this paradigm shift to attending the Parenting in SPACE conference last year hosted by House Calls Counselling in Chicago. Each of these pillars comes into play in the therapeutic parenting journey. The pillar of the day is empathy.
One of the many reasons I feel compelled to come forward with my new blog is trauma does not just journey laboriously with my family. I've come to learn that trauma is THE public health crisis. Learning to sit with pain and meet it with empathy for ourselves and others is critical not only for my family and others living with Developmental Trauma, but for the health of all of society.
Why make myself so vulnerable in this blog? I use to think this was a weakness. Society conditioned me that I was a hysterical woman who needed to learn to control my emotions. However, society has now been gifted with educated researchers who are also effective empathetic communicators whom I admire and hope to emulate. Dr. Brene Brown is one of them. Through all of her research she's found this: far from vulnerability being weakness, our very lives depend on it.
So why sit with pain this Mother's Day? Mother's Day and Father's Day are akin to Valentine's Day: they highlight the pain of lost, dysfunctional and non-existent relationships for many. So as we celebrate with those who have loving mothers, we also sit with the pain that is mother's day for many. Then from there, we learn to sit with pain every day of the year. It's only in sitting with pain will we find true connection.
Some of you may recall the blog I started six years ago when we were in process to foster and adopt, before we had met our children. I poured so much expectancy into this online journal of sorts, hoping to inspire others to foster and adopt. What has followed in the last six years resulted in me deleting that blog shortly after our childrens' lives crashed into ours. Though it came from raw emotion and the only truth I knew at the time, the last six years have been a painful yet freeing journey in discovering and facing the privilege and saviorism that was my truth. I thought I was following God's call to adopt. Now I no longer believe in a literal deity, and know from experience and the truths voiced by adoptees and first parents that foster care and adoption are complex realities inseparable from privilege. I've also come to respect the privacy and autonomy of adoptees and my own children over the perceived need or right of adoptive parents to over-share in the name of venting or even educating. You will not see photos of my children, nor will I disclose names or any other identifying information. I will be careful to express my truths and educate in light of the fact that my children will have access to what I've written for all the world to see, so I will do so with respect. My relationship with them is more important than anything I could possibly have to say to anyone else for any reason. Furthermore, I reserve the right to remove this blog should I feel I need to be more vigilent in protecting that. However at the end of the day I've come to the realization that I do own my experiences and have the right to express my truth, and in so doing my heart is to raise awareness. I raise awareness not to vent for the sake of venting, but in hopes to be part of the growing body of research that I have to stand in hope will one day translate in real help for families like ours. Real attachment trauma informed mental health support which is currently so scarce, real awareness from society including family and friends, as well as real support and empathy for others who are in the trenches. Empathy is the connection that holds the most hope in healing Developmental Trauma.
So why did I chose Mother's Day 2016 to go live?
Because, today I learned how to sit in empathy with my own pain.
Five years into parenting my children, I had been doing better the past couple months than I had since before they came into our lives. I thought I had processed this day enough. The expectations. The grief. The acceptance. Then one child yelled at me to "shut-up" over something seemingly insignificant, then another threw something at my head over something else even more seemingly insignificant. The progress I have come to measure despite invalidation is that child #1 only yelled at me to shut-up and neither threatened to kill me nor physically attacked me, and child #2 only threw a balloon at my head instead of a hard toy to show me their intended malice. Yes, this is progress, and those living in these trenches know what I'm talking about. Still, I decided then and there that I strive to meet my childrens' behavior with emapthy 364 days per year, but today I was going to meet my own needs with empathy. I usually would try to connect and correct, but today I calmly said while walking away, "it's ok to be upset. It is NOT ok to tell me to shut up or throw things at me." When I retreated to my room, my amazing husband offered to take the kids to the zoo to give me a break today. I burst into tears. I thought I was ok, but I clearly needed respite. I know mother's day is a triggering time for children with attachment trauma. I know their behavior comes from deep pain. I am acutely aware today of all they have lost and that I am all they have now. However today, *I* needed to be taken care of to be ok.
So as soon as my husband and children left, I allowed myself to cuddle with Pup-Pup and bawl for 30 minutes. In my journey of self discovery and situational depression, I previously would have heaped guilt on top of my grief. Guilt that I can't make it all better. Guilt that I can't do it all, and effortlessly, without emotion. Guilt that how dare I have needs. Now though, thanks to an amazing therapist who is a parent to an adult adoptee, a spouse who has stuck by my side, and my virtual "trauma mama" community, I instead met myself with empathy.
For the first time I realized that I NEEDED to sit with my own pain, and meet it with empathy. What I was feeling was real, and valid. This is hard. There are no easy answers. There is often no fixing this, there is only bearing it. There is only so much deep breathing, self care and pleasure to be had before you have to simply sit with the pain and let it out. There is no going around, or over, there is only going through. After 30 minutes of letting myself feel with my faithful furry friend by my side, I felt a burden lifted off my shoulders. Not that I won't feel any more pain, or that my children will be magically cured of Developmental Trauma or that others will suddenly understand and be supportive, but that this was a necessary healing and filling experience that will allow me to better empathize with my children. It's only in sitting with my own pain that I can sit with theirs.
Ok, class.
What did we learn from the movie Frozen, "conceal, don't feel" right? No, doing so only made it worse.
What did we learn from Inside Out? Joy cannot conquer all. Pain can only be released by sitting with Sadness.
So now that I've learned how to sit with my own pain, I can better take a deep breath and find the empathy to sit with my childrens' pain. The difficult part is that it's one thing to sit with pain that looks like sadness and textbook anxiety, but it's another thing to sit with pain that takes the form of rage, defiance, disrespect, aggression, obsessiveness, jealousy, stealing, lying, regression and plain obnoxiousness. However, I know now beyond a shadow of a doubt and even though I'm human and often meet these expressions of pain with exasperation (aka yelling), it is in fact pain and I'm striving to meet it as such. I've already witnessed in amazement the breakthroughs where nothing else in five years has worked. Not the best reward and consequence systems, token economies, 123s, or rigid time out sequences. It's when I simply sit with a raging child in empathy that a storm that use to rage for 45 minutes dies down in 5 minutes. Then in this year alone have come the breakthroughs of reduced aggression, and moments we'd never previously experienced such as unsolicited notes of apology and love. We still live with a tremendous amount of disregulation, but what this blog won't turn into is a daily vent of all of my childrens' behaviors. As my blog unfolds though I will be talking more about each point in the acronym SPACE: Safety, Support, Structure, Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy that has shifted my paradigm. I attribute this paradigm shift to attending the Parenting in SPACE conference last year hosted by House Calls Counselling in Chicago. Each of these pillars comes into play in the therapeutic parenting journey. The pillar of the day is empathy.
One of the many reasons I feel compelled to come forward with my new blog is trauma does not just journey laboriously with my family. I've come to learn that trauma is THE public health crisis. Learning to sit with pain and meet it with empathy for ourselves and others is critical not only for my family and others living with Developmental Trauma, but for the health of all of society.
Why make myself so vulnerable in this blog? I use to think this was a weakness. Society conditioned me that I was a hysterical woman who needed to learn to control my emotions. However, society has now been gifted with educated researchers who are also effective empathetic communicators whom I admire and hope to emulate. Dr. Brene Brown is one of them. Through all of her research she's found this: far from vulnerability being weakness, our very lives depend on it.
So why sit with pain this Mother's Day? Mother's Day and Father's Day are akin to Valentine's Day: they highlight the pain of lost, dysfunctional and non-existent relationships for many. So as we celebrate with those who have loving mothers, we also sit with the pain that is mother's day for many. Then from there, we learn to sit with pain every day of the year. It's only in sitting with pain will we find true connection.
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