You not mad at me?

This evening, J. had asked R. to do something and suddenly she is stomping around and beginning to disassociate. (Disassociating is still her go-to technique for dealing with anything stressful. It is a default at this point but is slowly getting better as she feels safer and is able to be more present in the world.) Suddenly from the other end of the house, we hear her shout, "You not mad at me?" We assured her we weren't mad at all, that Daddy merely asked her to do something. Life then went on. It seems like a small, inconsequential interaction, but I assure it is anything but.

My point for sharing this is to remind parents that you are not inside your child's head. What you think you said and what they perceived can be vastly different things. J. thought he had just requested that R. do something, and really he had. There was no intense emotional tone along with the request at all. R. heard emotional tone for whatever reason, and it was enough to point her in the direction of the ledge. This time, though, she was able to put her worry into words and ask if someone was mad at her. This is a huge step in her emotional growth. To accept the answer is another huge step.

How often over the years have we been going along just fine when all of a sudden, there is a meltdown which seems to come out of the blue? This is part of the explanation for this — that different lens through which our children perceive the world around them. This could be that they were already anxious about something else which colors their interpretation. It could be that there were words involved that they don't understand or have associated with the wrong meaning. They could be hungry or tired and their margin is thin. Or it could just be because they are so very used to seeing the world as a threatening, scary, and baffling place that they assume that everything is threatening or scary. The meltdown may seem out of the blue to us, but it probably had a long lead up in the child's head.

The other piece is that questions and requests are tricky for some children, especially if they have learned to distrust their environment. Questions can feel threatening because there is the need for a response. What if they respond incorrectly? What if they don't know the answer or the correct response and guess wrong? Many of our children have already lost everything, and as far as they are concerned, there was no discernible reason for this loss. If you don't know why, then everything can become an explanation. What if it was something you did wrong? Our children may not be able to voice this fear, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't lie buried in there somewhere at the alert to be sure the same thing doesn't happen again. We see a simple question, but they feel their body telling them that life as they know it is on the line. 

These automatic responses can be replaced with more appropriate ways of dealing with life, but it takes time. A lot of time and a lot of patience and compassion. Just because behavior seems random and unpredictable doesn't mean it actually is.