Well, that was unexpected. Looking back, it makes perfect sense, but it's taken me a couple weeks to wrap my head around exactly what's been happening. Our summer was going along swimmingly - we've had amazing weather, and the kids are at an age where we can be out and about for longer periods of time. It wasn't exactly monorail smooth, more like a rickety old steam engine on dilapidated tracks, but we were moving forward. Every once in a while we'd back up a ways, repair a stretch of track, and continue on. Then, a few weeks ago, we derailed. Completely came off the tracks. Behaviours that were rare became common again. I felt like I had to be super-vigilant all the time because I never knew when peaceful playing would turn into war. The level of disrespect and defiance sky-rocketed. Any little disappointment could send our oldest into a tailspin, and he was starting to take the whole house with him.I knew that I should be handling it with compassion and sensitivity, but I was mad. I was ticked off that we were dealing with all this junk again after all the hard work we had done to move past it. I felt entitled to more, and as long as my focus remained on myself, we remained off track.
Exhausted and desperate, I finally confessed to Brian exactly how I was feeling. As I talked it out with him, I realized just how disconnected Kolbie and I had become. And I remembered an important piece of information from our Empowered to Connect training: positive stress can load in our children's systems in the same way as negative stress. In other words, Kolbie's extreme excitement about our houseboat holiday and the beginning of kindergarten could be turning off the rational, higher-level regions of the brain and sending him straight to the primitive, "fight, flight, or freeze" regions of the brain. Everything began to make sense. He'd been operating in survival mode, and I'd compounded the problem by responding with anger and impatience.
Once we had a diagnosis (or at least a plausible working theory!) I knew what I needed to do. I needed to shift my focus and give my son what he needed, not what I thought he deserved. He needed a "high structure, high nurture" environment. I had to set my anger and self-pity aside (not easy) and look for opportunities to connect - little chunks of time to read a book, play some lego, build a few train tracks. I started a day plan on a little whiteboard and gave him a heads-up every morning so he knew what to expect. I went back to navigating transitions with his needs in mind, and remembering to communicate my expectations clearly in advance. And, slowly but surely, we've seen little improvements. In both of us.
