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Here's a fresh-from-the-trenches story from a parent who managed to Staylisten through a really important event in her daughter's life. This anecdote reminds me of parents' everyday courage and determination to do the best possible thing. I am convinced that, if each parent felt confident enough to tell all, there would be millions of stories every day of parents managing to love their children well under all kinds of trying circumstances.
I've added a few comments at the end, explaining a bit more about what you can expect when your child works hard to offload big feelings that get in her way of being hopeful, thoughtful, eager, and cooperative. Parenting by Connection sends parents in the direction of keeping things safe, then listening when children have upset feelings. This strategy allows the child to feel a hurt fully, then be done with it, rather than losing his or her sparkle slowly over time to the accumulation of hurt feelings.
Here's Sara's story:
"After the last friend left my daughter's 4th birthday party, my child lost it with the biggest-ever major-whopper tantrum. I felt like she was in complete chaos. She was shrieking and hitting and wild with feelings. But why???? I tried to listen, and couldn't make sense of the feelings she was showing me. She didn't even pretend to be mad at me. She just acted out in body-language--no words.
She went on for over an hour before she could calm down and fall asleep. When my husband asked me whether she was relaxed now, I knew, with a clutch of fear in my heart, that the answer was no, and she would likely awaken soon, distraught. She was sleeping with not-evenly-flowing breath, with a little catch at the end of it. I think she was still tantruming in her sleep; as mad as mad can be.
Sure enough, under an hour later, she awoke, making little yelps for a moment or two. Then WHAM, she was shrieking to wake the dead. She was pounding me, struggling away from me, taking off her clothes, concocting one random button-pushing excuse after another to not do what she was to do (sleep; be in bed). Finally, she pounded down the hall to the bathroom (naked) and I followed her.
When I entered the bathroom she shrieked "Go away!" so I backed around the corner but then there was this slooping noise, and I just had to peek in and find out *what* that noise could be. There she was, pumping all the liquid soap out into her hand. Now, this is a child who does not like textures and icky feelings on her skin.
What was she thinking -- that since everything was totally out of control, she might as well overload herself beyond her limit? Not surprisingly she started screaming and yowling and scrubbing the stuff off and rubbed at the towels, flinging every single one as far as she could. Things continued like this for a long time and I kept on asking her to give me words -- I must have tried at least 80 explanations/hypotheses for what could be the matter.
I let her push me over and jump on me and then she ordered me to stay there -- forever! I was thinking that I would try to play along and let her have "her way." At least this did have the effect of her staying near me (voluntarily). Sooner or later, I tried a new mindset, finally allowing that *something* must really be wrong, something tangible. So I tried talking about feelings, "You look angry," "You look mad," and then repeated every sentence fragment she uttered, little as it might be. And eventually I noticed that discussion of "loneliness" seemed to cause some change in her demeanor. She would say, "You Have To Stay Here, Forever" and I would say, "I'll be lonely without you." And then though she didn't look it, I asked: "Are you feeling lonely?" and finally, finally some teeny niche appeared. So I pressed on: "Are you disappointed? Are you sad? Was there something about the party that made you lonely? Were you missing someone?" Wail, Yowl, Scream: " Kendra!!"
What?! Evidently, she was distraught over the absence of our next-door neighbor who is just a couple months older than her older sister. Kendra's mother and I have never been very comfortable with one another and she has, tragically, isolated herself from me (and all the other people on the street). The children *never* get to see one another, though they live next door, and all like each other very much! I really think this inexplicable denial is traumatic for both my daughters.
So after this, there was some discussion about the situation. It scaled down to teary but more ordinary venting, not ultra-dramatic like the proceeding hours. And then it was just gone -- vanished. Honestly, she was so completely undone and for so long. To me it felt completely wearisome -- and uncontrollable. But I do think that it was Staylistening that pulled us through this. It wasn't until I really started using not my emotions but my brain, hard, and thinking, thinking, mining for clues that I got anywhere. And then, when loneliness and disappointment could finally be identified, well then we knew what to do about that. You can just hold someone and sympathize and share that hurt and talk about its magnitude, and just let it wash on by. There's nothing to change and nothing to fix; but identifying it opens up an emotional dam.
It took me awhile, but it really is good to feel that a problem *is* resolved instead of just pushed out of sight. Thank you for the Listening to Children books. It's really incredible stuff. It's just the most amazing set of parenting tools." --Sara, Los Angeles
Dear Sara:
Nice going! Sounds like it was a rough ride, and you managed to stay with it and bring your daughter all the way through. There are so many things that are totally typical about what happened:
1) Children often have major upsets around a special time, like their birthday or Hannukah or Christmas--high hopes and expectations flush their disappointments out of hiding. They can't be fully happy with an upset dragging on their feelings, so up it comes!
2) This big upset contained lots of fear. You can tell a child is working on fear when there's lots of physical action along with the upset feelings, and their struggle goes on and on. (There's lots of action with tantrums, too, but if it's pure frustration they're dealing with, it's over in a much shorter time.)
3) Children often fall asleep in the middle of working on fears. Fear usually comes in big chunks, and often, a child can't get all the way through the upset without retreating "inside" to rest and gather strength to do the rest of the job.
4) When the first big rush of feelings was subsiding, but she wasn't finished, she was smart enough to know just how to kick-start the feelings again (by dispensing the soap, which she hated). A child really wants to get the whole job done, once she's started working on an incident that caused major hurt. So children will keep coming up with pretexts to continue--usually, the pretext is that the parent keeps doing or saying the "wrong" thing. This is harder to take, but it works the same way as the soap--it is a way for the child to keep scrubbing awful feelings away.
5) There WAS a real hurt to be healed. There always is, whether the child can finally identify it or not. Sometimes, for very early hurts, there are no words about the hurt for a long time--you just try different reassurances, "I'm going to stay here with you," "I'm not going to leave you alone," "No one is going to hurt you," "I will keep you safe," and see what makes them cry harder or fight harder--the ones that intensify the emotional release are the reassurances they most need to hear. As just the right reassurance goes in, the very worst feelings come out.
6) I think her long tantrum and physical protest were VITAL and part of the process--she wouldn't have been able to talk with you about her exact feelings without going through that long, powerful, inarticulate first stage. It's not that you didn't catch on fast enough! It's that often, lots of emotional release has to happen before children can even begin to tell us what hurts them. The hurts feel so big, and words don't begin to describe the effect, so we get to SEE and HEAR the effect first and for the longest time. The verbal part is often a very small part at the end, important but not vital--sometimes it takes several big outbursts over weeks or months before a child can say what's at the bottom of the hurt. You don't really need to hurry to find the reason for the upset. You can trust that, if you tell her now and then that you're sorry she feels so badly and you'd love to hear what it's about, she'll tell you when she can. A guess here and there is fine, but you don't need to get too busy on your end. She's doing the work. You can do the connecting.
Congratulations for helping her all the way through! You can trust this process--and children always know what they're doing in the middle of it. The more reassuring you are able to be to them, the more vigorous they are as they go through the whole thing. It's as though their wise inner voice tells them, "I can't stand being weighed down by this feeling any longer! And my Mom/my Dad isn't retreating! Thank heavens!--so here are some more awful feelings!" I bet you and she had a good day the next day. Your courage made it a birthday to remember. |
