The
screams of, "I'M SCARED!!!"
echoed through the house. They were so high pitched and frequent, I flinched
each time I heard it. I didn't know what to do…
My
six-year-old son and I had been holed up in his room having a "time-in"
instead of a time-out. I've learned that they need us most when they are
melting down and driving us crazy. This all started over what looked to be
typical six-year-old behavior. I had been seeing the warning signs in my
eight-year-old daughter since she came home from school and was keeping a close
eye on her, expecting the meltdown to be coming from her direction. Instead it
was the quiet one, the one who has been with us since he was seven months old.
The
trigger? He wanted more bread with his uneaten dinner. (Of course the actual
issue was his background, the trauma that enabled him to eventually be adopted
and become our son.) First the screams of wanting bread. Brad took him upstairs
to his room. When Brad came back down, I went up. He actually climbed into my
lap for about a minute and a half to bemoan how awful Daddy was. Uh huh. Then,
since I was there and an easy target, I got to hear how awful I was too. I am
taking trauma classes with Heather Forbes (http://beyondconsequences.com) and
am learning a lot but am still at a loss for this. Loreli does trauma
differently than Daniel and this is a whole new ballgame. The verbal berating
was raining hard in that room and he kept it up for 30-40 minutes. He kept
saying I was a "loser". Where in the world had this coming from? He's
six! Is this something someone is saying to him in school? (I asked later and
he said no.) I finally reminded myself of what my horse Rayn recently told me
in regards to Daniel, "Set boundaries." So I told him that that was
enough. You can be mad but you can’t
abuse. He stopped.
Next
up was the screaming, "I'm scared!" It was so visceral, so gut
wrenching. I've also learned that to try to talk to someone in the middle of
such a place is pointless. They can't hear you and their mind isn't processing
normally. I got to the point where I couldn't think either. All I could do was
feel and what I was feeling was overwhelming sadness that my kids have to go
through this.
No
one tells you that someday you'll have to face a sobbing, screaming child who
is too young to fully verbalize his emotions and the "why" of it all
and all you'll be able to do is...nothing. Nothing helps. You have to weather
this storm all on your own with no knowledge of the tides or weather. You have
to try to find that "still, small voice within" and hope that you'll
be able to hear it through the shrieks. Hope that the voice you hear is really
your inner voice and not your family, your friends, any book you've ever read,
any advice you've ever gotten because 99% of them are wrong. I've learned this
the hard way. I've learned this because I followed everyone elses advice on Loreli
and got nowhere (and worse) until I started listening to my horses and my own
inner voice.
The
99% say:
“This is just six year
old behavior.”
“He's been with you
nearly all his life, what's his problem?”
“He's being
disrespectful.”
“Put him in time out,
he'll get over it.”
“Let him cry it out.”
What
do they learn from these? That you, the “new” parent, aren’t there just like their
birth parents weren’t/aren’t. They learn to stuff their feelings, to “toughen
up” and not show their emotions. They look at us and see that we are petrified
of showing emotions or experiencing other’s emotions and make the obvious
connection that emotions are really scary—hide them.
My
horses and my inner voice say:
“Some of this IS normal
six year old behavior.”
“Set a boundary, no
abuse.”
“His body and spirit
know the trauma.”
“HEAR him, let him know
he's being heard.”
“Stay with him no
matter what.”
“Be honest.”
Well,
I went through all of the above and the final thing was honesty. I was honestly
scared that I couldn't "fix" it, scared that he was going to be this
way forever, scared that all the Reiki and TFT and coaching training in the world
wouldn't be able to help this kid. Sad that he was so scared, sad that he was
sad, sad that he had to go through this, sad that I wasn't there for my
daughter for the first three years of her being with us, sad that she went
through this on her own. I finally broke down in tears and sobbed.
Daniel
stopped screaming and looked at me. For the first time in the hour-long
meltdown, he looked at me, saw me, said, "I'm sorry…" and climbed onto his bed to cuddle
with me. We both took some deep breaths and looked at each other silently, his
tear streaked face close to mine. I said, "I'm very sorry you are so
scared." He nodded and said, "I'm sorry I made you cry." I told
him that he didn't make me cry, I was
crying because I was sad for how scared he was. I said all the feelings we had
been having were normal and that it was okay to have them, to yell about them,
and to cry about them. I asked him what he was scared about, curious if he
could verbalize it. He said Daddy yelled at him (I know he hadn't) and then
eventually he said he was scared of a dragon.
Six
is so very young. How in the hell is he supposed to go through this? I guess
what my inner voice keeps saying is how: It's my job to give words to his
emotions and to explain and model ways to get through emotional hell without
hurting others. My job is to model that the wave of emotions washes over us but
doesn’t kill us.
There are many days when I don't think I'm up to the task and many days when I
think we are the blind leading the blind over here. I'm learning all of this
just now, at forty-four, how am I supposed to be able to teach them?
Oh...right...The
horses and my inner voice…I've
not ever been led astray by either. We will get though this--we won't just get
through this, we will get through and come out the other side the bright beings
of light that we were meant to be.
