Scared

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.