Let’s talk about triggers
One of the biggest ways to assist our PDA kids to become more regulated is to recognise and reduce the things that are triggering stress.
It sounds simple right?
But, what families often say to me is that everything is a trigger.
This is one of my favourite visuals. It’s from the PDA Society UK.
Often lots of our PDA kids are hovering right up in that orange zone where they can appear highly controlling and it only takes the smallest thing to tip them over into a fight/flight/freeze response.
When our kids reach the point of being in a stressed state, in the moment the best we can do is have a plan for keeping everyone safe. We have to go further upstream in order to mitigate those stress responses from occurring.
Sometimes it can be tricky to pinpoint what the true trigger is. What caused a meltdown, might just be the straw that broke the camel’s back. It is the cumulation of demands that have built up over time.
Sometimes we have to consider all the things that have occurred in the lead up, over the past day, week, or period of life to really figure it out.
If your child is constantly escalated and you can’t pinpoint predictable triggers, it might be that your child is either in or approaching a stage of nervous system burnout.
It might be necessary to radically reduce demands and eliminate everything across the board to really reach a place of nervous system regulation. It’s kind of like an elimination diet, first we have to take out all the possible triggers and allow for healing before we can start to add things back in to work out where the zone of tolerance is.
For our family, when our PDAer was in burnout it meant stopping absolutely everything, stopping any extra curriculars, stopping face to face therapy, stopping daycare and dropping everything at home except for expectations around safety.
Healing can take months or even years. It can feel really hard when you are in that place. It can be hard to hold onto the hope that you are doing the right thing and that it won’t always be that way. It can be hard to trust the process.
We are 18 months post crisis and feel like we are in a really beautiful place of stability.
It’s now much easier to spot the earlier, subtle signs of escalation. Our PDAer is regulated enough that he can collaborate, problem solve and negotiate with us. More often than not, we can de-escalate and diffuse before reaching the point of a meltdown.
It has taken a big picture mindset, letting go of things that aren’t truly important, and lots of intentional nervous system regulation. But what we now see is our son being able to stretch and grow in his own time and in his own way.
Hang in there. It can get better.
