I thought I would share a bit about our families experience with moving out of a crisis state. This won’t be the same for everyone but in sharing I hope you find some validation and perhaps some hope for the future.
Families often come to me concerned that they aren’t able to meet everyone’s needs. Those of their PDAer, their siblings, themselves and their partner. It’s not possible to work on everything at once, sometimes you have to prioritise one area and put others on hold until more space opens up.
This is the very short, simplified version, of course in reality it is not a beautiful linear process:
- Educating myself about PDA.
- Stabilising our PDAer’s nervous system.
- Stabilising my own nervous system.
- Meeting sibling needs.
- Re-connecting as a couple.
Educating myself about PDA
The first crucial step was finding out about PDA and recognising the characteristics in our son. It was also immensely helpful to have a professional validate this for us.
It was then necessary to understand what was happening at a neurological level so that we had a good understanding of the changes we needed to make to our lifestyle and the strategies that we needed to implement.
Stabilising our PDAer’s nervous system
Our PDAer hitting burnout was the catalyst for us working out that he fit a PDA profile. For our family, dropping demands low enough for healing 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.
Over 6 months we started to see how beneficial a low demand lifestyle was for our PDAer. The more demands we dropped, the more positive change we saw and the more confidence we gained that we were on the right track.
Stabilising my nervous system
6 months of intensely co-regulating with our PDAer and prioritising his needs over my own meant that I ended up in a place of care-giver burnout and it was necessary to switch the focus onto myself for a while.
There is an extreme amount of inner work that needs to be done in questioning lots of your long held beliefs around what your child should be doing, how you should be parenting, education, success, reconsidering what your life path might look like. It requires you to really consider what your big life priorities are. A counsellor was instrumental in helping me through this.
Initially I had to find micro moments for self-care that could be done at home and work hard on keeping my mindset in check.
Once our son’s nervous system became more stable, little pockets of time started to open up for us as parents to access more sustainable self-care options. Things like daily walks, getting back to part-time work and an evening class out of the house every week to pursue something I love became possible.
Meeting sibling needs
When our son was in burnout, I had to sit with the reality that for a season, prioritising our PDAer’s nervous system was actually what was best for our daughter too. If we set up days to keep his system calm it meant that the whole household stayed calm, I was more available for my daughter, there was a higher chance of being able to get out of the house and she was less likely to be the target of aggressive outbursts.
The more stable our PDAer’s system was, the more opportunities opened up to get out as a family, to get to playgrounds and play dates, to make park friends. Our PDAer was also more able to problem solve, negotiate and be flexible to come up with solutions that meet everyone’s needs and level of support.
We have also had to get creative with finding times in the week for our daughter to feel special too. Sometimes this is 1:1 time with us as parents, other times we enlist help from extended family.
Re-connecting as a couple
Early on, the priority with my partner was on communication. We literally had weekly crisis discussions scheduled in our diary so that we could constantly recalibrate if there were things that weren’t working that needed to be adjusted.
Once our PDAer was more stable, those crisis chats turned into date nights at home, and we are now at the point where we can get out of the house for dinner every now and then.
Getting the balance right is not easy. It takes a lot of focused intentional work. Over time the little glimmers of progress build upon each other until the point where your whole household can function better. You don’t’ have to work so hard just to stay afloat. You can come up for air.
