I get it.
It is no small feat to remain non-reactive towards a child who is displaying big behaviours.
When we can logically understand what is going on for our kids, it helps us to reduce the amount that we are triggered as parents. This allows us to have the best chance at responding with empathy, rather than becoming resentful, frustrated, angry or despairing which often leads to us becoming triggered ourselves and responding in ways that don’t align with the person we want to be.
We have to start from Dr Ross Greene’s core belief that kids do well if they can. Our kids are not bad kids. They know right from wrong. They want to be able to connect with us.
We can view behaviour as communication, it gives us clues as to what is happening in our kid’s nervous system. As Robyn Gobbel says, nervous systems are either in connection mode or protection mode.
Behaviours that come out during protection mode aren’t personal, they tell us that they are having a hard time, they are the presentation of our kid’s disability, they are not a reflection of who they are as a person.
Controlling, making demands on us, threatening, swearing and physical aggression, are all high-level signs of escalation in PDA kids. In the moment they don’t have the capacity to react in a different way.
One thing that helps me, is to translate in my head whatever my PDAer is saying or doing, I imagine him saying things like “Mummy, I’m feeling really overwhelmed” or “Mummy, I need help.” It helps me to stop and take a deep breath and remember that he isn’t in control right now and that he needs my support to feel safe again.
If things haven’t gone so great, remember that we are human, we can give ourselves compassion, we can repair, we can chalk it up as a learning experience and do the work to back track and figure out what we might change to mitigate the same situation from occurring again.
We do the best we can.
