Emotional Regulation

I was really proud of Miss Iz yesterday.  She did such a great job handling emotions!  She's been dealing with pretty severe anxiety ever since her open heart surgery at seven months old and has been in and out of therapy since shortly before she turned two.  As she grows and matures, the manifestation of her anxiety changes.  Adding an anxiety med last year helped as well and we moved from her very long selective mutism stage into what I call the "Fight or Flight" stage.

One of the things we deal with is the fact that regular ordinary frustrations for her age can often kickstart the anxiety and then we go from 0 to 300 in a very short amount of time.  She does OT as well as meets with a therapist to help and she and I do a lot of work at home.  She had been making big improvements and then school just set her back to the point we pulled her out.  She's made great strides again and those fight or flight outbursts are getting further and further apart.  Yesterday morning W had OT and then we ran errands to finish off our grocery shopping for the weekend and next week.  She did awesome navigating the crowds (sometimes just having so many people around puts her on high alert and it takes very little to tip her over the edge), she handled being told "no" to things like a champ, she listened to instructions fairly well.  She needed some reminders here and there but nothing escalated and she chose appropriate ways to express the emotions she was having.  She used her words, did her breathing, when we needed to we simply moved together to a quieter part of the store, we talked things out.

We talk a lot about how we all have big emotions and that that is okay and normal and we are supposed to have big emotions.  But we have to choose how to handle those big emotions--we can't hurt others or ourselves or destroy things.  We talk a lot about making safe choices and that even grownups have to still keep working on things, too.  She may not always be in control enough to make the choices she needs to (which is why she's homeschooled now--the school was unwilling to step in when needed to keep her and others safe.  She knows that if she's out of control, I'll step in to keep her safe.  She doesn't like getting "tight hugs" when she's upset but she's a smart kid and when she's calm, she can tell you she needs them, even when she can't ask for them), but she's working on making them a habit so she doesn't have to think about them.  We practice when she's calm and she's applying her calm down strategies to other people in the house.  I was irritated with W this morning because he kept trying to climb on me and almost knocked my coffee over and I asked him to get down and go into the living room--Iz came over and starting rubbing my back in long firm strokes and told me that pressure input is really good for staying calm when you start to get mad LOL (Iz's response to W irritating her is usually screaming and crying and we are working on that because the loud wailing won't fix the problem--using  her words will be more effective because then even if W doesn't stop because he's two, I can hear what the problem is and come help.  I used my words like she is supposed to tell W to stop and go in the other room but she figured some pressure input wouldn't hurt).  She's a funny, sweet, thoughtful little girl :)