When emotions run high, when the screaming starts, when her feelings burst out of her body in cries or stomps or wails… I see red. Red for anger, for danger.

And I try to fight the fire with water. Soothing the flames with the cooling quench of water.  Taking the heat of the situation. It seems logical, but it doesn’t work.

Petrol On Her Fire

The most provoking thing I can ask my child is to “please calm down.” Worse still when I use a soft soothing tone. I am fighting her amygdala with cool, calm logic, without realising that those two parts of the brain are not on speaking terms.

When I do that, her anger increases, her cries get louder and things go from bad to OMG!

Fighting Fire With Fire

When I visited the Thrive lead at her school, she gave me some advice. Advice I had read a few hours earlier in Dan Hughes book “Attachment Focused Parenting” yet I was struggling to get my head around it.  She offered me practical examples, acting it out, and suddenly the light came on.  I could see how it might work (then felt the tears well up when I recognised my own inadequacy as a parent).

Perhaps there was something in it.

So after the visit, I tried it. Fighting fire with fire. Not exactly. I wasn’t reflecting back her anger or frustration, so the emotional element was removed. But I was copying her volume, her intensity, her pace and tone.

The Impact Surprised Me

My opportunity came soon enough…

“He is SOOOOOO ANNNNNNOYING!!!!!!!!” she uttered crossly, after several months, still holding on at the top spot in the list of most commonly uttered phrases.

Before my meeting, I might have asked her curiously and gently “What is wrong?” or “Why do you say that” and received an exasperated “ARGHHH” in response as she stomped off brimming with stress.  But I didn’t.

“I can see how annoyed you are” I said quickly, sharply, echoing her own tone and pace and moving closer to her. When she didn’t bite back, I carried on “Little brothers can be annoying.”

For once she didn’t bite back or spit out more anger. This was going well.

“Let’s dance out our frustration together?” I suggested; my tone still intense, sharp, animated. I grabbed her hands whilst looking at her and commenced a pogo dance to de-stress.

We bounced a few times, then she looked at me and her face broke into a smile. And it was over before it even began.

Was It a Fluke?

After months of feeling like I was losing the battle for my daughter, for a happy family, this felt like a real achievement.

For the whole of last weekend, Andy and I responded with intensity when her brain dove into flight-fright-freeze mode.

• “I can see how frustrated you are“
• “You are angry about this“
• “I know you don’t like me“
• “It is annoying, isn’t it?“
• “Life can feel so unfair“

Always short. Always fast delivery. Loud, but not shouting. Intense, but not emotional. Nine times out of ten, she responded well.

Within minutes the situation was calmer, and she would be out of the adrenaline-fuelled reptilian brain state.

Empathy

“YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME” was spat with predictable regularity whenever Bubbles’ amygdala got in on the act. Even as I strained to hear every garbled noise that issues from her foaming mouth.

But not last weekend.

Her brain is not interested in logic or rational argument. It is not in play in these moments.  Her brain is reduced to emotions, and I wasn’t matching hers.  Her amygdala interpreted my lack of reaction, my soothing manner as not caring, as a disconnect between us, perhaps even as betrayal (a provocative word perhaps, but only through the filter of your logical brain).

How could I listen to what she was saying and not be moved, not be equally frustrated, not be similarly annoyed? Bubbles was searching for connection (isn’t that one of those tenets of trauma, that all behaviour is the search for connection?) and I wasn’t creating one.

But by matching her intensity, our connection was being forged rather than broken. She could feel the empathy in my response.

Connection Is Everything

Right now I feel I have been given a parenting upgrade, to version 2.1 (not the 3.0 I might desire but it’s going in the right direction).

I continue to work on matching her intensity, although I don’t always get it right and yesterday I fell into the trap of soothing, then had to ramp my intensity twice as far to recover the situation.

It seems to be working.

Wish me luck.