All or Nothing!
Well it has certainly being an eventful summer, one that has seen Mollie come out of her self-induced hibernation and begin to actively interact with those around her. However this really has been a double edged sword for both of us. Following months of socialising she has now retreated back into her own fantasy world. I should be sad but if I’m honest I’m relieved. I’m not happy that she has retreated but I am happy that I can have a break from the manic and stressful place that my home had become.
Months of having no control over my own home due to Mollie’s need to have it as an open house for whomever she chose, which was usually several children at the same time, was well and truly taking its toll. We had put in some early plans but these were constantly being tested and pushed to the limits due to Mollie’s need to please her friends. Play dates once or twice a week is one thing but every day for hours on end, as the sole adult, in a highly combustible situation really was taking its toll on me mentally and the constant noise was driving me nuts! Don’t even get me started on the mess, on average, two hours a day was spent simply tidying away the destruction that was left behind following a play date.
So why do you allow it I hear you ask. Well, I simply would not have tolerated this from Jake or his friends but because of Mollie’s lack of friends and isolation I was basically willing to walk over hot coals in order to give her whatever she needed in order to facilitate a social life of some kind or another. Also any attempts that I made to encourage her friends to tidy up would completely freak her out in case having to tidy up their own mess would result in them not wanting to play with her.
I tried desperately to explain to her that this wasn’t the case and that it was normal for a mum to have house rules for play dates and to expect things to be tidied away. However Mollie really couldn’t grasp how her friends would be able to tolerate such rules without it having a detrimental effect on how they viewed her. I suppose if complying with demands evokes high anxiety in an individual it may be difficult for that individual to understand that this is not how demands affect others.
On top of the noise, lack of privacy in my own home and the mess I was also finding that I had to deal with a steady decline in Mollie’s behaviour. She was snappy, abusive and extremely short tempered. Trying to hold in her behaviours with others meant that Lee and I were facing an increase in backlashes within the home. Screaming, shouting, and swearing, extreme panic and meltdowns over the smallest of incidents and the return of trashing the house was becoming more and more common place.
All of these factors combining together simply meant that I soon reached my capacity of what I could cope with myself. Years of dealing with explosive and violent behaviour have greatly reduced my capacity to cope while also remaining mentally well. The ability to not react and to let things go over my head became greatly depleted and I soon felt the dark cloud of anxiety coupled with depression threatening to visit and to outstay its welcome.
Going on holiday was just what I needed in order to give myself a break from the madness of home. However as soon as we returned home I struggled to cope with settling back into a rather dreary, monotonous and uneventful existence on one hand but also filled with high anxiety, noise and stress on the other hand.
Within a couple of days we had experienced several more meltdowns and mine and Mollie’s relationship, due to me not being on top form, was beginning to show cracks. Instead of remaining calm I was retaliating back to many of her outbursts and quickly losing my own temper. This is not the way to successfully handle a child with PDA and I would really beat myself up with guilt over not handling her properly. However I do have to forgive myself for these periods of dyer and crappy PDA parenting because I am only human and wallowing in guilt will not undue what has been done.
Perhaps due to the level that she was struggling or perhaps due to me not coping well at all or perhaps due to a combination of the two things Mollie withdrew and she is currently behaving very well, there is no stress but she appears sad and she is cocooned in her own world again. I feel very sorry that this has happened but this period of rest really couldn’t come soon enough for me because I was struggling to cope and feared that my cracking point was only around the corner.
I am certainly feeling much, much better due to the breathing space that this break from socialising has given me and Mollie is definitely calmer and not as highly strung. So where do we go from here, I guess that I will now restart the process of trying to rebuild things and to encourage her to play with her peers again but in the hope that we have both learned something from the experience which we can take forward with us for when we reattempt the social world.
In an ideal world Mollie would be able to choose to go out to play when her anxieties are low and her tolerance is high. She would have the mental resolve to reduce the frequency and the duration of her socialising when she is struggling to cope. However this is where Mollie really struggles, it is either all or nothing and she never, ever travels along the middle ground.
Once she begins to play out she instantly becomes obsessed with being with her peers and she becomes almost manic with anticipation. When she isn’t out playing, perhaps because her friends are out, she cannot settle at all and paces around like a caged lion repeatedly looking out of the window.
When she is playing with her peers she is working so hard, in difficult circumstances, to maintain her friendships and to keep her behaviours and her need to control under wraps that the rising anxiety must become all consuming. Eventually it has to be released somewhere, released where she knows that, regardless of her behaviour, she will still be loved. Therefore the increasing pressure is often released in the comfort of home and it is usually her dad and I who become the target of the outburst of compressed and internalised stress.
Due to quickly becoming obsessed and manic Mollie’s ability to monitor and to make allowances for her ability to cope or rising anxieties at any given time appears to be non-existent. Even when she is about to explode she just doesn’t appear to have the mental flexibility to think “things are really getting tough right now, I think that I will go in before I explode and have some calm time”, instead she becomes completely rigid and solely focused on remaining where she is even if her anxieties are going through the roof and the situation is quickly escalating. So we find ourselves in the situation of Mollie either being completely overdosed on social exposure or being a complete recluse. The happy middle ground of going out as and when she can cope, when an anxieties are low and monitoring her own anxiety levels at any given time and reacting accordingly to them just doesn’t appear to be something that she can manage. Therefore we are left in a situation of all or nothing!
I have previously tried the book that can help some individuals deal with this very scenario called ‘The Amazing 5-Point Scale’ by Kari Dunn Buron and Mitzi Curtis. I have also previously discussed with her via a thoughts diary and strategies of how to more successfully manage these issues. Although she agrees in principle it doesn’t appear that she can actually put these strategies into practice when the issues arise. Perhaps, just like many other areas, this is an area that will develop with increasing maturity and that we just need to keep plugging away at it.
Anyway, for now, I will enjoy my rest and replenish my depleted levels of patience, tolerance and emotional well-being. Hopefully Mollie will use this time to do the same and then we can start the whole process all over again and fingers crossed we can make the next time a little bit less fraught for all of us.
Please click here to view my You Tube videos about PDA, also on the playlist of videos by Neville Starnes and Mollie xx https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRVOGwpSi6Q0vgrwgbuQx70eSNsJx_Cn8
