Learning Lessons from Being Wrong
Every once in a while, I realize exactly how lucky Pop Tart is to have C. I do not mean in a way that she is lucky to have been adopted (because if she were truly lucky, she never would have ended up in the foster system to begin with). I mean that there is C to balance me out. I am the bad parent. I am the unsympathetic parent. I am the parent who does not naturally react in the way her therapist thinks we should, because it goes against my grain.
Tonight, C kicked me out of the house. I was planning on going out to write anyway, but C pretty much yelled at me to leave. And he was not wrong, for more than one reason.
Pop Tart has a medical issue that, honestly, probably results in her being, if not actually in pain, then uncomfortable, pretty much as her base line. (Please know she is under medical care for this condition, and it is possible get rid of it, but it takes a long term commitment to following a medical protocol to do so, and we are still in the middle of that protocol.) It is so much a part of her existence, and has been for the entire time she’s been with us, that she does not notice the discomfort on a regular basis. On the rare days when she is not in pain, she does notice, in that she feels “great”.
So the first thing I need to remind myself of is how much it sucked when I had constant headaches, remind myself of what I was like when that pain was my baseline, when a headache free day was the exception, not the norm.
However, her pain is not all physical. (And this is where I am a poor parent.)
Tonight, for example, she went from being mad at us that she asked her to come in for dinner about 5 minutes early to being screaming, nearly hysterical in pain in under 30 minutes. This used to happen on a somewhat regular basis. Regular enough that C and I had been able to identify the triggers to her therapist, and they had worked on them. But it has not happened in over a year.
I had thought we were past this, and the backsliding tonight made me react more harshly than I should have, and more harshly than I would have when this was more regular.
The progression was very typical of the previous attacks. She is mad at us about something. We then ask her to do something she does not want to do. (The fact that it is a stated expectation, and something she is supposed to do every day does not matter. She does not want to do it.) This was compounded by the fact that she had a friend sleep over last night, so she is running on less sleep than she needs, and the fact that I was planning on leaving the house to have writing time.
This combination produced an attention seeking pain (and likely anxiety) attack. And my problem is that I have a hard time separating the pain itself, which is very real, from the fact that I know it has a psychological cause in addition to the physical cause. So when she starts trying to self-diagnose a burst appendix less than 30 minutes after she was begging to run around some more with her friends, I do not respond with sympathy. I respond as if she should be expected to understand the psychological aspect of her pain.
I am WRONG.
Even if she were an adult. Even if she had a better understanding of the emotional component. I would be wrong.
I cannot reasonably expect her to understand the mental side of her anxiety attack in the middle of it. I cannot reasonably expect that of anyone, let alone a not quite 12 year old girl.
And yet, my first reaction is to expect exactly that, to respond as if I doubt the reality of her pain.
I repeat. I am WRONG.
One of the lessons we learned when we were first going through this with her was that it was a way she had, unconsciously, of making us prove that we loved her. Taking her to the doctor, spending hours in urgent care, made her feel better. The doctors NEVER gave her anything for her pain. We were given her diagnosis; we were given vague talk of the treatment; but she was never given anything for pain.
Still, she always felt better by the time we left, because by taking her to urgent care, we showed that she was more important than whatever else we had going on.
But in the process, we have also learned of some other treatments that do help with the physical portion of the pain. And giving her medicine often also helps her feel loved. (We do worry about hypochondriac or drug seeking behaviors for her future life, which is one of the things we were working on with her therapist.)
And so tonight, after I got past my initial reaction to her anxiety attack, I tried to do one of the things that would help the physical aspect of the pain. And she decided she did not want to do that.
And I get frustrated again. I hate seeing her in pain. I want to fix her pain if I can. And when she then refuses a treatment she knows helps ease her pain, my mind goes back on the “drama queen” angle.
Again, I am WRONG.
She is in the midst of an anxiety attack. She cannot be expected to behave in a logical manner. I cannot expect that of her. But I do.
I am WRONG.
C kicked me out of the house.
It was the right thing to do.
My attitude was not helping the matter. It was not productive. It was making things worse.
And kicking me out let me get out of the situation and think about it, so that I can come away from this with something productive (that is not this blog post).
Things had settled down fairly well. We recently moved quite a ways away from her therapist, so were going to transition her to a new one. But she had said she felt she was doing well, and she did not think she needed to see a therapist right now. We listened to her, as we try to do.
In this case, we were all wrong.
Tonight’s reversion to old habits really indicates that she needs to be back in therapy. It can be scary to have a new therapist, to open yourself up to someone new. And my guess is that is why she was saying she did not think she needed therapy anymore. She was losing someone she trusted. Trusting someone new is hard. And she definitely does not like to do hard things (if she can get away with it).
But she needs to be back in therapy. She needs someone who is not C or I to talk to, to help her come up with coping techniques, and to help her talk to us about what is going on. There have been a lot of changes recently, and we were naïve for thinking they were not going to have an effect.
So tomorrow, we call the new therapist and make an appointment. Because we want Pop Tart to be better. We want to get rid of the physical component of the pain (which we are working on, but still are 6+ months out from completing the medicine protocol) and the psychological component of the pain.
Just because she moved from having a diagnosable generalized anxiety disorder to some minor anxiety does not mean she was “cured”. It means her treatment was working. We mistakenly stopped the treatment, so now we need to start over.
