42% of the way there

That, my friends, is 8 out of 19 days of winter break we have survived.  Almost halfway there.  If you have never counted down the days during a break, you probably don't have a trauma kid (TK) in your family/circle.  Because I count down every break - 3 day ones are pretty doable, one week ones are tough, and the long ones - like now - are a struggle.

Many TKs (like mine) thrive on structure and sameness, predictability and schedules.  TK is very flexible within a structure, but a complete lack of structure leaves her feeling adrift and unsure.  The first few days are fine, but by day 6 or so she becomes more needy (pat me to sleep, let me sleep in your room) and more easily dysregulated. Of course right now that is compounded by the hormone swings of  puberty, so it's a double whammy.

Thanksgiving break had some challenges for us.  It reminded me that while TK has come far on this healing journey, she is still overwhelmed and prone to dysregulation when we are with large groups of people that are important to us.  She feels she is competing for attention and acceptance, and this often leads to a resurgence of trauma behaviors - sometimes physical but more often verbal.  Some say this is because she is the only child of a single mom, so she is accustomed to being the center of attention. That is quite possibly part of it, but much of it is the scarcity mentality so common in trauma kids.  If someone else is getting the attention/manifestation of love, there's less for me.  This is worse in "high risk" situations- when the people involved are all dearly loved, even the hint of rejection is devastating.

So we've kept our world small this break.  This means we have had a scant few visits with our loved ones, a few people at a time.  The plus side of this is TK has not felt the fear of rejection, and our loved ones have not had to deal with a dysregulated TK. The down side of this is I am the sole provider of emotional support, the entertainer, and the recipient of all dysregulation and puberty moments.  

The part that is still, to steal TK's word, confuzzling to me is how well TK does in social situations at school and other peer environments, but she falls back into massive fear of rejection when older kids and adults are involved.  I'll have to ponder that one for a while and see what bubbles up.  

So we have 11 days to go.  In the first 8 days I've had about 2 hours without TK; I expect that will be about the same for the next 11 days.  But we will, as always, do what needs to be done and handle it.  Not always with grace, but always with love.

Hang tough during your "time off" (yes, I'm laughing - or crying!), trauma mamas.  I know only too well how hard it is to make your TK's world small, and I know the price you pay for that.  Grab the grace that comes with doing what is best for your TK.  We can do this, trauma mamas. 

Sending you grace to get through the holidays.  Feel free to send some back in return.

Trauma Mama - emphasis on the Mama

I am pretty well versed in trauma, yet it still confounds me at times.  I am a good resource to a lot of folks who are in the hot and heavy trauma battle, yet still struggle with the intermittent, ever-changing way trauma presents in our house, and how to deal with the fallout.  That's what this blog is about - dealing with fallout.

Thanksgiving was okay, considering we had 9 days of nearly 24/7 mom/Trauma Kid (TK) time. On Thanksgiving day we went to a family dinner and got to love on the newest baby (TK LOVES little kids - the under 4 set are her favorite people) and all seemed okay.  On the way home we got a phone call saying TK had kicked someone during the family soccer game.  It was  news to me as I had been playing watchdog to the little ones on the slide.  Unfortunately the conversation started rather abruptly, with "I heard you kicked X. Why did you kick her?"  TK immediately went into survival mode and said she didn't do it, that X had tripped her and she'd talk to the caller about it later (we were on the speaker in the car).  I didn't bring it up on the rest of the car ride because I knew she was in fear mode and nothing good would happen if we pursued it at that point.  We got home and TK went into her room and hibernated.  I was okay with that as I knew she was decompressing from having a lot of people around and the phone call.

I continued the conversation via text.  A lot came up, and I'm still not sure what to do with it all.  I heard that TK did something very rude and disrespectful this summer, that the folks feel they are walking on eggshells around her because they so desperately want her to be comfortable but aren't sure how to accomplish that and she's so unpredictable.  I had a very mixed response.  My first response was to shut down and hide. When it comes to fight, flight, or freeze, TK is all about the fight and I'm all about the flight!  I spent the next two days heartbroken and sobbing.  Then I spent two days furious and ready to fight.  My anger was mostly around hearing about something that happened this summer. We have worked REALLY hard to deal with things as they arise, make it right to the best of our ability, and move on. So hearing something old dredged up felt like an attack to me, and it seemed really unfair.  I couldn't do anything about it now except stew on it.  Luckily I don't have the fight response, and am old enough to know that time is key to moving through emotional turmoil, so I purposely just let it sit until I could view it all with calmness and recognize the information was provided as just that - information, not condemnation. I forget that others don't know what causes those rude outbursts nor how to deal with them. I am grateful that they are trying to be sensitive to the trauma journey, and at the same time frustrated that no one but me knows how to handle it.  And let's be real, sometimes even I don't know how to deal with it. 

Once I moved past sadness/hurt and anger, I was just, as TK says, confuzzled.  I still lean toward running, for a variety of reasons.  (Let me clarify that this is our local, "adopted" family - dear dear friends who have included us in their family and accepted us with all our baggage.)  Obviously TK doesn't trust the family's love yet -----she kicked X because she tripped when X went for the ball, and folks saw TK trip. So she looked, to TK's trauma brain, like a failure; failures aren't lovable; they won't love me.  So she reverted to fear mode and lashed out.  I also don't want them to feel like they have to walk in fear around her, waiting for the next explosion.  And I don't want to spend every gathering in fear, always in high alert for any remote evidence that things could go south.  And I don't want to go through another three days where TK feels less than, which she did after this occurred.  She felt unloved, untrusted, and rejected.  Thus the whole "trusting the love" thing.  I suppose it is too much to ask her to trust that any other people could love her unconditionally......it took her years to believe that I did.  

On the plus side, TK wasn't thrown for a loop for nearly as long as she would have been a year ago.   And her reaction was less extreme than it would have been. She tested my love a few times, purposely pushing some buttons to see what would happen.  Luckily I knew where her head was, and I was able to call on my Trauma Mama heart and respond correctly.  

So there you have it.  This Trauma Mama is still "confuzzled".  Sometimes we focus so much on our TK's struggles that we don't stop to recognize or validate our own.  So I'm telling myself, and you, it's okay to be confuzzled sometimes.  You won't always have the right answers, or even any answer. Sometimes you just have to walk through it step by step and deal with it as it comes.  Clarity will come at some point.  Hang tough til it does, Trauma Mamas.  That's what I'm trying to do.