Reply to Can you help me understand my child’s emotional outbursts?

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Reply to "Can you help me understand my child’s emotional outbursts?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We have an evaluation scheduled, but not for a while. My eight year old is analyzing everything in our lives for fairness over the past few days and using it as an excuse to cry, get furiously angry, tell us that we mistreat her compared to her sibling… it goes on and on. She was telling me today that I am a bad person and her dad is good. She feels that her dad spends too much special time with the sibling (dad and sibling have some newly aligned interests this year). She was telling me that she has mostly enemies at school because people don’t like her and therefore she doesn’t like them. The venting is endless. I can’t seem to stop listening. She seems so miserable, but I don’t want to feed whatever this is. We are clearly feeding it. Ugh. I want to be able to help her reset.[/quote]

It's really tough and frustrating. This sounds like something that can be worked on with a child version of cognitive behavioral therapy. She has black and white thinking-things are all good or all bad. Her thoughts about situations are rigid and causing her a lot of stress. A good therapist will also work with you and your husband on strategies to support what she learns in therapy. Also, be open to the therapist suggesting meds at some point if it seems she just cannot respond to the techniques. Sometimes the combo of meds and therapy is the sweet spot because for some meds help them relax enough to be open to new ways of thinking about situations and learning skills.

I know this is easier said than done, but I had to remind myself to see my child as struggling/suffering and not take it personally. Once you get the issues identified and are getting the right interventions, try to focus on every win. It's amazing when a situation that used to cause so much stress is now something your kid can problem solve or when they talk about something that used to be BIG deal as though it is a LITTLE deal and they get over it quickly.

When she complains about unfair treatment, it's good you let her share that. See if you can talk it through and reflect back what she is saying and also help her identify the feelings of frustration/anger/hurt. See if there is something you can agree with and if not, maybe say you will take this all into consideration. Once she is getting the therapy and possibly meds, it will be easier to talk these things through, but until then it may help a little for her to emote and if there is one thing you agree with give her that, if there is one thing you think can be reasonably changed mention it and see if it helps.[/quote]

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