Tag Archives: self regulation

Let’s Regulate!

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images-2Self-regulation is the cornerstone for being in relationship. If I am not regulated, then it is very difficult for me to be in relationship with you (or myself).  The same is true for children. When a child is dys-regulated he is disconnected from his/her body, has difficulty expressing him/herself in words, may be struggling with behavior or may shut down and all-around has difficulty being in connected, engaged relationship. The good news is that through modeling and through practice, we can actually teach children’s nervous systems how to go from a state of dys-regulation to regulation.

And the benefits to this are tremendous!

A regulated child is more able to focus, stay calm and listen, have a greater window of tolerance and express emotion without reactivity and impulsivity—just to name a few qualities. Here are some strategies for helping children regulate—use these consistently as ways to teach your child what it feels like to be regulated.

  • Model and name out loud the ways that you regulate your emotions. Take deep breaths, feel your feet on the ground, shake your arms and legs out, wiggle your toes, give yourself a little squeeze…
  • Play fun dance music and boogie with your kids. Then stop the music and everyone freezes!images-4
  • Hula hoop, shake it out, make a band and get in rhythm with each other.
  • Nature time! Spend time outside playing, skipping, moving like animals, noticing what you see, hear, smell, feel, taste. Being in nature is extremely regulating for most children so get outdoors and have some fun.
  • Warm bath with some lavender oil or bubbles. This can be especially regulating when a child has been hyper-aroused and acting out. Stay close and help your kiddo feel safe. Pour water over his/her body with a funnel or sieve (ask if this is something he/she wants first).
  • Wrap your little one up like a burrito. This can be great for hypo or hyper aroused children. Ask them what they want in their burrito (toppings, love, sprinkles—there’s no wrong answer!). Then wrap them up and give them a sweet and loving squeeze.
  • Play “I Spy” or, for older children “I Am Aware”. The first one is self-explanatory. The second one I do like this: we toss a ball back and forth. When you have the ball you say something that you are aware of (something you notice). I alternate each round—first round something you’re aware of in your environment, second round something you feel inside of you (emotion, sensation, body, etc).

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  • Dig in the dirt, mud or sand. Move rocks. Throw a weighted ball back and forth. How earthy can you be?
  • Find your inner animal—walk and talk like an animal. If you were an elephant how would your body move? What sounds would come out of you? How much space would you need around you?
  • images-3Order a sensory brush and brush your child. I’ve found this extremely beneficial to my hyper-aroused clients lately. Ask them how they want the strokes (pressure, direction, where on their body, etc). Brush each other. This is a great thing to do each night before going to bed or each morning before the day’s activities really get under way. You can find these little plastic brushes on Amazon—they are inexpensive and so easy to use.

 

Regulation activities like these can be done every single day to help kids’ nervous systems develop an imprint of what it means to be relaxed and present. Get fun and playful with the ways you regulate yourself and your children. It may seem simple but the rewards are many: more resilient, communicative, focused, relaxed and relational children. What more could you possibly want? Now go regulate and have some fun!

Supporting Kids Through Stress

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Play Therapy: Trauma, Stress and Dysregulation

Often I am asked by curious, perhaps sometimes skeptical parents, what Play Therapy is and how it will help their child be calmer, more resilient, more mentally healthy. Play Therapy is the preferred approach in working with children, speaking to kids in their language of choice. Each model of Play Therapy has something unique to offer and can be beneficial in its own way; however, when it comes to working with children’s stress, trauma and their emotional (and therefore behavioral) dys-regulation, it is critical to have a Play Therapist who understands the biological mechanisms of stress and its impact on the developing nervous system.

Leading trauma author and researcher Dr. Peter Levine says, “Trauma happens when any experience stuns us like a bolt out of the blue; it overwhelms us, leaving us altered and disconnected from our bodies. Any coping mechanisms we may have had are undermined, and we feel utterly helpless and hopeless,” (from Trauma Through A Child’s Eyes by Peter A. Levine and Maggie Kline) The flight/fight/freeze response in our brain has been activated in response to a perceived threat, neurochemicals and stress hormones are released signaling to the brain and body to either mobilize (fight/flight) or to “play dead” (freeze) and the nervous system is flooded with information. When the danger has surpassed, if we are not able to discharge the flood of nervous system energy and integrate the experience, it will likely be stored in the nervous system and the body as trauma and can be debilitating to the life of the individual, particularly to children.

How Can We Help Children Move Through A Traumatic Experience

Integration refers to the linking of different parts of the brain in order to help them function well together. Trauma is primarily a function of the brain’s right hemisphere, which is more closely associated with the lower, or more primitive parts of the brain. In fact, our fight/flight/freeze response is governed by our brainstem, the very back of the brain close to where the back of your head meets your neck. In order to heal from trauma and integrate an experience, we must create connections between the sensory information that is stored in the right hemisphere (the imprint of the traumatic experience) and the rest of the brain, particularly the left hemisphere and the pre-frontal cortex (the area behind your forehead responsible for more sophisticated functions such as rational thought, sequencing of events, empathy and intuition, etc.)

Now that you know a bit about the biology of stress and trauma, what can you do in the aftermath of a frightening event to help a child calm his/her nervous system and ultimately to integrate the experience? Here are some pointers:

  • Use the oxygen mask philosophy: attend to your own state of regulation and do what you need to do to regulate: deep breaths, feel into your body, shake your hands out, feel your feet on the ground, say a calming phrase to yourself (such as, I am ok).
  • Attend to your child’s basic needs first—safety, human touch (rubbing his back, holding her hand), nourishment (a glass of water), rest.
  • Maintain an authentic attitude of empathy and compassion. Even if your child was in the wrong in some way (i.e. made a mistake and fell off his bike), now is not the time to discuss this. Let him know he is safe now, that you are here, that you’ll talk about the details of what happened later and that now is the time for him to just get safe and calm himself.
  • Repeatedly orient your child back to his/her body. Ask her to feel her feet on the ground. Tell her to let you know where it hurts or what it feels like right now. If she has a specific sensation, ask her for more detail about this. Does it have a color, a size, a shape? As humans, one of our coping mechanisms during trauma is to dissociate or “check out”. One way to keep the trauma from developing into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is to interrupt this dissociation by “getting back in the body”.
  • Crying, trembling, shaking and movement are normal and healthy once the shock of a traumatic experience has worn off. Allow this to happen naturally and stay present with your child while he/she releases these waves (this is energy that has built up in the nervous system as a result of the frightening experience and it needs to be discharged). Assure your child that this is normal and it’s ok to cry or shake.
  • When the child is calmed again, has rested and had his/her basic needs tended to, now is the time to talk about and integrate the experience. This is the time in which parents can ask questions and allow the child to tell his/her story. Draw a storybook or comic describing his memory of the experience, focusing on how it felt for him/her. This allows integration between the two hemispheres of the brain and can lead to greater resilience and healing from the experience.

When To Consult a Professional Play Therapist

There are times when we are not able to fully help our children integrate and bounce back from an experience. Here are signs that it may be time to consult a Play Therapist with a background in trauma work to help your child process and feel better:

  • Changes in personality or drastic changes in behavior
  • Regression: suddenly acting younger than his/her age, reverting to old stages of development—reverse progress in potty training, sucking thumb, talking baby talk, bed-wetting
  • Mood swings and/or the child is unusually sullen, sad, angry or controlling
  • Unusual themes and feelings in the child’s play that suggest he/she is working through an overwhelming experience
  • Sleep disturbances, Nightmares
  • Social withdrawal or isolation for a previously social child
  • Changes in appetite and eating habits
  • Physical symptoms that don’t have a traceable physical cause

How Play Therapy Can Help

Here is how Play Therapy with a trained and experienced Play Therapist can help your child move through this difficult time and come back more resilient, confident and emotionally regulated.

As humans we are inherently relational, using our relationships to learn about ourselves, develop confidence and to heal when we are facing or have faced a challenge. Play Therapy offers children a unique relationship in which they can express their internal world and explore their struggles in a highly supportive and compassionate environment. As children express themselves, the therapist facilitates the processing and integration of stressful or traumatic experiences. Through their play, shifts in the biology of the child’s brain and nervous system are able to take place thus allowing the child more ease and fluidity in nervous system regulation. This shift leads to greater resilience, the ability to regulate stress and more ease in the expression of one’s emotional experience and states through words rather than through behavior.

Play Therapy is the research-based method of choice for helping children with a variety of issues including, but not limited to PTSD, depression, anxiety, abuse, behavioral challenges, adoption, divorce or separation, separation anxiety, grief and loss, sleep or eating disturbances, bed-wetting, impulsivity, social challenges and more.

The Whole Brain Child: A Must Read

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Daniel Siegel continues to publish fascinating, applicable and well-researched material on shaping the parent-child relationship in ways that will most optimally foster a child’s emotional development. In this book he teams up with Dr. Tina Payne Bryson and the two set out to teach cutting-edge parenting strategies that speak directly to a child’s brain. Bryson and Siegel demonstrate what language to use and when to use it, in order to most effectively help a child integrate the various parts of the brain as he/she processes emotions. They explain their ideas not just through neuroscience but with comics, cheat sheets that you can keep on the fridge for quick reference, and hands-on techniques for explaining the concepts to children (even very young children) in order to help them understand their own brains.

Most parents want their children not only to survive and make it through life, but to thrive, to flourish, to be the best they can possibly be. Siegel and Bryson explain that the integration of the various parts of the brain is the key to developing emotional well-being and mental health. How to facilitate the integration process? Speak to your child, both verbally and nonverbally, in ways that take into account their logical, linear left brain and their creative, emotional right brain. Like a married couple, ideally these two sides of the brain connect, communicate and work together, especially when the going gets tough.

When kids are struggling or upset, Siegel and Bryson teach us to “connect and redirect”. First start by meeting your little one’s upset with a big dose of empathy and understanding. “Wow, I hear that you’re feeling really angry right now!” (I’d add, really sink into his experience and feel what it’s like to be him in this moment—sometimes parents tell me that they are concerned that empathy can feel condescending or feigned. Not if you’re truly being empathic and seeing the world from your child’s perspective.) So light up his right brain with some emotional connection. Once his big, intense feelings have settled, bring in the logical, linear left brain. Now you can offer discipline (which means teaching or a lesson, not punishment) and help him form a coherent story of the upsetting event.

In my practice, I often recommend books to parents as I think they are useful tools for normalizing our experiences and giving us strategies to work with. This one is not just a recommendation. It’s a MUST! Siegel and Bryson have given us such an accessible, hands on tool for helping kids through difficult times and, for those of you more left-brain types—it’s backed by neuroscience! What more can a parent ask for?

My Child is Driving Me Crazy!!!

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You know those times when your child does something—something s/he does on a regular basis—that drives you absolutely batty? You’re frustrated and angry for reasons that you yourself can’t even understand. You want to yell, throw something, run away, shut down. Maybe you actually do one or all of these things. You react in ways that you later question or regret, but in the moment you were overwhelmed by the need to let your child know how out of line s/he was? Want to know what’s really going on and how you can stop it from happening? Read on…

If you have found yourself acting or reacting in ways described in the first paragraph, you were probably acting from a place of fear, triggered by an unresolved issue from your own childhood. Most likely as a child you had an experience that left you feeling extremely overwhelmed, helpless, sad, terrified. Now that you are an adult, having never fully resolved the terror or grief you experienced as a child, seemingly unrelated experiences can unexpectedly re-elicit those feelings within you. As an unconscious process, we usually don’t realize that this is what is going on, thus projecting the feelings (through blame) on outside sources. Being triggered in this way takes away our ability to act rationally and calmly. It keeps us from being present in our relationships, causing us to act according to old patterns and wounds (typically unrelated to anything our child has done in the moment).

Fortunately, there is a way out. We can learn to heal ourselves in order to repair the relationship with our children in those moments. It starts with understanding and empathy towards ourselves. In his book, Parenting from the Inside Out, Daniel Siegel says, “If we pay attention to our own internal experiences when we are feeling upset by our children’s behavior we can begin to learn how our actions interfere with the loving relationship we want to have with our children. With resolution of our own issues comes greater choice and flexibility in how we respond to our children.” (Siegel, 28)

Try the following exercise and see what comes up for you. You may be surprised to realize that what is driving your reactions isn’t really related to your child’s behavior.

Take out a journal and start to reflect on an issue that is impairing your ability to connect flexibly with your child. Focus on the past, present and future aspects of this issue. Do the themes or general patterns come to mind from past interactions? Do the themes or patterns feel old? How old do they feel? What are the feelings associated with these experiences? Are there other times when you have experienced these feelings? Are there elements of your past that may contribute to them? How do these themes and emotions influence your sense of self and your connections with your child? How do they shape your anticipation of the future? (Adapted from Daniel Siegel, Parenting from the Inside Out)

Children are our greatest teachers, bringing us in touch with the deepest parts of ourselves. Through our relationships with children, we get to know our own inner child. If we are open to this experience, there is space for great healing and growth, fostering more close and connected relationships.

Remember that with awareness, acceptance, self-empathy, self-care, and doing your own “work”, you can heal your unresolved issues and develop a connection with your child that allows you to be present and authentic, responding from a place of openness and compassion towards your child and towards yourself.