My daughter has been overreacting to situations lately. My husband and I have been trying to figure out how to best handle a situation in which, say my son pushes by his sister to get to the kitchen first. In these types of situations my daughter will cry like she’s wounded or mortally offended. Her reaction doesn’t seem to match the level of insult or injury she received.
I talked to Dhruti, Reese’s play therapist, about what we’d been observing and she gave me some great insight and advice on how we can help. The first thing she told me was that while we think my daughter is overreacting, our perception of the magnitude of the event isn’t the same as hers.
Let’s do a test first: take your right hand and cover up your right eye completely. Then squint your left eye so you can barely see out the eye. What you’re seeing right now is probably significant more visual information that she can see. Now that you’re limited in your vision, invite few boisterous children over and run around your house with them; see if you bump into anyone or anything without even knowing it or they were there.
That’s what’s happening to my daughter. She has zero peripheral vision on her right side and the rest of her vision is sketchy. Her right side is a complete blind spot. So when she gets bumped by her brother or runs into the tricycle she didn’t realized had been moved, her space has been intruded. Alarms go off in her head. She wasn’t prepared. She is in sensory distress from the unexpected contact. There could also be pain associated with the event. She feels threatened, violated and upset because she either didn’t know the contact was coming or she thinks she should have been able to prevent it.
All of this happening makes what seems like a non-event to us, a big deal to her. How do we handle it? Dhruti’s advice: say nothing. Be there for her and comfort her with a hug or an ice pack, but don’t talk about it in any way. She will work through it herself. Telling her to be more careful or to watch out for her brother is the wrong thing to do. It tells her she’s not capable of some things. It reminds her of her vision loss, something she is painfully aware of. Words of advice or warning are actuality interpreted as us judging her, and she doesn’t need that.
So now that we understand what’s happening in my daughter’s mind, we’ve been able to react to physical intrusion situations with her in a better way. Helping her like this over time should also extend into other areas, making her feel lest threatened when it comes to other, similar things in her live.
The Big Boy Update: We drove to my in-laws this afternoon. My son was asleep when we arrived and came into the house groggy. He knew there were toys in the basement and after eating a snack went downstairs to play with them. Grandpa came down to see my son who was met with, “I’m shy, go upstairs.” When Grandpa came down a bit later my son said, “when I’m over being shy I’ll come upstairs.”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter and I were rolling out cookie dough and stamping out cookies with Nana before dinner tonight. My daughter was having what I’d call one of her “bad days” vision-wise. She wasn’t easily able to see the dough or what any of the cookie cutter shapes were. At one point, Nana was across the room looking through a bag of other cookie cutters. The bag was plastic and was making crinkling sounds. My daughter suddenly said, “I want to pick a cookie cutter from the bag.” She is smart like that, using sounds to figure out what’s going on. She couldn’t see a bag across the kitchen, but she knows what a bag sounds like and knew Nana was looking through a collection of cookie cutters.
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