9:18 a.m. - 2008-05-20
grrr
First of all, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my mother. I hope I'm a lot like her when I'm 59.
Well the honeymoon is over. I'm not talking about my marriage - I'm talking about my little 4 year old client with autism. My first week with him, everyone raved about how good he was with me - he paid attention, did every activity I put in front of him, never threw a single tantrum. His mother practically wept with gratitude. While there was a small, egotistical part of me saying "well, of course...I'm awesome.", there was a larger part of me that I verbalized saying "I wouldn't bet on this lasting - he might just like me because I'm new." Well, I was right. The novelty of me has worn off.
Last night there was screaming bloody murder at the tiniest things. He threw a fit about everything - had a total meltdown when his little brother went outside for about 12 seconds while his dad took the trash out. He was in complete, utter anguish, crying and shaking and yelling "WHY???? WHERE. IS. HEEEEEEE?????????" And then "I NEED A BREAK. I NEEEEEED. A. BREAK!!!!" Ok, ok. Breaktime. Believe me, I needed a break too.
I got through this and got him back on task with the promise of stickers. Oh, he loves stickers. Stickers are my new secret weapon.
After all of this, his mom was really apologetic and told me he had had a lot of sugar that day and some gross processed snack with a lot of red dye in it that may or may not exacerbate certain behaviors in little ones with autism. Hmm. Thanks.
So that happened. And we also had a committee meeting during which I got deeply annoyed - I won't go into the details of why because they won't make sense to anyone but me, but I will confess that what was said caused me to do this thing that I hate, that I always feel bad about later, where I shut down and inadvertently make every sensitive person in the room feel like an ice storm has frozen over everything. Why can't I be like one of you wonderful introverted people who can fade into the background unnoticed at will, like when you're mad but you don't want to cause a scene or you're just not ready to deal with it. I'd like the freedom to be secretly mad sometimes! I know plenty of people who hardly ever speak and rarely smile in large group meetings. No one notices - everyone thinks you're in your own brilliant little world solving the problem of global warming or something. But the second I stop chattering and smiling, everyone is like "Oh crap. What's wrong?"
Mostly, I later decide I shouldn't have felt so mad in the first place, but now I've created another issue by making others feel uncomfortable. Then I wonder if I need to revisit the situation and go to those people and apologize for this ambiguous thing, which will involve getting into the thing I didn't want to talk about in the first place and is probably stupid anyway.
It's usually because I'm having a selfish reaction to something but the rational part of my brain says it's not justified to feel that way while the other part of me feels wounded and angry. If I voice it I will sound like a self-centered baby - but I can't help feeling like that in the moment.
What is a good strategy for dealing with this? This sort of thing happens with less frequency than it did 10 years ago - chalk it up to growing up and getting my priorities straightened out a bit and understanding that 99% of the time when someone says something that bugs you it can be dealt with one of two ways - 1. deciding they didn't mean it that way or didn't realize it would hurt you and 2. Call them out on it right there. But there are those occasional, paralyzing moments where the situation doesn't fit into one of those categories or it's compounded by other issues - stress, hurt feelings from something else, aka a low "immune system" against these things.
Got a good way of dealing with this? Email me.
