Behavior Escalation

Good morning!

In my 25 years of being Tyler's dad, I have been far from perfect.  Like nearly all special needs parents, I was not mentally or emotionally prepared for the level of difficulty that Tyler's needs would present.  As with any stressful situation, this kind of adversity will expose your strengths and your weaknesses.

Tyler has challenging behaviors mostly due to his anxiety about things he cannot control. He also has space issues which can cause him to lash out.  It's hard, even as his dad who loves him heart and soul, to not take these behaviors personally.  Its hard to not become angry when he lashes out at his mom, or his sister, or anyone else.  My natural emotions don't always co-exist with his natural emotions because they come from two very different places.  What I feel is unacceptable is something he does out of his own necessity.  

Under most circumstances I could keep his behaviors in some sort of proper perspective.  I could rationalize, and then defuse the situation safely.  But I'm not a robot, no matter how much I wish I could be.  I have bad days just like everyone else.  So there were times that I reacted to his negative behavior with my own negative behavior.  There were times where I would yell instead of talking calmly, or I would sit him in timeout, grabbing him and placing him in his chair with added enthusiasm.  While I would never, ever, ever, physically do harm to Tyler, there were times where I would try to fight his anger with my own anger.

(I take no pride in writing any of this but I feel it is important to talk about even the ugly truths in order to gain understanding)

I have the perfect example of why I learned that going negative versus negative is such a bad idea.  One occasion Tyler had done something I found objectionable and for some reason it made me angry.  I decided to take Tyler by the arm, march him upstairs, and put him in bed for a timeout.  Somewhere between point A and point B he could feel the intensity of how angry I was and he went into a self defense mode.  By the time we reached his bed he had started to scratch and bite me, which he never did before.  Once he decided he needed to top my negative with his negative he put all of his strength toward me. Suddenly I was left trying to fend him off which was extremely difficult.  We finally got him, and I, settled down again and nobody was hurt.

It left me very shaken.  I knew I had contributed to the situation escalating beyond what it should have.  At that moment I vowed that I would never deal with his negative behavior with negative behavior of my own.  My goal needed to be to de-escalate at all costs, for his safety and everyone else's.  After that, we never experienced that level of anger again, and behavior situations were handled much better.

Again, none of us are robots, and we are imperfect emotional creatures.  Even during the best of times we make mistakes, but as special needs parents we deal with stress and exhaustion on top of "normal" challenges.  All of us can approach that tipping point.

This is what I think we must remember no matter what...we have to recognize that behavior escalation is a dangerous thing.  We have to have the self-awareness to know when we are vulnerable to using negative behavior.  And we have to counter aggressive or destructive behavior with cool and controlled behavior.  It sounds easier than it is to do, but if we start to think about this each and every time the negative behaviors begin, we can condition ourselves to think the right way.

Be well and God bless.    Tom