A Tiny Taste of Therapy

After I met with Sunshine’s Psychologist, we determined that when we first started we pushed too much at her at one time. Upon her first visit with him he spent almost an entire hour with her one on one, playing games and talking. His first and foremost rule for the child is that if they need their parent at anytime they just need to say so. For Sunshine though this would have meant a weakness to ask for me, so instead of speaking up she endured the panic attack that she was going through. Upon our second visit which was with Papa, myself and her, she was in a panic attack even before we went into his office. When he didn’t pick up on what was truly going on he suggested some ideas to use here in the home that actually made her anxieties worse. She began to do things that made us believe she was truly trying to tell us how she felt. Let’s just say it was not a pretty few days in our home, she was angry, trying to get us to listen to her nonverbal cues, and not understanding why we were not catching on.

Now we feel we have a system in place which will allow us to take smaller steps with her, move a little slower while exposing her to these things that cause such anxieties for her, but most important a way to communicate her feelings so we can then come and talk about them in a more appropriate manner. One of the first things we did was have Sunshine create her own Feelings Chart. She came up with the design and decided what colors would represent the different feelings on her own. All I did was draw the circles for her.

The larger the circle the more intense the feeling is. We also decided that it is alright for her to feel more then one feeling at a time. Does she use it, oh yes you bet she does, it is nothing for her to go directly to it and let you know how she is feeling.

The other part was to have Sunshine respond to our requests with only one verbal cue from us. She must respond the first time we ask her to stop doing something or to do something. If she doesn’t there are no chances to respond, she looses a privilege. These privileges can be anything from loosing a toy she might be playing inappropriately with to her TV or Computer time. She has to have a consequence of some sort. Then she has the right to earn her privileges back. We  brainstormed on how this would look. While the Psychologist gave me several ideas, I again wanted it to be something that Sunshine worked on with me.

We chose to use all the bottle caps we have saved for math over the years. When she responds the first time we ask of her she earns a bottle cap which she picks out and places in the pretty jar with the purple lid. When she has earned 5 bottle caps she then receives the privilege back. For instance right now she is trying to earn a couple of toys, her TV time and her Computer time back. We get to choose what she will earn back. She understands that just because she earns 5 caps does not necessarily mean she will get back what she wants, but what we choose to allow her to have. She is thrilled right now because she only has one more to earn to reap her reward. It is our hope that as we move on she will lose less privileges, and be able to earn things like craft kits, small toys, and books. Over time this will become a habit of responding when first asked and we will no longer need this tool to help her.

Our visits will change now with the Psychologist to be a family session where we will be able to talk about the things Sunshine is feeling anxious over or what bothers her. She will still have the opportunity to spend 5 to 10 minutes with him alone to play a fun game and build from there the amount of time she is able to tolerate. It is important that she is pushed to some point to do the things that causes anxieties but we do not want to push to hard to the point of panic attacks.