I’ve been writing as a coping mechanism since I was a kid.  When I started this journey with Girly keeping a journal seemed natural.  I could just dump out feelings, form them into sentences, organize my thoughts and the journal ended up paying off in ways I didn’t expect.

1. Keeping a journal helped me identify another trigger time of year I wasn’t aware of. 
2. It helped me identify several general triggers I wasn’t aware of.
3. It helped me get a successful medication tweak.
4. It was proof when proof was needed.
5. It helped remind me that triggers and trigger times of year pass.
6. It proved that things in some areas actually got better. 
7. It helped me identify what did and didn’t work.
8. Quantify what “better” looks like. 

At first the Girly journal started as a rambling mess but over time, it became more of a hub for documentation.  I would mention specific behaviors or occurrences (like suspensions, chopping off chunks of hair, peeing in weird places, sleep patterns, side-effects from medicine).  There were times I didn’t write much at all which told me things were going pretty well during that time.  I did try to be consistent with journaling but eh.  I found a compromise which I talk about at the end of the post.

I had about four or five years of journaling when I went through it making a chart to narrow down when certain behaviors were happening the most.  I knew early on her birthday was a major trigger time of year but I didn’t know things were just about as bad in Spring.  There didn’t seem to be any sort of specific “thing” that I could identify.  At first I assumed it was Easter but that wasn’t the case.  I looked closer at the weather patterns for each year.  I compared them to my chart.  I felt there was a direct correlation between behaviors and the weather.  An early Spring meant February or March was hell.  A late Spring meant May was hell.  A typical Spring and April was hell.  I have heard changes in seasons can be dyregulating for kids that hate change but I decided to keep digging.  I discovered she went through her first removal in Spring.  That particular month in that particular year she was first removed Spring was full on soggy.  It had been for weeks so whatever happened leading up to the removal was probably not all that pleasant for her thus, I concluded, the weather changing to Spring was a trigger.  Years when Spring sped by quickly and wasn’t particularly soggy were much better than the long, wet dreary Springs that happened during other years.  A long Winter has always been optimal. 

As I mentioned, her birthday was always a particularly bad trigger.  (She associates her birthday with sexual assault but even beyond that, birthdays are usually pretty triggering for these kids even if there’s no specific trauma around them).  I always see aggression, regression, predatory sexual behavior, etc. leading up to the birthday. 

Therapist: Keep the birthday low-key.

I did formulate a plan to make her birthdays less triggering but other adults struggled to follow my lead.  I understand the desire to make things special for a little child that’s lost so much but at some juncture, adults with fully formed brains and a plethora of life experiences to draw from need to recognize when their own desires are causing trouble.  I didn’t want Girly to always hate her birthday, to regress and self-harm, to attack other children, to pee in the heater vents.  I sincerely don’t think she wanted any of that either.  After a couple of years, Girly started to recognize when her birthday was approaching. 

Girly [lamenting]:  You know what’s coming up. 

Me:  Yes, I do.  This year, your birthday is on Wednesday.  We are going to have a cake, open presents,  X, Y and Z will be there and once Wednesday is over, your birthday is over.  We are keeping it low key and then we can forget all about it until next year.   We are going to zip through it and it is going to be okay.  I promise.

The more low-key the birthday was, the easier it was to deal with.  But, again, other adults resisted my suggestions and would insist on extra people.  Or, make too big a deal of things.  Too many gifts.  Trying to push the “celebration” to the weekend after her birthday to accommodate others.   I specifically said no decorations, they didn’t listen.  The traditional birthday song was the first clue I had that something was up with the birthday.  We’d start to sign and Girly would literally melt-down.  Bawling.  Those first few notes were enough to trigger something major. 

Us:  Haaaappy birthdaaaaay toooooo…

Girly [tears, genuine deep sadness, wailing, covering her ears]

We eventually started singing other songs; Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, one year we all did the Starwars theme song “da daaaa da da da DAAAA daaaa…”, eventually a new birthday song popped up on that Sprout channel, “Happy happy birthday to you, happy happy BIRTHday to you!”.  One year, we didn’t sign anything.  I asked her if she wanted to skip singing, she did.   One year she wanted to try the traditional birthday song, she cried.  She tried so hard to make it through it too. 

Some adults resisted abandoning the song.  They would push for the traditional birthday song so I had to show out and look like an asshole.  Oh well.  It isn’t Girly’s fault some adults with fully formed brains are incapable of learning or following basic instructions.  I’m not going to going to let adults harass her with a song ON her own damn birthday.  I had to get ahead of this everywhere too, not just in the family.  When I told teachers not to make a big deal about her birthday and definitely do NOT sign the birthday song, they thought I was being punitive.  They felt bad for the little girl who’d lost so much. 

Yeah, well, if you don’t heed my warning you’re going to be removing a pencil from someone’s eye so pay attention.   I’m not saying just flat out ignore her on her birthday, I’m saying keep things chill.  And, whatever you do, do NOT sign that birthday song.

It was bad enough I couldn’t control people singing the birthday song in other situations but if I asked it to not be sang for HER birthday, I just don’t understand why so many people had a problem with that request.  It really illustrates how difficult it can be for some people to see an experience from another perspective.  I still have to deal with the adults every year that simply can’t process a big party is a mess for Girly.  THEY want a celebration and they just don’t seem to be able to see it isn’t going to be the great time they think it will be.   

The end of the year holiday season is also always very dysregulating.  I’m in a group full of parents and caregivers raising traumatized kids.  There are specific times the group dies down and there are other times it comes roaring to life with vengeance.  September (when school starts) is one of those times.  End of the school year is another.  As the holidays approach, it’s full on chaos.  The adults are stressed to the max trying to make everything “special” and “festive”.  The kids are melting down and often exhibiting the worst behaviors, often doing things that they weren’t doing a few months earlier.  It really screws up what “better” looks like in your own head. It’s a hard turn to make when you think a behavior is resolved and it comes roaring back to life – during a time that’s supposed to be full of FESTIVE CHEER and FUN. 

Let’s be real; holidays can be very stressful.  They can be expensive.  They are not the typical schedule.  Adults are being pulled in a variety of directions.  School will be out for a couple of weeks, there’s a tree that needs to be put up, big meals need to be prepared or there’s a visit to another place for a big meal.  Family gets together.  Festive food and cookies and treats are made.  Decorations.  School parties.  There’s presents that need to be bought and wrapped.  The stores are crammed full of people so even if you just need milk you’re going to be stuck in the store for 30 minutes with holiday music blaring overhead.  If you’re religious, there’s a whole other layer of the holiday season that comes into play.  If your kids are young, you might do the magical Santa thing where some random guy, that’s been watching you all year, is going to break into your house and leave stuff behind.   This new Elf on the Shelf nonsense.  The classroom had an Elf on the Shelf.  Girly touched the magical elf and upset everyone.  I got a phone call. 

Expectations are at an all-time high.     

Holidays.  Are.  Dysregulating. 

They are dyrgulating for adults and they are DEFINITELY dysregulating for kids with a trauma history.  The expectation of happiness can be damn near unbearable. 

So, what happens?  The threats start. 

Adults:  If you don’t stop doing X, you’re getting coal for Christmas! 

Early in my journey with Girly, things were rough, especially at school.  I remember a particularly difficult holiday season when she was in trouble — a lot.  She was particularly pokey one day so I began the regular (and exhausting) mining expedition into her head to figure out what was going on. 

An exasperated teacher’s aide told her if she wasn’t good, Santa wouldn’t bring her anything except a lump of coal.

Being “good” wasn’t on the menu back then.  Girly knew she couldn’t pull that off so she quickly resigned herself to getting coal for Christmas.  I don’t think she even knew what coal was but she definitely knew it wasn’t good.

A couple of my co-workers and I penned a simple letter to Girly from Santa.  (She came to me believing in Santa and I was never really sure how to deal with it, I personally don’t like the whole Santa thing which I’m aware is a big problem for some people).  I put it in an envelope and snuck it into the mailbox.  I still have the letter somewhere.   I pulled up to the mailbox, pulled out the mail.  “This is addressed to you!” I handed it to her.  She looked at it without opening it.  I can still picture her sitting in the passenger seat looking at the envelope with a blank expression.  She’d never gotten a letter before so I assumed she was trying to figure out who it was from, what it was — but now I know she very likely assumed it was something awful.  It was unknown and anything unknown was always bad. 

I encouraged her to open it.  Or, maybe she asked me to open it.  She couldn’t read at the time.  The letter had a few cheery graphics on it and the gist was that she was definitely not getting coal for Christmas.  I think there was something about Santa wishing adults would stop saying the “lump of coal” thing.

I don’t remember what her response was.  I do remember she was VERY suspicious.  Back then, anything seemingly good wasn’t to be trusted.  Everyone wants good things but if you’re conditioned to lose everything good because you can’t do anything right, you associate good with loss and failure.  Better to want nothing.  It’s safer.  Getting something good immediately triggers feelings of loss.  It’s a tricky mess to navigate. 

Once Christmas starts getting closer, the kids start reaching their breaking point.  The adults end up triggered and don’t have enough emotional resilience built up.  It spirals out of control. 

I totally understand the frustration and I can’t say I haven’t wallowed in holiday hell myself so I do understand the natural gravitation to “taking things away to correct behavior” and protecting myself. It is hard to remember she isn’t choosing the behavior (neither are we, the adults, it’s old wiring). She is trying to protect herself (as are we, the adults).  She hates surprises (no one likes to be sucker punched).  It’s exhausting for her trying to be ready for the bottom to fall out all the time (as it is for us, the adults). 

But. Girly didn’t create the holidays. She didn’t ask for them to exist. She wants to like them but she can’t trust them. If I’m flying off the handle because I’m overwhelmed, I don’t deserve to be trusted. If I’m threatening to return her toys or give them to another kid, I’m the asshole. She can’t help how she feels about all of it, but I have a fully formed brain with a plethora of life experiences to draw from. It is my job to make things “better” but it isn’t always easy to know what “better” even looks like. Sure, it’s ideal to get compliance from a kid like Girly but if it isn’t going to happen, it’s my job to wake the hell up and get a relationship with reality going.

I dumped the Santa thing (but really pressured her to NOT tell little kids he wasn’t real – there were troubles with this) and told her what she was getting for Christmas. Once I erased all the “surprises”,  Christmas was miles better.  I let her have choices about where decorations would go. Or, if they went up at all. I stuck up for her and explained to her where her behavior was coming from. I was honest about my stress levels and tried to manage my expectations. I gave her some space to lose it without threats of throwing presents away or resenting her for not being appreciative (for a bunch of a shit she didn’t even ask for). I explained how brain chemicals work. You know the let down after all the presents are opened? I told her ahead of time it would happen. She wasn’t being ungrateful, her brain chemicals were subsiding after she opened everything – that’s all.

That can be a painful, dysregulating experience. Brain chemicals are powerful. When the good ones start to subside, it’s hard to let it go. It’s hard to feel them slipping away.

One year we had a huge ice storm and the power was knocked out in my area a day or two before Christmas.  It was cold but we have a fireplace and all that.  My sister got me some Christmas lights that were battery powered.  I moved a mattress into the family room near the fireplace.  We hunkered down on Christmas eve.  Once she was asleep, I moved all the presents into the room.  As I was getting into bed, the mattress wiggled and she woke up.  I tried to pretend to be asleep.  Out of my slitted eyes I could see her looking at the tree and back to me.  I tried to figure out what to do.

I tried to get her to go back to sleep – that wasn’t happening. 

Girly:  Emmy, Santa came.

Me [groggy]:  No, it’s too early. 

We got up.  I told her she could open ONE present.   I ended up letting her open all of them.  I just couldn’t justify fighting about it.  And it was absolutely fine.  In the morning, she played with her new toys.  No surprises.  We ended up at a hotel with a pool for a couple of days until the power came back on. 

Overall, it was the best Christmas ever.  Being camped out in the family room together, roughing it.  The hotel.  The not having to go to any celebrations at anyone’s house.  It was totally off-book, flying by the seat of our pants, taking things as they came and just rolling with it.  If I’d been strict about following Christmas protocol, it would have been a nightmare but I let it go and just rolled with it.  (And this was before I was trauma trained so training isn’t necessary to accomplish a lot of good things!). 

Since I primarily wrote in the journal heavily when things were at their worst, it gave me a pretty good roadmap I was able to use later on.  Once I was able to identify different triggers, I could brace for them and get ahead of them.  I could warn Girly what was coming up, not to rattle her, to give her come control.  Get some hacks in place.  Get some explanation for her increasing anxiety.  I could carve out some resilience to deal with the bottom falling out instead of being sucker punched. 

When a new medication would start, I could compare side-effects.  I preferred to start a new medication in early Summer or late Spring when behavioral issues were less of an issue (something I knew because of the journal).  When I knew a medication wasn’t working, I was able to draw up a chart to prove it.  I applied this same approach when I removed dyes and refined sugar from her diet, when I introduced different types of sensory tools.  It’s hard to know what “better” looks like if you don’t have a baseline. 

It’s kind of funny how much trouble I had identifying what “better” looked like without the journal.  It was a crucial piece of information though and without the journal, I’d of missed a lot of successes. 

It doesn’t need to be proper journal either.  I made a monthly chart (I still do) and gave days a rating from 1-10.  If a bunch of days in a row were 3, the journal could help me identify what the issue was but even without the journal, after a while, those dots alone told a story.  If you keep a little chart like that for a year, patterns were emerge.  This was how I managed to diagnose myself with PMSD when I was in my late 20’s.  That little chart proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, three days before my period every month was a nightmare.  Knowing that meant I had power over it.  The same concept applied to my life with Girly later on.  I carry around a little notepad with me and I slap a dot on it every couple of days or so.  If I feel like I need to fill in some blanks, I go back through my social media posts to see what sort of mood I was in and try to recall those days.  I’ve found memory to be somewhat misleading so I try not to rely on it too much for the journal.  One particularly bad week, I’d not updated the chart. It felt like I’d been in a hole for months.   Instead of just slapping a low number on all the prior days I’d missed, I went back through my social media posts.  There was irrefutable proof my memory was wrong.  I double checked the date on a post I’d made.  I had posted it four days earlier but it felt like I’d posted it over a month ago.  When I saw it, I totally remembered posting it and I was in a great mood that day.   

It was an important reminder to not rely on memory alone.  Sometimes things ARE better but we don’t realize it until we see proof.  Sometimes it helps to have proof behaviors are not as severe or are occurring less often.  Sometimes it helps to have proof that a particular behavior doesn’t even exist anymore and that a new one has taken its place.  Sometimes it helps to have proof an intervention is actually working – or to abandon one that isn’t. 

I personally get a kick out of being smacked in the face with this sort of thing because sometimes it is GREAT to be wrong.  And sometimes, you need to prove it.