Why is My Child So Dramatic

Transcription:

Welcome back guys to another episode of The Unscrew You podcast. If I haven't said this in a while, let me just start by saying, I'm so grateful to you, if you are a new or a regular listener to this podcast, this podcast is one of my biggest passions. I love this platform. I love having deeper, longer conversations with you guys. And I also am so appreciative of the feedback I receive on the podcast, you guys DM me, you tell me what you thought you asked me for specific episodes. And it really warms my heart to have this kind of connection with my audience. So if you're new here, or if you've been here for a while, first of all, thank you. Second, feel free to reach out to me, let me know what speaks to you let me know what topics you want me to cover. Maybe you want to suggest a guest. It's all you know, I'm happy love, love, love hearing from my listeners.

So with that said, today's episode is about over reactivity in your children. Have you had the experience? Or have you noticed that sometimes your child overreact to something and it feels like why did they explode over this thing, even if it was something genuinely, you know, disruptive or genuinely problematic, but their reaction still doesn't match the size of the problem. And in particular, I've seen this come up in families where children were experiencing, let's say, I won't say bullying but meanness, meanness from a fellow child, a classmate appear.

And instead of kind of seeing it for what it is, they sort of quote unquote, blew it out of proportion and said that they were being bullied or said that they were being you know, that that child hated them. In general, we often are witnesses to our children kind of really what we would call exaggerating situations. And I want to kind of unpack that a little bit. Because first of all, we have to remember that children, especially young children, when they're immature, they do tend to see things in very black and white, that's a very immature stance, it's an immature approach it immature because it's very, quote unquote, primitive, it is survival based, safe, or not safe. That's the only thing our children are gauging. It's very binary. Whereas as adults, we understand that there's a much more nuance in the world and in relationships.

So not everything is life or death as an adult. Even though as a side note, I will say we oftentimes still operate from that place, because it's conditioned in us. That's a topic for another episode. But when it comes to our children, they genuinely just don't have the maturity, the nervous system development, the brain development, the experience, to see nuance. So everything is categorized good or bad, black or white. In that world, that is very black and white, our children oftentimes tend to kind of it sounds like they exaggerate. And it really, the first place I want you to take you to when it comes to this is I want you to understand, they're not exaggerating, because they're dramatic.

They're not exaggerating, because they're looking for attention. They're exaggerating, because they genuinely do not have the sophistication to see the nuance the gray in the world. So everything is either good or bad. And if it's bad, it's very bad. So if you have a kid who says they are being bullied, and if you were bullied, you would probably have a big reaction to that, right that that makes sense, then to have a big reaction to the perception that you are being bullied. But then it might also spill over into other experiences where you were your child where you notice your child reacting in a way that you might catch the you might label as over the top.

So for example, if your child has this kind of perception that they're being, let's say they're being bullied at school, or that their friends hate them, or that they are the dumbest kid in the class, how many of you have had that experience? I've definitely heard my own children telling me they are the dumbest children in the class, which I know is not a fact. It's not a fact. And I'm sure you guys know that too about your children. But this is the very primitive categorization of an immature brain to see things in black and white like that.

So when that happens, you might also notice that you your child asks you A question and let's say, you don't quite understand the question you give some kind of answer that wasn't sufficient wasn't what they were expecting. And then they completely blow up on you. Right? They're there every, it seems like every reaction they have is just so over the top. If that's you, that's the thing I want to talk about today. Because you might realize that your child is having a hard time in certain circumstances, but then it might feel like, why are they then also just blowing everything out of proportion?

Why are they being so dramatic over every little thing. So that might be how it shows up in a fairly young kid, I would say like, let's say, an elementary age children. If you have a child that's a little bit older, maybe a preteen, or a teen, it might look like it will look different, right? It might look like you notice your child using. I don't know if you guys have already have children at that age. But the vast majority of schools in the United States, children have personal iPads, Chromebooks, some some pieces of technology, you might notice that your child is using screens, and oftentimes by the time they're preteen and teens, they have a phone, using screens to suit themselves.

Maybe they're using those screens at home, maybe they're even using those screens at school. Either way, it becomes highly dysfunctional very quickly, right. Because if your child cannot tear themselves away from the screen, something's up right then it snowballs into a million other things that your child shouldn't be doing, but isn't doing. That might be a way that your child's overreaction shows up. That is the extreme that shows up. So rather than the child who explodes, it is the child who withdraws, withdraws into themselves glued on the screen, why I'm bringing up these two seemingly opposed reactions, because I want you to understand they are the same reaction in a different dress, the child who explodes over every little thing.

And the child who completely withdraws, burying themselves in a screen. These two children are having the same emotional experience, it's or rather, the root cause is the same for both of these children. It's just that their coping mechanism is different. So what is actually going on here? It's not that the explosive child or the withdrawn child are having an overreaction so much as they are already at their threshold of being triggered. And they cannot tolerate even one little thing. So they're already out there extreme. How many of you have ever felt that way? How many of you have raise your hand, nobody's gonna see it's a, it's a podcast, right?

You're with yourself, maybe you're with someone in the car, be brave. And raise your hand. If you've ever been in this situation where you just can't take one more thing, right, it's the straw that broke the camel's back. And if you've noticed your child like that, then every small minor thing throws them into an entire giant reaction. They cannot get away from their own triggered state because their children and they don't know how to do it. And they simply cannot.

And because of that, they will they use a coping mechanism. So for the teen, the easy thing, the most common coping mechanism for every teen is to withdraw into a screen. That's the most common and available and accessible coping mechanism. And for young children who are not yet don't have their own screens, some of them the most common coping mechanism is outbursts, melting down, right, this is, this is how it starts even in toddlerhood, this is why we melt down because we don't have there's a huge gap between what we're experiencing and what we're capable of understanding about ourselves emotionally. It goes back to what we talked about every single episode, almost regulation, it goes back to not being able to regulate ourselves. So what happens when we can't regulate ourselves and it becomes chronic, we become chronically dysregulated, then a every little thing will trigger us to the point of have a full blown reaction and we're going to start adopting coping mechanisms and we become habituated into these coping mechanisms and And certainly when it comes to screens that are by design addictive, then obviously then then it's a perfect storm, so to speak.

So, what to do, right? What do you do? First of all, you have to raise your awareness and become aware of this is actually what's happening in your family. And if it is, you have to work on your own, or with a professional on finding the ways to regulate yourself and your child. And when I say regulate, I don't just mean in those moments when your child exploded, or what in those moments when it was really hard to pry the screen out of your child's hand, I mean, regulating in the bigger sense, how do you create an environment that is conducive to regulation for you in your home, and for your child, and if that sounds like way too big of a project, like something that is completely out of your wheelhouse? A I want you to know, I understand. And B, I want you to start either educating yourself on what is regulation, and how does it happen in your nervous system. And B, you have to start exploring the ways in which you yourself regulate it starts with you. It's not just about your child, because when you when you know how to regulate, you can also show your child how to do that.

And many kids, I will say, are learning about regulation in public school. So they already have a leg up on us because we're adults learning then learn together, learn alongside your child make it an opportunity for you guys to connect these situations that our children are in at school, whether it's friends being mean to them at school, or being unsuccessful, academically, whatever it is, right? These are the situations that our children are in, they need us to be their allies, they need us to be an ally to their experience, right? Because if we can't ally with them to understand the fears, and the reason why they react with aggression, or with withdrawal, who's going to be their ally?

If we are the ones who judge them? What kind of voice or what kind of inner voice or they're going to develop into their adulthood? Maybe you can think back? What are the things your parents said to you that have now become your inner voice, and think about what kind of things you want to say to your child, how you want to approach them in order for them to grow up with that inner voice, right. But these situations that our children find themselves in, these are really the breeding ground. This is the breeding ground for how our children are going to talk to themselves and treat themselves when they are grown men and women.

So are they going to learn that their explosive anger needs to be compartmentalized and shut down? Are they going to learn that they are bad? Because they've been labeled, quote unquote, difficult or explosive or unpredictable? Because there was no adult in their lives that believed unconditionally in their goodness? Or are they going to learn that anger is a feeling like every feeling and they need to learn how to feel it and they need to learn how to express it without hurting things or hurting people. So when it comes to these overblown overreactions on the part of our children, we have to ask ourselves, what example are we laying for them? How do we respond in these situations, right, because every human being experiences big feelings, it's so natural, all the feelings are justified, by the way. And reactions are often mostly are a mandatory result of a feeling. So if a child feels threatened, their nervous system has to fight back. It has to it's mandated.

It's mandated in a place in your brain that is so primitive and so old, and so deep, that there is no way to intercept that. So if you feel you're under threat, you are going to react, and you're going to react in one of four ways. That's it, you're either going to fight back, that's the explosive kid, you're going to run away. You're going to freeze. That's the withdrawn kid who just goes in tunnels in or you're going to people please. So the question is never Why does my child overreact? The question is, why is my child under the impression that they are threatened? What is it that my child experiences as a life or death threat and how can I help them navigate that? So because this is a thing that becomes, yes, it becomes a habit.

And also we become kind of like hair triggered. So that when we have chronic dysregulation in our lives, whether we're kids or adults, our triggers become hair triggers, every little thing triggers us. So if this is what you're seeing with your child, I want you to start asking yourselves better questions as parents so that you can help your child. Let me know if this was helpful to you. But to recap, what we're talking about in this episode is, what do I do with my child over reactivity. Either they're completely explosive, and just, you know, exploding over every little thing, or they are so addicted to their screens, that it's impossible to pry it out of their fingers out of their hands. And we said that both of those situations even though on the outside, they seem different, but really on the inside, they're much they're very, very similar because they speak to a chronic dysregulation. And as it comes to regulation, we talked about the fact that our children are simply not sophisticated enough to tell the nuanced differences in social cues and social situations.

So everything is either categorized as safe, or unsafe to them. And as such, it's a life or death thing, even though from our perspective as adults, it's really not a life or death thing. So if this is something you want help with in your family, I would encourage you to reach out or check out my secret podcast link to it is in the show notes for this episode, or check out my bio @rachelduffyhere on Instagram. As always, I want to thank you again for being a listener of the podcast and I will see you on another episode.