Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Kim Neely, and this is the trauma informed SLP.
[00:00:06] This is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment to build resiliency in everyone we know, including ourselves.
[00:00:20] Okay, so, hey, I'm doing a slightly more informal video here. This might be, it's geared really more toward actual speech language pathologists, this one. But I wanted to get a little better at doing like more casual videos that just deal with some topics that I see come up, like on the SLP subreddit and other social media things. So just kind of like my thoughts on certain issues. I don't have thoughts on all issues in our field, so. Cause, you know, I have my own little hyper focus lane. So most of this will be stuff about that. It might be interesting to parents of neurodivergence or adult neurodivergence themselves. It might be something of interest and something to like for me to get your input. It would be great. So on the SLP subreddit last night, I noticed this comment or this thread.
[00:01:11] Is that what they're called? Anyway, this post, I guess it's called a post. I think so by rainy day lover bee on buzzwords in our field. And I wanted it brought up something that I've been meaning to do in a video that I wanted to address anyway, so good time to try it. Let's give it a shot. And I'm going to read off part of it and I'll put some of it on the screen here, too. But they said, I truly believe in dysregulation. However, I feel that a lot of slps throw this word around for any kind of behavior. No, the artichoke kid is artic, meaning articulation isn't dysregulated because I said no candy during speech. We can't have it after they threw themselves on the ground crying because they are never told no. And this brought up something that I wanted to talk about anyway, which is, I agree, dysregulation is overused. It's overused not just in our field. It's overused on social media as well. It's kind of become the over generalization of therapy speak in general. I think it's one of those terms that gets used a lot. And in fact, if you go back to my dehumanization in science, I believe it was podcast episode. I had to edit and correct myself because I called myself dysregulated when actually what I was feeling was emotionally upset by the material. So that's what I wanted to kind of talk about is this difference between dysregulation and emotional upset, or, like, uncomfortable emotions, as I would want to call them, because they are different things. And I think this is a very good point that we need to address. There is also some other things in this. Like, along the thread, I saw some things like tantrum versus meltdown. And also somebody mentioned behavior is. Communication is like a generalization. You know, they don't like it. The all behavior is communicative theory and stuff. So I'm gonna actually address all three of these in this video, and hopefully I can do it well enough that I don't have to do a whole lot of editing. But if I get a little circuitous, forgive me, because the goal here is not to have to edit a ton the way I do for, like, the more formalized episodes that I've been putting out.
[00:03:23] In this article, they talk about what is dysregulation as a term, and the American Psychological association defines dysregulation as any excessive or otherwise poorly managed mechanism or response. Now, in the field of psychology, they go on to say, usually, emotional dysregulation is what's been studied the most and is really kind of focused on the most because it has a negative impact on well being overall and, like, quality of life and stuff. So that's why we're getting a lot of the term dysregulation in general across a lot of different fields. I feel like it's probably bled off of the work done in the psychology profession and, like, cognitive sciences and such. Okay, so, in this article, they go on to describe emotional dysregulation, and they include four main aspects of it by Graz and Roma. I'm gonna guess Roma in 2004, which is a lack of awareness, understanding, and acceptance of emotions, a lack of adaptive strategies for regulating emotions, an unwillingness to experience emotional distress while pursuing desired goals, and an inability to engage in goal directed behaviors when experiencing distress. So, those four aspects define emotional dysregulation.
[00:04:47] And they also referenced this one article by D'Agostino and colleagues from 2017 that suggested that examples of emotional dysregulation include avoidance, rumination, denial, emotional suppression, aggression, and venting. So they're behavioral strategies that essentially make certain emotions a little worse or maybe cause, um, unhealthy behaviors as ways of coping with those more uncomfortable emotions. Okay, so I kind of like, at the end of this article, they sum it all up as essentially saying emotions fluctuate, which is true. Emotions should fluctuate. There should be an ebb and a flow to our emotional state. But if you find yourself struggling with frequent, strong emotions, I'm quoting from the article again here, if you find yourself struggling with frequent, strong emotions that you can't seem to manage, you might be experiencing emotional dysregulation. Okay, so they do include negative emotions, is one of their quotes, which I don't actually like saying. Some people say negative or bad emotions and good or positive emotions. I've tried to train myself out of saying that because I don't like the idea of moralizing the type of emotion we're having. Cause the emotion themselves. It's just a reaction to something that happened or something someone said. It's natural for us to have that emotion. And if we want to be more accepting and validating of our emotional, like, ebb and flow, I feel like we should also be less moralizing of, like, certain emotions. But I do call some emotions uncomfortable and or, and or challenging. So what I mean by that is, if you look at the emotion wheel, emotions that are just either uncomfortable in your body to feel or just challenging to cope with. So these are the ones we would consider, like, the negative emotions. And they're not really negative. They're just tough. You know, the things like when you feel angry or sad or afraid of something or confused or frustrated or just disgusted about something, like these type of emotions, they just make you feel, ugh, right? They're like, bleh, yuck, feeling type of emotions. So they're just tough to go through. You know, they're still important. They're important to be able to acknowledge, it's important to be able to process them.
[00:07:10] And that's the issue where we get to dysregulation, because a lot of us are not given the tools or the strategies to actually recognize, to have that awareness of the emotion we're feeling, and then to actually have the tools, the strategies, the skill set necessary to process through that emotion and actually use it for really the purpose that, at least in a healthy, balanced mental health state, you could use that emotion as more of like a, huh, what happened? That made me so angry. Right. And I like how I believe it's destiny Ann. And I think she's on TikTok, but she's also on Instagram. And I follow her there where she did this great video. I think now it's at least three years old. It's probably older. My brain thinks three years, which means it might be, like ten years old by now, for all I know, because that's how my sense of time passing works. But she did that great video on, like, your anger is trying to tell you something. Like, a boundary has been crossed or somebody stepped over the line. And, like, the job is to process that anger and try to use it to inform you about what happened, but not to vilify that anger.
[00:08:16] I don't like the moralization of emotions as good or bad, because if we start saying they're bad or they're negative, then I feel like that naturally leads to a tendency to want to avoid them. If you feel these bad emotions, it makes you a bad person, and that's not really the case at all. The truth is, if you feel challenging emotions, you're having challenging emotions, and you're human, and that's okay. This gets at that idea of emotional validation versus validating behaviors, right? So, like, a lot of people don't like that idea of, like, all emotions are valid, and people are like, that's not really true. And it's like, I think what people are really getting at when they talk about that is that the emotions are valid. Yes. You can have whatever emotion you need to have. What is not valid is using your emotion as an excuse to mistreat somebody else or harm someone else or even harm yourself. Right. The idea is, essentially, you can have an emotion that's fine, feel what you feel, but then you need to have awareness and the ability to process through that emotion so that then you don't just reactively behave off of that emotion. It gets at that. Like, it can be an explanation, but it's not an excuse for mistreatment of others or causing harm to others, or ideally also not yourself either. Like, it would be great to have more healthy ways of processing this stuff right now. I think dysregulation comes about a lot. Obviously trauma. There have been researchers that have said, essentially, just like, nervous system autonomic dysregulation is a really key symptom of PTSD. Actually, formerly diagnosed PTSD. What I mean by that is essentially in the trauma literature, dysregulation tends to be, your survival modes are getting activated a lot faster and a lot more intense and kind of hangs on a lot longer than they necessarily should. It usually leads to a decrease in awareness of what's going on, at least for your higher cortical thinking, conscious area of your brain. It doesn't really exactly know why you're being thrown into such a survival mode, such a major upheaval with the adrenaline and all of that stuff pumping through you.
[00:10:27] So that's from the trauma literature, is that the idea is the emotional memory, the subconscious emotional memory is getting triggered because of a past threat. It is now being triggered in the presence of anything that's even slightly reminding that emotional circuitry, that memory of that threat. And so it's kind of interpreting, it's like overgeneralizing, over interpreting everything as a threat, essentially, even if it's just a little bit related. Right. This gets the idea of, like, classic example being veterans who've been in a war zone being triggered by 4 July fireworks because they sound like gunshots and or bombs going off, right. And so their conscious brain knows they're not in a war zone anymore. And this is a holiday where there's a lot of fireworks, and that's just a natural thing that happens and it's normal and you're safe. But their system, their nervous system, and their, like, their amygdala area of their brain and their sympathetic fight, flight, or freeze response in their body is very highly activated because that emotional memory is saying, this is potentially dangerous. These sounds sound like a threat, right? So that's the idea behind dysregulation. When it comes to trauma literature, I think you can have emotional dysregulation as well if you're doing a lot of avoidance behaviors. I don't know which one is chicken or egg here because I do think at least in certain, or I guess in mainstream, I guess, american culture in the United States, a lot of people are taught to avoid or suppress these emotions. You know, a lot of people are taught, like, it's not good to feel that anger or that fear or whatever, right. We're taught to either push through it or ignore it and not really given time or space to process those emotions. And so I think that's where we get into that issue. So let's apply this, now that we sort of described this, let me apply this a little bit to the situation that this SLP was talking about, which was the case of a kid in therapy who was having an issue was being told, no, they can't have candy.
[00:12:29] In this thread on Reddit, what they were talking about is this kid who essentially threw what people would call a tantrum, like kicking and screaming and crying on the floor because they got told they can't have candy in their speech session.
[00:12:45] And basically the kid was told they have to wait for it. They can have the candy after. They just can't have it right now. And the kid, like, threw a huge fit about that. Okay. And people were saying, oh, this kid is just dysregulated. We gotta calm them down. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that got into this discussion of a tantrum versus a meltdown, which is a really important thing to talk about when it comes to emotional comfort, like, whether it's like an emotional upset or if we're talking about dysregulation, because meltdowns are definitely from a dysregulation, like a complete loss of control, a loss of awareness, awareness of what's going on. Like, I have meltdowns and anxiety attacks, so I definitely know what it's like to have those things. And it really is a true disconnect going on there.
[00:13:28] Now, the thing about the debate of whether it's a tantrum versus a meltdown is actually not interesting to me. I'm going to be honest. It's not the question we should be asking. I think it leads to a lot of debates and discussion about something that is nothing that important, to be honest. Because in my clinical experience, if you handle a tantrum the way you handle a meltdown, you end up with the same result. The only difference I've noticed is the only true tantrums I've really seen where kids just really, like, are, they're actually in control, but they're, like, really trying to get their way from me. They're trying to manipulate and control the situation. First off, that's actually pretty rare. Even with, like, preschoolers, it's pretty rare for that to really happen where a kid's really, like, crying and whining and then, like, looking in and checking with you. Like, they're able to, like, turn it off in an instant, right? That's pretty rare. But in the time I have seen it, I have seen it. Even though it's rare, I've definitely seen it. And when I saw it, I handled that kid the same way where I had my little, like, energy level meter slash emotional scale for them to point how they're feeling in their body and then to gain some awareness of, you look very upset.
[00:14:46] Does your body feel this way? Let me know. And if it does, here are your choices, right? Like, if you're feeling this upset or maxed out, let's help you calm down first, right? Because the idea is they're having this big fit because you said no, right? Like, in my case, the kid was having a fit because he was told to clean up because the whole class was transitioning to another activity. They had been playing, having a lot of, like, free play time in the classroom with toys and such. And this kid didn't want to clean. And so he threw a giant, giant, giant fit, and I had already planned on handling it because I knew this kid. I did the intake evaluation for this kid, and so I knew he was going to have a pretty big issue with being told no and with being forced on a schedule, like, at school.
[00:15:32] And this was preschool, so he was like, three, not quite four yet. And I had already told the teacher I planned to be there for this sort of for the transitions for at least his first, like, few days, just to, like, help, because that I knew the classroom staff would need that help. And I was like, I'm gonna help establish, like, you know, a understanding that you don't have a choice of not cleaning up. I mean, if you choose to not clean up, it means you don't get to participate in another. Right. There's still a consequence. There's a natural consequence to that, right. If he didn't clean up, then he couldn't do the next fun thing they were about to do. He wasn't invited to that. You know, you got to do the cleanup to do that. If you don't want to do the cleanup, then we can give you more work to do. Basically, you know, it's like, you give them, like, a choice of two things, and one of those things is not the thing they want, you know, kind of a technique there. And so. But this kid was just having a fit, and so I handled it in the same way that I would have meltdown in the sense of, like, I want to help you calm down so that we can talk about it, like, give you the language around, like, you know, I can tell you don't want to clean up, but this is the reason why we need to clean up. Everybody else needs to clean up as well. We're all here to share. We're all here to, you know, we have to do this as a group now. It's not about a single person and what they want. We're here as a group. We're here to learn as a group, blah, blah, blah, blah. Take him through this whole, like, kind of lesson on why there's this schedule and why it's important to share and why it's important to clean up the toys. Because if you leave them on the floor, maybe someone will trip and hurt themselves, or you might trip and hurt yourself, or, you know, there's always, like, reasons for it, right? So it's not just about being neat and tidy in a classroom. It's about, like, I don't want someone. You know, someone might step on it and break the toy someone might step on it and trip and fall and hurt themselves. Right? There's reasons we need to do this. So I took him through all of that. It did take this kid a long time to actually engage with me like this. But once he started to figure out that, like, you know, requesting or asking to not do the thing would lead to just a brief explanation of why he needs to in order to do this next thing, it kind of helped him navigate what the expectations were. And eventually the tantrums got less and less and less because the first really big tantrum that lasted a long time, I just didn't budge. I just sat there and I let him cry. I let him do his whole thing. And then I was like, when you're ready to come and point to how you're feeling, we can go through some ways to help you calm down, and then I'll talk you through what we can do.
[00:18:13] You know, what I can do to support you with helping you clean up, basically. Like, what kind of help do you want from me? Like, I'm not going to do it for you, but I can be here to help you, you know, that was kind of the tact I took on that. Now, I think that that is.
[00:18:27] It took a long time, and if I had not had skills to regulate myself, it would have been pretty hard. It would have been pretty dysregulating for me. And especially that's why I wanted to be there for that kid, because, like, school staff in classrooms, they often do not have that kind of time. And I was like, I'm just gonna do this and count it as iep minutes. Like, just some additional minutes that I banked with this kid because they're gonna need it for the transitions.
[00:18:52] I needed to take that time, right. And so it was not as interesting to me. Is this kid having a tantrum or not? What was important was I was calmly presenting options, calmly explaining reasons why this is the expectation in order to do this thing, calmly explaining very natural consequences of not doing the thing, of not cleaning up. You don't get to join the group with their next little activity over here. I think they were making pancakes or something. It was something really cool. They were doing, like, a cooking lesson kind of thing. So he wanted to do that, right? And it's like, well, you don't get to be. If you don't do the cleanup, you got to do that first. Right.
[00:19:32] And being there to support him with the things that, you know, if the cleaning seemed overwhelming or hard, I would help him with it. Right. But if that was part of it, I was there to support and help him, but I wasn't going to do it for him. And I just sat and I waited for him to join me with where I was, basically, and to help him. And the reason it wasn't important to me whether it was a tantrum or not, is that little, little kids, I don't expect them to be that aware of their emotions. They're like three year olds, you know. I don't expect them to really have a lot of awareness of what's going on in their bodies. I don't expect them to know, to be able to tell me how they're feeling. I don't honestly expect that very much. So it can all become a lesson, whether it's a tantrum or not. I'm going into a lesson of, these are the kind of feelings you could be feeling. Maybe it's just an energy level in your body. Maybe your body just feels uncomfortable. And let's talk about that. I'm going to give you the ways to tell me about that, whether it's visually pointing to things or whether it's saying it. And I want to give you ways of helping your body calm down a little so that then we can start to understand why we want you to do the cleanup, why you need to do the cleanup, what your options are with that cleanup. Would you like some help or not? You've got to communicate that, right? How can we support you with this? Learn to kind of advocate that kind of thing. Right? So that was the work that needed to be put in, in my opinion. And it didn't matter whether it was a meltdown or a tantrum. Because the thing is, a lot of times I think little kids, people will label. Label it as a tantrum, label it as a, I'm avoiding something and I want to manipulate and have my way. When honestly, a lot of little kids just feel big, upset emotions and they have no way to express it. They don't have the language behind it. They don't have the awareness for it. And so it just becomes this, like, power struggle between the adult and the kid when honestly, it can get diffused really fast if the k or a little bit faster anyway, maybe not very fast, but a little faster and a little more productive, like resolution can include the adult using it as a teaching moment to model, to demonstrate how to calm yourself down, to demonstrate that, yes, I can feel that way, too. When I feel that way. My stomach feels like this, my chest feels like this. I might get a headache, whatever are you feeling that way in your body? Does your body feel uncomfortable? You want to point to where it's feeling uncomfortable, that kind of a thing. You can do stuff like that to help give them the language around it and increase their awareness around it. And that way, when they're having those big emotions, instead of having just the emotion overtake them and overwhelm them, which is technically some level of emotional dysregulation, even if it's age appropriate in the child, it might be appropriate for a preschooler to have an overwhelm from an upsetting emotion. Right. And it's not really a tantrum in the sense of they're manipulating. Sometimes I think genuinely, they're just little kids having big emotions in their tiny little bodies, and they just don't know what to do about it or how to handle it. And it's not part of our cultural norms, especially not in this society, to demonstrate how to handle that, the more appropriate and or healthy approach to that is not usually addressed. Right.
[00:22:51] I wasn't taught it. Most people weren't taught it. I think in the United States, it's just not a common thing to be taught. And so I think the more we can shift to that, though, the better, you know? So regardless of whether it's just an emotional upset, an uncomfortable emotion or dysregulation, whether it's a meltdown or a tantrum, I think these are the things that kids could be taught. We could be taking that tact of, let me teach you to recognize what you're feeling in your body, how we can address it, what your options might be, and then also take time to explain why you might be feeling that way, and also why we have certain expectations. Right. What's the importance of not having candy during speech for this particular kid? If they were an arctic kid, they need to not have stuff in their mouth. That's speech sound. Articulation is working on speech sounds. So it's like, I don't want you to have food in your mouth while you're talking, because then you might. It might accidentally go down your airway. You know, it might be dangerous. Right? So it's like, better to wait until we're done with the talking to have the candy. Let's do the talking first, and then we'll have the candy. You can always explain why in the sense of, like, is it a safety concern? Is it this or that? You know what I mean? So that stuff helps a lot of. And the thing is, when someone's having a meltdown with, like, a sensory overwhelm or something. They need to start to understand how their body's feeling, but they also usually need someone there to co regulate with them. Right. They need someone to help them relax and help them calm down. So like I said, I said this a bit, but it is just, it's less interesting to me. The question of, is this kid having a tantrum or meltdown? And how do you tell the difference? Because the other thing about a tantrum is sometimes I've seen kids start off with, what is a tantrum? It looks like they're in control of it. It looks like they know what they're doing, but they actually work themselves up into such a state of upset that they actually become dysregulated. It does end up becoming a meltdown because they just keep working themselves up, which kind of makes sense, right? If you kind of, like, just keep going and going with certain behaviors and you keep increasing that adrenaline rush in your body. Yeah, you might end up tipping over into that dysregulated. I can't calm myself down anymore. The emotions are just making me, all the stress hormones are rushing through their body, and then they can't calm down from that, you know, so less interested in whether it's a tantrum or not, more interested in actually, let's just give them more of the, like, awareness and language and modeling of how to calm down so that we can have better and more effective conversations or teaching moments around what the expectations are, why we have those expectations. And if they need some help transitioning into new things, what help do they really need? What help? I want them to be able to tell me in some way whether it's using visuals or pictures or their body to show me or their voice. I don't care, as long as they show me somehow what they might need for me to help them, because that's what I want. I want to help them understand it, right. And as a communication person, I want them to be able to advocate for their needs as much as possible.
[00:26:14] So this also gets at that whole discussion of communication or behavior being communicative. That whole thing of, like, dysregulation is so grating. This is what this person said. I believe it was fearless. Cucumber 404, which I kind of love. I don't know if Reddit assigned to that or not, but that was kind of, that's kind of a fun name.
[00:26:34] They said on the same thread, the word dysregulation is as grading to me, as behavior is communication. No, not all behavior is communication. Sometimes kids are just jerks and behave that way 100%. Sometimes people in general are jerks and kids are people, so it makes sense. Yeah, sometimes kids are jerks, they behave in jerk like ways.
[00:26:54] True truth. And I can understand why it's so grading, because it's a term that's become less specific as it gets more over generalized for people using it as dysregulation versus upsetting emotions. You know, dysregulation being they've lost control of those emotions. Those emotions are now in control of everything. And the emotions, the emotion I call it, it's sort of like when I ever have a meltdown or something, it's like my emotional system has hijacked my body, okay? Like I'm not in control anymore. It's coming from some other part that's not my conscious brain, essentially, and it's not listening to this. I can't make it stop on just using thought alone. I can't do it. I've lost that control.
[00:27:37] And like I said, like with little, little kids, like toddlers, preschoolers, I don't expect them to have that much control. You know, they're not, there's, their control is only going to be so much. They're probably going to need a lot of help and adults around to help them model and understand how to calm down, just in general, because like, you know, it's going to be a continuous process as they grow and learn, because their little tiny brain can only do so much at one time. You know, they just, they're, they're little, they're little kiddos. You gotta give them a little bit of a break. And if they're acting like a jerk, it, it does suck. And you do need to learn that there are natural consequences for lacking. Acting like a jerk. It's not great, it's not a healthy way of doing it, and it's not an excuse just because you're upset. You don't get to like, hit somebody or throw blocks or like, do any of that stuff just because you're upset. That's not a valid reason to do that.
[00:28:26] Okay? Only valid reason, probably, to hit somebody is if you're actually defending yourself due to an attack, which means it's a valid survival response, perhaps. But other than that, there's really not a valid, valid excuse. The emotion can be valid, the upset is valid, not how you're expressing it. Right? It's not okay to do that, which means relational repair, it means apologizing and growing and learning, hopefully from that. But that's something we all struggle with, let's face the facts, we're not only going to be perfect about that, that's just kind of how that goes now. But getting at this behaviorist communication thing, I understand. I used to love this phrase. I still kind of do, at least in the way I interpret the phrase.
[00:29:05] But I do understand why it's such an issue. In my understanding, a lot of times this behavioralist communication, at least in our field, came about because so many people look at non speakers, for example, or kids with more significant, complex medical needs, and they presume this kid isn't there, they're not thinking, or their behavior truly doesn't mean anything. And so they get neglected a lot. And people ignore their signs of protest or their signs. They're requesting for something essential. Right. And so it makes sense to say something like that, to try to, like, break people out of that pattern of thought. But I also know this phrase has also now been used for there is a certain profession out there where people will use this phrase as a way to say that everything's under their scope. Because if their scope is behavior, then everything's under that scope. And that's not really true either. And it's very unethical, in my opinion, because they start to dance into things that they truly don't have training on, and that's unethical. So I can understand why this phrase really stinks, what I would want to say. So this is my proposal. How about instead of all behavior is communication, let's use the phrase all behavior is informative, or can be informative for the people present.
[00:30:21] Let's go with that. How about all behavior is informative? And what I mean by that is if a child or even an adult who's having a meltdown, if they appear dysregulated or they appear that they're starting to become very, very upset and overwhelmed by that upset, whatever that upset is, they might not be intentionally trying to communicate a very clear message at that moment in time, but due to the way that that upset looks in their body and due to the behaviors that come out of, whether they're trying to avoid it or trying to, like, you know, discharge it by being aggressive or by running, whatever it may be, that type of behavior can inform, especially the adults present. It can inform you about something. It's an unintentional communication, if you will. There might not be intention behind it, but it doesn't mean you can't get information from it. And my issue that I have is that so many people look at children especially having meltdowns or even having tantrums. And they interpret the behavior one way and one way only, and they just get stuck in that interpretation and they have such a hard time budging from it. Meaning, same thing with my whole dehantrum versus meltdown discussion. When people have labeled a child's behavior as manipulative or avoidant, avoiding avoidant or a power grab, once they get stuck in that type of thinking, that I think is where you might have a significant chance of neglecting an important thing. Like maybe that kid is having a medical change. Maybe they had an acute pain suddenly, come on. Because maybe their appendix is flaring up, who knows? Or they have a huge headache or something and they have no way of telling you, and they got sensory overwhelm, and then they started a meltdown. Well, now, if you interpret that as avoidance or a power grab or a manipulation, you are potentially ignoring a medically significant situation that needs to be dealt with. Right. It can be dangerous. It can be a very dangerous assumption to assume it's a power thing and it's manipulation because it leads to the adult doing things that inherently might make that child feel incredibly unsafe and truly, honestly might threaten their safety in the long run. So I don't like it. I don't think that's a very safe assumption to make. Some people say, make the least dangerous assumption, which is a valid thing. That's pretty much what I just did there, where it's like this. Maybe a kid is banging their head on things and I'm thinking, do they have a headache? Is that why they do that?
[00:33:02] Which is not a. Not something I often hear educators do or parents, even when they see a child doing that, it can be very upsetting. But a child, especially a child with complex medical things going on and no way to tell you, maybe they do have frequent headaches and we don't know because they can't tell us. Maybe they're showing us they have a headache because they're hitting their head to try to avoid the headache. You know, maybe sensory stuff is giving them a migraine, but they, you know, because the pain is felt here, they're trying to, like, you know, diffuse the pain basically by banging their head. We won't know unless we can teach them how to tell us what they're feeling, right? We won't necessarily know. Or if we take them to the doctor and they could figure it out. But even then, it's usually communication, more so than scans and such. Usually that helps with those sort of situations.
[00:33:53] So what I would say, maybe not all behavior is communication, but let's look at behavior as informational. So if behavior is informational, okay, when you see a child, start to have what perhaps you may. You might call it a tantrum. You might call it a dysregulation. Or you might just call it an upsetting emotion. Whatever it is, they're getting upset. Something is happening. Something has changed in that child.
[00:34:19] My suggestion is think of at least three possible reasons for this change. And one of those reasons has to involve only that child's body. It has nothing to do with people in the room. One of those reasons, meaning one of those reasons can be possible change in medical status, sudden acute pain somewhere, a stomach ache, a headache, something like that.
[00:34:48] Or perhaps they're really, really hangry. They're, like, so hungry, they're getting really, really upset by that. Or maybe they're very thirsty. Maybe they suddenly really have to go to the bathroom, and they don't have a way of telling anybody that. And now they're really upset because somebody said, no, they can't do that thing. Or somebody saw them run toward the toilet. They thought they were avoiding a task, but the kid was, like, trying to show them, I really need to use the bathroom. And it's, like, painful, right? And now they're having a meltdown because it's like, what are they supposed to do? They need to go to the bathroom, right? Whatever it may be, one of those things needs to be the reason. One of those three things needs to involve that person's body. Maybe their body's getting overwhelmed because the lights are too bright. Maybe there's too much sound in the room. Maybe they can hear the buzzing of a fluorescent light that you can't hear. And it's really, really, really bugging them, and they just can't take it anymore.
[00:35:39] One of those reasons has to be that, okay, so that's what I would say. Take the time to calm yourself down and actually try to think through what are at least three possible reasons, particularly for non speaking children. Particularly.
[00:35:56] And there are a lot of children that when they become overwhelmed, they can't communicate anymore. They need, usually, visuals or some way to help them communicate because they might not be able to access spoken language very well when they're upset or when they're in meltdown. I can't talk very well when I'm in meltdown. So it happens. It definitely can happen. But that's what I would say. Behavioral is informative. Behavior is informative, and you. It's the adult's responsibility. The caregiver's responsibility to try to reason and think through why those behaviors might be happening with more than just one thing, at least three things. One of those things has to not involve another person in the room.
[00:36:39] And the more people practice that kind of thought process, I think we might see people thinking very differently about the types of behaviors they're seeing, particularly among neurodivergent children.
[00:36:52] It's a whole other soapbox about non speakers and how much they need access to robust communication modalities that allow them to tell people about what's going on in their body. If they have some sort of medically important thing to tell someone, if they have a really important physiological need that's not being met. Yes, we definitely need to do that so much. But if we're only looking at their behaviors as either avoidance or manipulation or power tripping somehow, or trying to gain power, testing boundaries, whatever we look at it through that, if we only look through that lens, they're never going to get access to those modalities. And even if they have access to it, they're very unlikely to be motivated to use it with you because you've already made your determination, you're already treating them in a certain way. Why are they going to trust that you believe what they say or what they showed you, or what they use their device to tell you? You might not be a trustworthy adult for them anymore, so they might not ever actually tell you if they are in pain or sick or feel awful, right? Because they might take it as they don't really care. When I feel this way, and I hate to say that, but it's true. It's heartbreaking, but true. That is how that goes.
[00:38:00] This is a long response to this, but this one little thread brought up so many different things that I wanted to talk about, and I can address all of these things in separate videos if you would like, or separate podcast episodes if you're listening to this on the podcast, because I probably will post it there as well.
[00:38:16] But yes, dysregulation is overused. It is become. The meaning has become diffused a lot because it's entered the public colloquial speech, and it's become part of that therapy talk that a lot of people know. And so, yes, people are overusing and overgeneralizing the word dysregulation. And even myself, I can sometimes do it, especially being someone who went through her own trauma therapy. You go from being dysregulated to be just being more like, emotionally upset about things sometimes as you heal your dysregulation, it's really all too easy to use the word dysregulation because that's what you've always used to describe. You're upset when actually what you're feeling is upset. And I'm currently trying to sort of train myself out of that. And you can hear an example of it. When I believe on my dehumanization and science episode, I had an example of overusing that word and ended up having to edit and correct myself.
[00:39:10] But dysregulation, appropriately emotional dysregulation means the emotion has overtaken someone's body. They are out of control of their body. They might be consciously aware of what's going on, but they cannot really tell you things they're not. The conscious brain isn't really very well connected to the emotional center. And they have all the stress hormones, the adrenaline, all that stuff starts to rush through their body, and that starts to take over. Essentially, that's dysregulation.
[00:39:34] People can also have emotional upset, which it means you're having what I would call an uncomfortable emotion. As we like, if we want to take apart the moralization of emotion, whether it's good or bad, not as interesting as to me. We do have emotions that are uncomfortable to feel disgust, anger, sadness, that kind of stuff. Right? And those uncomfortable emotions, they usually, you can. It's valid to have those emotions, but a lot of us aren't given the tools to process them and to really, like, work through those emotions and start to understand why we're having those emotions. Most of us are taught, at least in the United States, and I'm pretty sure in other countries, a lot of us are taught from a young age just not to feel those emotions, to either avoid them or discharge them by usually taking it out on other people or doing something that's harmful to ourselves. And that is the issue there. That is where, like, we have to learn to start to honor and respect these emotions, because emotions are valid. But the behaviors you do based off of the emotions are not always valid or healthy. Right? So you can have an upsetting emotion, but then using that emotion as a way to justify to yourself harming someone else is not valid. Okay, the emotions are a reason, but they are not an excuse for mistreatment of others, and also really not for yourself either, although it is sometimes very difficult to take care of yourself in that sense. So there is that issue there that said, whether or not neurodivergents, particularly non speaking, like, especially little kids or medically complex kids in general are having a tantrum versus a meltdown. I think that's not that important of a question. What's far more important is to recognize and realize that regardless of what's going on, the child is upset. And while not all behavior is communication, in a certain sense, behavior is informative, can be informative. And what is more important for adults in the room, for caregivers in the room to do is to think through possible reasons that this emotional upset is occurring and then addressing it appropriately. So if you handle a tantrum the same way you would a meltdown, the same way you would a dysregulation, if you handle emotional upset the way you would dysregulation, it can lead to the same result.
[00:42:02] But it is a process of allowing that child, or teaching that child, demonstrating to that child how we recognize what we feel in our body, giving them some sort of communication modality to explain it, to show, to agree, or to point to how they're feeling, what their energy level is in their body, and what they might need to help them calm down so then they can listen and they're in more of that learning mode, essentially of like that sort of like in control, conscious learning mode, I will say, because we learn in emotional modes as well. But what we tend to learn in survival mode is survival. We don't tend to learn really detailed stuff like we put up the toys in the classroom so people don't trip over them and so that we can continue to share them. People don't break them by stepping on them. You know, we don't eat our candy during our articulation speech session because I don't want you to breathe that can. I don't want that candy to go down your airway. That can be very dangerous. And we're doing a lot of talking right now, so let's get the talking part over with. And then you can have your candy at the end, right? That is the idea there. So good to calm someone down so they can start to take in that information and understand what's going on. And then we do that through modeling, through co regulation, through providing those sort of communication modalities and hopefully, ideally, yes, robust communication modalities that allow them to really explain things. And when you see this type of behavior, the real dangerous assumption to make is that, or. Yeah, what I want to say is, sorry.
[00:43:35] The reason I don't like the question of is it a tantrum or a meltdown? Is because what happens in those situations is when people determine tantrum, what they only interpret tantrum to mean is manipulation a power grab, boundary pushing, which, yes, are things kids do. But some kids can be in a tantrum and then work themselves up into an actual dysregulated state or true emotional upset. And a lot of little kids being tiny and impulsive and not having fully developed prefrontal cortices will just have big emotions and have big behaviors from those big emotions. It doesn't mean they're dysregulated necessarily, but it also doesn't mean they have the language to tell you what's going on or to try to figure out how their body is feeling and what to do about it. That they're uncomfortable now. Right. That discomfort can lead them to have big behaviors, that big discomfort from the emotions. So in that sense, the emotions are. The behaviors from those emotions is informative, even if it's not intentional communication, it can inform you. And what I say, what I think people should start to learn to do, is to make at least three possible reasons, think through at least three possible reasons for the behaviors, for the emotions that are happening at that moment, be it a meltdown, a tantrum, or just a big upset, big mad. Right. Whichever one it is, think of three possible reasons for it. And one of those reasons, especially in the case of meltdowns, and especially in the case of neurodivergent children or children with complex medical needs, one of those reasons needs to relate to something only internal to that child, not to other people in the room. Meaning, do they have a change in their body status in terms of a headache, a stomach ache? Are they exhausted because they didn't sleep well? Are they hungry? Are they thirsty? Do they need to go to the bathroom? Or do they have a sensory need, like the bright lights are too much and it's giving them a headache, or they hear a buzzing sound that is just driving them crazy? Okay, that has to be one of those assumptions. One of them has to be that the other two can be something else. But I'd strongly discourage people from always automatically assuming that a child is manipulative. If they're controlling, if they're doing a power move, if they're avoidant. I don't like those assumptions, because those assumptions are the ones that oftentimes, especially in the case of neurodivergent children, and particularly with non speaking neurodivergent children, those are the assumptions that often lead to unintentional mistreatment of that child in the form of neglect, particularly when it comes to medical needs. When it comes to actual physiological shifts that do need to be addressed, particularly by medical staff.
[00:46:19] So that's my big suggestion there. That's my many points that came from this tiny little thing.
[00:46:27] I hope this was helpful, and if it was informative, leave me a comment on any of my social medias. Send me an email which is on my website. If you're listening to the podcast, it's usually in the show notes. Or if you're watching this on YouTube, or if you're watching this on any of my other social medias, drop a comment. Let me know if this was useful, if this was insightful, if you still have questions about it. If you're not sure, let me know. If you want me to go more in depth with on some of these topics, but this is just a slightly more informal video, slightly to address some things that have been on my mind lately. You guys. Oh, that's my husband calling. Anyway, take care of yourselves, treat yourselves kindly with compassion and respect and all of that, and I will get back to you next time.
