I wrote a couple of weeks ago about silly-dysregulation for the first time on here. It’s the winter school holidays here in Australia, and it turns out that same silly-dysregulation was kind of the theme of the break. The pattern would be heralded by a grating new stim of hoarse shrieking and then escalate into out-of-control laughter and, in my kid’s own words, “trying to annoy everybody” while cackling — throwing small stuff at family members, touching or taking their stuff, getting up in their face or space, making noises, and, if ignored, moving to taunting about it. Like, “see what I haaaave!”
We’ve spent about eight years working on supporting through angry-dysregulation, but silly is a relatively new one with this kid.
(The other kid gets silly in a way that is “just” an excess of movement, and the other kid is very redirectable with “challenges”: “i bet you can’t do 30 front rolls on the crash mat,” “how fast can you do 100 jumps on the trampoline,” etc. Those high-energy activities give my other kid’s brain something to latch onto as they try to discharge all of that silly energy.)
But movement hasn’t been helpful for this kid. The silly-dysregulation has a different flavor, sort of a social one. I might need to invent new language to describe increasingly nuanced dysregulation states, or maybe somebody else already has and I just don’t know the words for it. I’ll go with “social-silly-dysregulation” for now. There’s an element to it of feeling like the only thing that would help is if the other person interacted in a big, emotional way with you. And it’s waaaaayyyyyy easier to get someone to react with big angry or big frustrated or big annoyed emotions than any other, more pleasant kind of emotion. (source: see all social media algorithms, ever)
This has happened over and over and over during the break, I’d say probably on a daily basis. I’ve met it with lots of my emotional energy over and over and over while still staying patient and regulated, usually focusing on getting intensely lovey and cuddly, giving my child squeezy, proprioceptive input during that time until I felt them come out of that overly-silly, out-of-control stage and back into their self. A couple of times we have also shifted into “pretend mad”, such as me pretending to be mad that they are saying or doing these things and giving a silly threat, like that I’ll sit on their head or that I’ll squirt them with a water squirter, and then turning it into roughhousing as I follow through with the silly threat and we play in a high energy way for several minutes until that energy is expended.
We have also been talking about it extensively, since it’s coming up every single day. Lots of tiny drip of information sentences like:
“it’s great to be silly and have fun, but I don’t like mean fun.”
“Your body is full of energy, that’s where all this silly is coming from.”
“You have [screaming/sneaking/fighting/wrestling] energy.”
“Sometimes kids need help to get silly energy out of them.”
“Can you change your body’s energy by yourself or should I help you?”
Today, my kid was getting silly-dysregulated again, and I was not in a position where I could easily help them, at all. The garbage bag was over-filled and had something poky in it. It had torn open the bag as I tried to pull it out and I was dealing with wet, loose garbage all over the place.
My kid was both doing the hoarse shrieking thing (which everybody in the house hates) and escalating into more physical silly-dysregulation too. I was trying to verbally support while also dealing with the mess. “You can go in the garage and roll around on a crash mat,” I suggested, even though that’s more of a suggestion for the other kid. Sure enough, they said, with a great big goofy smile (so triggering!!), “Nope! I just want to annoy everybody in here!”
It is so easy to see tears and screams as a meltdown (body becoming out of control and overwhelmed by emotion), but it is quite hard to see smiles and escalated giggles as a meltdown, but I know that’s exactly what it often is for them. I did my best to ignore their provocative words and remind myself of what was really going on.
“You NEED to be in a different place than your sibling,” I said, letting go of the garbage for a moment and bumping my backside into them like I was a truck backing up and ushering them into the playroom, off the main living room space. I used a more serious/stern tone. “Listen to your body. It is getting too much silly energy and you’re trying to use our energies to fix yours. My energy is trying to fix wet trash right now. It can’t fix your energy right now. But YOU CAN,” (with a voice tone of as much empowerment/belief as I could muster, not like, angry blame.) “you can do it. I know you can. You just have to put it somewhere else.”
The room I was steering them into has various proprioceptive tools: a tub of communal stuffies to throw, a mini trampoline, couches that the kids climb on, blankets that they lay under. This was my last ditch effort, too. I mean, if the situation escalated any further, then either “my kid would end up getting touched with trash hands” (to stop a true emergency) or “I would run and wipe/wash my hands off in order to stop them” (to support in anything less than a true emergency). Like, sometimes there are no perfect options. If someone is melting down, all we can do is survive.
I stepped back away from the room, rushed to finish managing the wet exploded garbage bag and getting it outside, and then to wash my hands, and then I quickly gathered up blankets and pillows because I figured the next step I would do is go into the playroom where I expected them to be kind of lying around in a limbo state, having staved off further dysregulation for a few seconds but not having managed to do anything to fix it themselves. And I was going to go back in there and suggest I put blankets and pillows in a big heavy pile on them and then squish them with it, since squishing seems to be the fastest way out of silly-dysregulation for them.
But instead I came back into the room to find them having started up a video game they don’t usually like or play often, that has a timer with a competitive mechanic they don’t usually like much (as they don’t like feeling like they lost), and they were channeling all their energy at yelling enthusiastically at the video game timer.
Separately from all of this, I know that my child really thrives on positive and encouraging words and also frequently writes us notes and throws them as paper airplanes, so that’s exactly what I did. I wrote them a note, and folded it into an airplane, and threw it at the desk that their computer/video game is on.
Then, I went to go keep making lunch for the kids.
A few moments later I was tacklehugged from the side by a very proud kid (who still needed a big big squeeze.)