My kid woke up disgruntled. There wasn’t really any discernible reason for it. I’m not identifying which kid because honestly, I swear they take turns doing this.
I had stayed up late the night before, and I knew I was on “wake up” duty in the morning. (Rev. Dr. Mr. TOPT and I usually swap off who gets a lie-in on weekend days.) I had vowed to myself the night before that if I was gonna stay up late playing D&D with my friends, I knew it would mean I’d be verryyyyy tired in the morning, which predisposes me to be grumpy with my kids. And I was going to follow every strategy I had to make sure I stayed regulated.
But dang. This kid was doing everything they could to rattle that. Picking at their sibling, unprovoked. Protesting my “injustice” by name-calling me when I tried to intervene.
Even though I usually want to give my kids space to figure out how to entertain themselves, and they have *lots* of options, I still tried getting this kid set up with entertainment so they’d stop going after everybody else. It didn’t work.
I stayed calm. And stayed calm. And put in my earplugs so I could stay calm. I reminded myself that it’s only for a little while and that the uncomfortable feelings in my body wouldn’t last forever. I made sure to take time to eat food, drink water, and use the toilet to minimize any discomfort in my body and to give myself the blood sugar I needed to stay regulated. I didn’t get sucked into verbal sparring matches—I let them say dysregulated things without taking the bait and coming to the fight. I got their sibling set up with something fun in the other room since their very existence seemed to be annoying this kid.
They still kept picking and picking.
I know about myself that when I lose my cool—when I reach 100% dysregulated—I tend to scream and yell. It’s my body’s emergency strategy for trying to get regulated quickly. That doesn’t mean it’s logical or right; that part of my brain isn’t operating on logic or morals. It’s operating on pure gut instinct and it knows that proprioceptive sensory input is immensely, physiologically, regulating to human bodies. It reaches for the default, ingrained proprioceptive strategy that feels like it would “help”.
Taking a big deep breath with my rib and abdominal muscles and pushing it all out in an angry yell that exerts my vocal cords and my throat muscles and opens my jaw gives me a loootttttt of “exertion” proprioception. It’s my body’s emergency strategy.
But I wasn’t in an emergency yet. I was at maybe 70% or 80% dysregulated, not 100%. I had a little bit of my logic and my morals running my brain still left, and those don’t want to yell at my kids and know it doesn’t *actually* help in any way.
But…the physiological proprioceptive sensory input *does* help! It does help bring my body toward more regulation. It doesn’t solve the problem and it sure doesn’t parent my kids well or bolster my relationship with them, but it does help me regulate. What I needed was a strategy rooted in my logic and my moral reasoning (help my body, don’t hurt my kids) that would meet my proprioceptive needs before I got to 100% dysregulated and did it in an emergency, harmful way.
I went into the laundry room, where my kid wasn’t, and did a big whisper-scream to myself. “aaaaaaaa!”, unvoiced. No angry or hurtful or impatient words and no kid around to soak it up as the target. I was taking the physiological, proprioceptive, exertion and replicating it. Taking a big deep breath with my rib and abdominal muscles and pushing it all out in a muted whisper-yell that still exerts my vocal cords and my throat muscles and opens my jaw. Then I stopped and took more deep breaths, too, getting even more of my rib and abdominal muscle involvement.
Then I jumped up and down three times for good measure because “impact” is another category of proprioceptive sensory input. It’s not the same category as exertion, but it still takes that energy in my body and moves it elsewhere.
It had brought my body’s energy back down a little ways. If I had been 80% dysregulated before, maybe now I was 60%. When my kid started picking at me again, I told them in a calm voice, “I’m really getting frustrated that you’re talking to me like this. I don’t know why, since I’m just trying to make you food.” It didn’t magically solve anything. And, it wasn’t a scream—*will you just CUT IT OUT??? I haven’t even DONE anything!!!*
And on and on we go. Using the tools I have to keep myself somewhere below 100% dysregulated. At some parts of the day I felt as good as 10% and at some parts of the day it felt like I was hovering somewhere around 98%. But today I stayed below 100 and that’s some powerful modeling of how to live well in my body, for my kids to carry on with brains less out-of-whack than mine.