The Great Behaviour Breakdown
This week's #WASO theme invites us to write about challenges, positives or something that's worked really well for your family. It's a good one, as it's pushed me into writing a post that I've been wanting to write for a long time, but which I've been putting off because it's a big one and needs quite a bit of time and mental engery. I've referenced some training we attended recently in a couple of previous posts and haven't said much more than that. I wasn't meaning to be cryptic, I just didn't have the time at that moment to write too much about the specifics. And because it's something quite different to anything I've done before, I didn't want to mention it without being able to do it justice. So here it is... The Great Behaviour Breakdown, which is the cornerstone of pretty much everything we're trying to put in place at home at the moment.
Rewind nine months. Little and Tiny had just moved in. We had the typical 'honeymoon' period, then all hell broke loose. Little was scared and angry and she expressed it several times a day with her feet, fists and teeth. We'd known that it was a theoretical possibility, and it's something I'm sure the majority of adopters have been through. But it's also a situation that I don't think you can really mentally prepare yourself for until you are in it. We came across GBB by chance while desperately looking around for support and it's really helped both of us to deal with some of the challenges we've had to face. The implementation is by no means easy, and we're still far from proficient. It requires a complete shift in thinking and that takes some time to achieve. But we definitely feel like we're on the right path.
For those who aren't familiar with it, I'll try to summarise some of the main points of the model here (the full GBB book is also downloadable as a PDF if you want to find out more). It requires a complete paradigm shift to seeing challenging behaviour as coming from a place of fear, and holds that any behaviour which isn't driven by love is motivated by fear (be that our children's behaviour or our own). Challenging behaviour is not a choice, but rather arises from a state of stress, which is itself fed by fear. It is only by attuning ourselves to that fear that we can work with our children to calm their behaviour, and the focus is on calming the stress that led to the behaviour, rather than on addressing the behaviour per se. Throughout our training we were repeatedly told that GBB is process-oriented rather than outcome-based, and that by getting the process right, outcomes are improved. This has certainly held true for us.
GBB has helped us to understand that any kind of consequence-based parenting is driven by our own fear (e.g 'she needs to learn that x y or z is wrong, or she will grow up as a menace to society') and that our children have next to no ability to take on information or learn lessons from their behaviour when they are dysregulated and in a state of stress. The only thing that can be done is to help calm and regulate them, and return to discussing the behaviour at another time. Through their difficult backgrounds, our children have not learned to regulate themselves, and so we must help them learn this skill through remaining calm ourselves, much in the way a parent soothes a distressed baby and the baby then learns to regulate itself. It also advocates getting to know our children's triggers and supporting them with situations which we know are difficult for them, to avoid things even getting to the state of dysregulation in the first place.
One of the things Tiny used to really struggle with (and occasionally still does) is toothbrushing. We think it's a sensory thing, but at one point he was refusing to even consider brushing his teeth and it led to epic power battles and a lot of tantrums, crying and aggression. The GBB approach to this is to acknowledge even before asking him to brush his teeth that we know he doesn't like it, we know that it feels funny, and that we don't really like it either, so how about we do it together. We then engaging in brushing each other's teeth, or turning it into a game and seeing how many 'germs' we can find. After a couple of weeks of this, tooth brushing was suddenly much less of an issue. It does still flare up occasionally, usually when he's upset about something else, but we have a strategy now, and it doesn't often turn into the massive flashpoint that it used to.
That's just one example to try and illustrate the theory a little. A huge thing that it's helped us with is Little's physical aggression, which still happens, but is more like a weekly rather than daily occurrence these days. I can't get across in this blog post just how well it suits us and how it's working for us at the moment - it's not the only model we follow, hence my need for this blog to process all the ideas, and it's needed lots of tweaks along the way, and still does - but it's definitely improved our own confidence in helping our children deal with their difficulties and has helped us to turn what seems like an insurmountable situation nine months ago into something which even feels like fun at times!
Rewind nine months. Little and Tiny had just moved in. We had the typical 'honeymoon' period, then all hell broke loose. Little was scared and angry and she expressed it several times a day with her feet, fists and teeth. We'd known that it was a theoretical possibility, and it's something I'm sure the majority of adopters have been through. But it's also a situation that I don't think you can really mentally prepare yourself for until you are in it. We came across GBB by chance while desperately looking around for support and it's really helped both of us to deal with some of the challenges we've had to face. The implementation is by no means easy, and we're still far from proficient. It requires a complete shift in thinking and that takes some time to achieve. But we definitely feel like we're on the right path.
For those who aren't familiar with it, I'll try to summarise some of the main points of the model here (the full GBB book is also downloadable as a PDF if you want to find out more). It requires a complete paradigm shift to seeing challenging behaviour as coming from a place of fear, and holds that any behaviour which isn't driven by love is motivated by fear (be that our children's behaviour or our own). Challenging behaviour is not a choice, but rather arises from a state of stress, which is itself fed by fear. It is only by attuning ourselves to that fear that we can work with our children to calm their behaviour, and the focus is on calming the stress that led to the behaviour, rather than on addressing the behaviour per se. Throughout our training we were repeatedly told that GBB is process-oriented rather than outcome-based, and that by getting the process right, outcomes are improved. This has certainly held true for us.
GBB has helped us to understand that any kind of consequence-based parenting is driven by our own fear (e.g 'she needs to learn that x y or z is wrong, or she will grow up as a menace to society') and that our children have next to no ability to take on information or learn lessons from their behaviour when they are dysregulated and in a state of stress. The only thing that can be done is to help calm and regulate them, and return to discussing the behaviour at another time. Through their difficult backgrounds, our children have not learned to regulate themselves, and so we must help them learn this skill through remaining calm ourselves, much in the way a parent soothes a distressed baby and the baby then learns to regulate itself. It also advocates getting to know our children's triggers and supporting them with situations which we know are difficult for them, to avoid things even getting to the state of dysregulation in the first place.
One of the things Tiny used to really struggle with (and occasionally still does) is toothbrushing. We think it's a sensory thing, but at one point he was refusing to even consider brushing his teeth and it led to epic power battles and a lot of tantrums, crying and aggression. The GBB approach to this is to acknowledge even before asking him to brush his teeth that we know he doesn't like it, we know that it feels funny, and that we don't really like it either, so how about we do it together. We then engaging in brushing each other's teeth, or turning it into a game and seeing how many 'germs' we can find. After a couple of weeks of this, tooth brushing was suddenly much less of an issue. It does still flare up occasionally, usually when he's upset about something else, but we have a strategy now, and it doesn't often turn into the massive flashpoint that it used to.
That's just one example to try and illustrate the theory a little. A huge thing that it's helped us with is Little's physical aggression, which still happens, but is more like a weekly rather than daily occurrence these days. I can't get across in this blog post just how well it suits us and how it's working for us at the moment - it's not the only model we follow, hence my need for this blog to process all the ideas, and it's needed lots of tweaks along the way, and still does - but it's definitely improved our own confidence in helping our children deal with their difficulties and has helped us to turn what seems like an insurmountable situation nine months ago into something which even feels like fun at times!
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