Hard Things

Scott is prone to anxiety.

He takes my perfectionist nature to the Nth degree.

So we have taught he a few things that we hope will help him in the future.

We go through his daily affirmations sometimes more then once a day.

"I am SMART!

I am STRONG!

Jesus LOVES me, 

Mom LOVES me 

and Dad LOVES me!"

I am hoping that whatever problems arise in his life he will remember these things and find hope and comfort in this knowledge.

Another thing we are also trying to teach him is that he can do hard things.

When we can see his anxiety rising over a task we quickly come to him and try to teach him how to do what he's trying to do while telling him that he can do hard things.

When completing we give him a hug or a high five or something telling him, "See, you can do hard things."

We will often tell him part of the script that applies to his issue.

In the picture below you see a sweet four year old attempting to do push ups with his dad.

As he was trying to do it he, in heavy breathing voice tells us, 

"I can do hard things."

Yes we were pretty proud of our boy.

We happily confirmed he can do hard things because he is strong.

A couple other times where he has drawn on this knowledge is while he's practicing a new letter and he tells me he can do hard things.

I remind him that he is smart.

While he tries to put on his shoes the first time he freaked out.

The next time he tried, after a lot of teaching mini step by mini step, he had a few struggles but I hear him say as I'm pulling my things together because of course we are rushing to get out of the door, "Don't freak out, I can do hard things."

Can I just say at that moment something changed in me.

WOW!

It might seem like something small to others but to me that was my four year old who is known to fly off the handle easily, think calmly through his problems.

I have a hard time doing that still to this day, maybe that's why I'm so proud.

By the time I got to him to praise him he had his shoes on and his face was in the biggest, proudest grin.

I say, "Scott you did it!"

He says so excitedly, "I put my shoes on and I didn't freak out!"

You would have thought he won the race or got the game winning touch down by both our reactions.

That my friends is called SUCCESS!

Since this happened Scott has had an influx of anxiety attacks.

They can happen anywhere, at any time, and we had no clue why.

They got progressively worse to the point that he seems out of control.

Mark and I have been clueless as to the cause of them.

For a while we punished them.

He was reacting to things badly and he needed to learn that bad choices got bad consequences.

This is a concept he knows and it usually has worked in teaching him acceptable behavior.

But the only effect it had on him was making it worse.

This past Sunday it happened in sacrament meeting and Mark brought him home.

I waited for the speaker to finish his talk before I too slipped out, knowing that if Mark took him home it must be really bad.

I got there and Scott was still going hysterical.

We're talking about 15 to 20 minutes long so far and it was elevated to a point neither of us had ever seen.

I grabbed him and tried holding him to console him.

He wanted me and hated me all at the same time.

It took me another 15 minutes to start breathing normally.

It was this incident that made me realize, this is not him going through a stage or acting out because of not enough sleep.

I remembered the doctors saying that if he freaks out it's because he's experiencing anxiety over his environment.

Here we were punishing him.

Knowing and having experienced anxiety attacks before, punishment is NOT the way to fix them.

So we had to figure out what was causing the anxiety.

It had been happening gradually for the past month so it was hard to find the consistent trigger.

But just last night I caught a freak out at the beginning stage and figured it out.

Scott, being in two schools, is learning two different things.

In one he is working on his letters and colors and hand writing.

In another he is working on behavior and speech and scripts of how to play with others.

Both schools are trying to get him ready for kindergarten and helping him be more independent.

He has finally developed the drive to want to do things on his own.

Before he was content with letting me do things for him.

The freak outs are stemming from a desire to do things on his own and a lack of developmental ability to do them without help.

This is an anxiety that pretty much every kid goes through around his age or some even sooner.

But his anxiety becomes so great that he shuts down and becomes unteachable.

Knowledge is power.

We now know what he is freaking out over and hope to help him learn to deal with it.

I know he will, as we all do still to this day, have a hard time with our desire to do something and our ability to do it often aren't always at the same level.

It is that desire that makes us as a person and us as a society better.

Scott, like everyone, needs to learn to do the hard thing and figure out how to adjust his ability or his desire to be at the same level.

I know he can!

He is SMART!

He is STRONG!

Jesus LOVES him!

Mommy LOVES him!

Daddy LOVES him!

And HE CAN DO HARD THINGS!