There isn't an adult I know that doesn't have at least one fixation. Something they are obsessed with or hate. It's a normal part of personhood to have likes and dislikes and things we just have to do a certain way.
I am obsessed with packing. I love getting everything together just right, deciding where things should go and knowing that everything is where it is supposed to be. I don't like wasted space.
Does this drive my husband nuts? Uh, yeah.
But he lets me pack.
He has his own strange things and I have learned in five years of marriage to respect those.
So why is it so hard to accept the fixations of toddlers?
It's so easy to dismiss what they want to do because it doesn't seem important to us.
But that doesn't make it any less important to them.
We've been lazy about bedtime recently. Sleep is about to change and motivation to get everything in order is waning. Joe has been sick and we are all just focused on sleeping as much as we can when we can.
It's working well.
But this led to Truman wanting to sleep on the couch last night. He happily snuggled in and let us turn out the light.
At some point he started crying and Joe went downstairs to see what was wrong. Apparently he had been trying to find a certain Word World and couldn't find it.
In a tired haze he came to bed and slept. He cried several times in the night. I was not my best at these moments and told him everything was fine then shushed him.
I will have to work on that.
Anyway, in the morning he was still obsessed with the Word World. The problem? We had all the Word Worlds, yet he still thought something was missing.
He was crying a bit and very upset and we kept asking him what he wanted. He kept answering the same way: "I want one."
After asking him which one and giving him suggestions, asking for different words, etc., nothing had changed.
I knew what was going on here. His mind gets stuck in a feedback loop. He was frustrated about last night and not seeing that the situation had changed. He just remembered how he felt then and couldn't get past those feelings enough to decide what to do next.
In the past I have just left him there to calm down until he can tell me what he wants. After all, I don't have all day to sit and listen to him repeat the same phrase that I can't understand as both of us get more upset ... uh ... right?
Well, once I started looking at this as a fixation he just couldn't get passed I realized what he needed was to be guided. I hugged him and talked about last night and then showed him that all the Word Worlds were there. He thought and looked and then smiled and grabbed the one he wanted.
1 comment:
You are so right. Many time we have higher expectations of them than we do ourselves. I spoke with our homeopath recently and explained that stress brought on minor hives (a Candida reaction) for Jackson, and her answer was really interesting. Our emotions are tied to a hormonal response and the liver is responsible for clearing the body of those hormones once the stressor is removed. If the liver is compromised (which is one issue we're dealing with) it can't properly clear these hormones and the feelings can linger longer than they "should." Explains why sometimes Jackson gets 'stuck' on things sometimes, I think.
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