First of all, Happy New Year. I hope you had a good Christmas and New Year, one that was (relatively) meltdown/shutdown/stress-free.

Our Christmas and New Year were good. Our youngest struggles with school, but then struggles with the lack of routine at the start of the holidays, so the first week was a little tense at times, but the habit & routine of lazy mornings and slow days kicked in, and our new routine was set.

Christmas morning, we have family round, a sort of open house, and then everyone goes home at lunchtime leaving us to an afternoon of peace and quiet, but a house full of people can be stressful to anyone, and our youngest sometimes struggles with the thought of all the visitors. This year was OK, and he coped very well.

Between Christmas and New Year we had lots of walks, conversations and family time (as well as much more screen time than normally happens, but hey, it’s Christmas). New Year’s Eve was quiet, and New Year’s Day was a walk in the Peak District followed by a family lunch.  All good.

And then last night, ‘it’ happened. The shutdown and meltdown that I had been anticipating for 2 weeks. Two weeks of low grade, chronic stress had taken its toll. Now everything was over, he could release the stress, he could finally let it all go, and let it all out. Headaches, feeling hot, nausea & vomiting – all the usual suspects were there, and this was a long one, lasting well over 3 hours from start to finish.  This is all part of his coping mechanisms, something we learned in CAMHS over the summer. His stress goes beyond fight or flight, and he freezes, shuts down a little. When the stressor is over, be that an exam, a stressful lesson or two weeks of festivities, all the pent up stress, worry & anxiety comes out as a physical & physiological meltdown. For us, this is our normal. For you, it might be something completely different.

So, now it’s the morning after the night before, and everything is fine again.  All the stress has been released and he’s back to normal, no remnants of the night before at all. I, however, am exhausted! A night on his floor with the storm raging outside did not allow much sleep at all, but that’s fine. I can catch up later. What matters is that the stress storm has passed, the clouds have parted and we have sunshine again.

 

Yesterday was parents’ evening for our younger Skware Peg. As expected, it was all incredibly positive, and he’s doing very well, at least from school’s point of view. There are still too many anxiety triggers, but that’s yet another blog for another day. Flash back 8 or 9 years to our older Skware Peg, and it was possibly better from a socially adept point of view, but not as good academically. And the teachers who all taught him were asking about him and reminiscing with smiles, and sending him their love & best wishes. Does this mean that we can compare? I’m not sure.

Our eldest is the most amazing young adult. He could be the poster boy for ‘I didn’t do that well at school but look at me now….’. He is growing his own business, and he has an ease and a charm that I am very envious of. Our youngest describes him as a really clever Joey from Friends, and that’s quite a good description. He just has an incredible aura that allows him to coach, motivate, train and inspire people. You could be in education for decades and not have that skill. It is innate, and could never be taught or learned.

Our youngest is completely different. He has a quiet charm, if he likes you, and if he doesn’t, he puts on an emotional mask and all you might get is an eye roll or death stare. He, however, is very academic and just ‘gets’ science, maths and humanities. Although writing or typing things down is hard for him, the process of learning is easy. He already knows what GCSEs, A-levels and even what he wants to read at uni, and where he wants to go.  It doesn’t occur to him that his brain won’t take him there.

In some ways the differences between them are the differences between ADHD & ASD. One is out there, doing, socialising (even when he doesn’t like them), wearing his heart on his sleeve, and everyone wants to be his friend. The other is introvert, almost secretive with an exclusive group of friends (with all the other peers being organised as acquaintances, others and mortal enemies – yes, really), and most of them want to be his friend.  Because they live with each other, and see each other’s strengths, weaknesses and daily struggles, the boys are incredibly close.  If they were at school together in the same year, they would hate each other. They are so different, and yet so incredible similar.

So, full circle – can we compare them? Yes, in a way.  We can compare their compassion (both fabulous), kindness (fab again), we can compare how they both work to overcome their barriers (ticked boxes here too), and how hard they are working to achieve their potential (yep, pretty good here as well). But we can’t compare like for like. Our eldest would hate a career in maths or physics, and our youngest would hate a career in coaching and motivation (Talking to people every day? *insert eye roll here*). What we can do is encourage them to look at their strengths, what makes their souls sing, and support them in every way we can to make sure they are amazing human beings who will make the world a better place. And surely, we should be doing this for all of our children, be they skware pegs, round pegs or nonadecagonal prisms (the joys of having a mathematical child!)!

 

Last Wednesday was quite a day in our house. For the second time in 13 months, we have been discharged from CAMHS. This obviously means that after our discharge last October we have to have another referral (in January), which was very hard at the time (details about that here), but now, almost 11 months later, it was the best thing that could have happened.

Luckily, our referral took us back to the same case worker as before, and he listened to our concerns, got our son to do an anxiety test, and was going to talk to colleagues about the possibility of re-testing for ASD. No joy with ASD, but the test showed that he now had clinical anxieties, and so was eligible for CBT on the NHS, but we would have to wait.

We waited for a little while, but no where near as long as I was fearing, and we started the therapy with the most amazing therapist. She got him straight away, explained everything in scientific detail, and barely raised an eyebrow when he talked about neurotypicals annoying him. The CBT made a fantastic improvement (details here) but there were still missing pieces. He was almost as good as he could be, but I wasn’t ready for him to be discharged. Luckily Super Therapist was also trained in EDMR (details here) and so that followed CBT.

It was a little strange, and I thought I would find it much more distressing than I did. Watching his body language throughout was fascinating from a scientific point of view, and I could certainly draw lots of similarities from my training in animal therapies. He found the sessions very tiring, and after the first two he was incredibly clingy and emotional, and although he slept well, he didn’t feel refreshed when he woke up.   After the final session last week, however, he has been better. Maybe a little more tactile than before, but definitely more confident, more assertive and possibly even less tolerant of those he doesn’t like!!

So, on Wednesday we were discharged from CAMHS. Super Therapist and all the wonderful people who work constantly with tight deadlines and even tighter budgets have worked they magic on our youngest, and, for now, we have no more appointments, no more safety net and it is equally exciting and terrifying. He says he feels more himself, and he can feel a big improvement, but he still doesn’t like school (meeting on Wednesday so expect another blog at the end of the week), doesn’t like most people, and still doesn’t like being social – but that’s fine. We know that he will always be an anxious person, a worrier. We know that he will always have ASD traits. What his therapy has done is allowed him to take control of them, rather than him controlling him.

Super Therapist’s final words to us were that we could always get a referral back, if we need to. Hopefully we won’t, but it does feel more like Au Revoir than Good Bye……..

After having considerable (& quick) success with CBt (Cognitive behavioural therapy, info can be found here), our youngest was finding life easier to cope with.  It was still stressful, it still caused anxieties and people, sights, smells and tastes are all still issues that he has to deal with on a daily basis, but he now has the coping skills to deal with said issues. However, I still felt that there was a piece missing in the jigsaw to make him feel, well, normal isn’t the right word here at all, but I’m not sure what is. There were still things going on in his subconscious that were causing problems, and although CBT had helped a lot, and we know that the sensory issues are something else altogether, my gut feeling was that there was stuff somewhere inside his head, and we had to unlock it and help him deal with it.

Actually, to be completely honest, I knew what it was/is. This was the first ‘issue’ I tried to sort out with him when he was 3.  The issues are all to do with his neonatal, postpartum experience. Although many people say that you can’t remember things from when you were brand new, there are now some people who believe that we have foetal memories. We talk to our babies when they are growing so that they know our voices. I bought a close friend a jingling necklace to wear when she was pregnant as the idea is that the baby will remember the sound when they arrive. We might play music to them, sing to them, even read to them. Our instincts says they hear and remember, and science is catching up with us. A study published 21 years ago says that there is definitely foetal memory (details here), and I am sure (I hope) that there are much more recent studies into this.

So, his birth story is quite straight forward – normal pregnancy, quick labour, and he arrived a day early. So far, so good. When he was just a couple of hours old, however, he went blue and floppy and had to be rushed into the SCBU where he was put on oxygen, he had a glucose drip, and within 24 hours he had an umbilical drip as they couldn’t get enough glucose in quickly enough, and he had to be fed fortified milk through a nose tube.  In total, he spent about 8 days in an incubator, and another 4 days in SCBU before he was discharged to come home, on hydrocortisone liquid every 8 hours, and a referral to an endocrinologist. Every 4 hours while he was in hospital he had to have blood sugar (this is important!). At 6.5 weeks, we then had to go to Sheffield Children’s Hospital for 2 days for controlled withdrawal of his meds. There was no other way to see if he could come off it, whether this was a lifelong condition or a neonatal blip. While he was there, it was 4 hourly blood sugar tests, and then he had to have between 2 & 5 mls of blood taken from a heel prick (there was a medical reason why this couldn’t be from a vein, but the actual amount needed & the reason why are long forgotten). He came off the meds, his blood sugar was stable, and at his 3 month check up, we were discharged completely, and we thought it was all forgotten.

Fast forward 3 years, when he started having dreadful nightmares, with green monsters appearing above his bed. He was adamant, and consistent, when telling us where they came from.  When we had to visit my Dad in hospital at the same sort of time, he announced that this was the hospital where he was born and where he had to stay in a plastic box. And then he told us one day while we were eating dinner, that when he was a baby, a giant used to come and stab his fingers with pencils……and then the penny dropped, and where the monsters were appearing was where hand would go into the incubator. At the time, cranio-sacral therapy was recommended, and we saw a lovely lady who we called the bad dream lady, and 8 sessions with her made the bad dreams go away.  When they came back a year or so later, we went to see her again, she worked her magic, and all was good.

Except, it wasn’t, really. He would occasionally tell me that he remembered that once he cried and I didn’t come. He doesn’t like hospitals at all. He couldn’t sleep through the night on his own until he was 5, and the only way we could get him to sleep through was for me to sleep on his floor, and when things get too much, I still sleep on his floor.

When I mentioned this to his amazing CBT therapist, she suggested that EMDR might help (info here). I read up on it, and it has been used mainly for PTSD so far, but is being increasingly used for non-verbal memories. So, today we had our pre-EMDR session, and it was strange. We both went with him as we are both off this week, and there are bits of the birth story that I couldn’t remember, Our son said ‘I was put on a tray thing, and then lowered into a box’, and apparently that’s exactly what happened, but I hadn’t remembered, and my husband hadn’t said anything.

So on Monday we start EMDR properly. We know that it might make the nightmares come back while the body processes the memories, but the fact that he had a tummy ache going today, knowing what we were going to talk about, and on the way home he was emotionally drained shows that it is still there, like the elephant in the room. I will blog about it, as there must be many skware pegs that have had emotional trauma that still sits in their brain causing minor problems from time to time, but I feel very positive and optimistic that this is the missing piece, the missing link for us.

And that’s a good place to conclude and pull everything together. What works for one person may not work for another, even if their problems seem very similar. Also, mental health help doesn’t come with a one size fits all, or one solution will ‘fix’ you. It might be that 10 sessions of CBT or NLP or whatever else works, or it might be that CBT followed by EMDR with regular top ups or Reiki and aromatherapy are what works for you.  It might be art therapy that keeps you feeling fully functional, or other talking therapies, or it might be being outside with nature (ecotherapy is definitely my personal favourite). The point I am trying to make, is that we are all amazing, unique individuals. How my brain works isn’t necessarily how your brain works, so what helped me isn’t necessarily what will help you (although it’s always good to share what did and didn’t work, as long as we don’t force the matter). What matters is that we do whatever we need to do, and we get whatever help we need to optimise our mental health and well being.

At the moment we are in an (almost) enviable position where we have one child through the hell that is teenage years, and one not quite there, but definitely on the cusp. Most of the parents I talk to and are friends with now have children around our youngest’s age, and, for the majority, it is their eldest or only who share our son’s peer group. I also have friends who have much, much younger children, and who complain about the terrible toddler years. I just smile and nod, knowing that what comes later is much, much tougher.

Our eldest sailed through most of his teenage years. He’s never been an easy child; ADHD and dyslexia ensured lots of tantrums and tears (and that was just us!), but he was & is a joy to be around. I can remember feeling quite smug when other parents of his peers would tell stories of all night drinking sessions, missed curfews, answering back, mystery stains on clothes and so on. Out biggest issue then was the frequent visits to A&E with rugby injuries.

But then came year 11, and we had a very, very tough few months. Various things happened that were beyond our control – exams, family bereavement, peer pressure, hormones – and they all happened at once. I’m not going into details here, but at the time I felt we would never get through it. I couldn’t see how our beautiful boy would find his way back to us. Older parents told us that as long as we could hold on tight through the storm, we would get through, probably stronger than before. They were right. We did, and although there have been inevitable hiccups along the way, we are better than before. It didn’t kill us, but instead made us stronger.

So now we are standing, looking at the teenage storm that is ahead of us once more. Some of our youngest’s peers seem to be in the storm already, others seem quite naive and a way off.  I think we are closer than we might like to think, but I also think it’s going to be a very different teenage storm to last time; not better, not worse, just different.

I now completely believe that we are meant to have the storm. Just like the ‘terrible twos/threes/fours’ are meant to happen as these little people are becoming aware of themselves and their surroundings, so the teenage storm is meant to happen.  I like to think of the teenage brain as a caterpillar turning into a pupa, getting all mushed up, and then emerging at the end as a beautiful butterfly.  They need to push against us, to test boundaries, to see how far they can go and still come back safely. They need to explore new ideas, new music, new ways of living their lives. They also need to explore these new stronger, heavier, hairier bodies and see how to live with them. They are pupating from children to adults. There is now scientific evidence that shows that their brains do go through a form of rewiring as they learn to cope with hormones, feelings and ideas. They have to have the freedom to find out who they are, while still having us as a much hated safety net. We need to say no when we need to say no, but also to tell them that we love them even though they are smelly, grumpy, stroppy individuals. Even if we think that saying ‘I love you’ will be met with a smirk, an expletive or an ‘I hate you’, we still need to say it because they will hear us, and it will filter through.

We also need to be honest, though. With our eldest there were may days when I didn’t particularly like him, and I definitely didn’t like his behaviour, and I told him so. But I also told him that even when I didn’t like him very much, I always loved him completely. When I thought he wouldn’t listen, I wrote notes. When I thought that I would end up losing it with him and bellowing, I also wrote notes. Sometimes he wrote them back, sometimes I found them scrumpled up in the corner of his room.

Parenting is the hardest job in the world, and I think that the more you try and the better you do, the harder it may seem. However, it is the most important job, and the most amazing job. There are so many highs, but there are also lows.

I think that social media and hashtags like #soblessed #happyfamily #altogether and so on make this worse. We see unreal images of perfect children having perfect family time and the we look at the closed bedroom door, and feel that life isn’t available to us. We feel that we are failures because we don’t have the rose tinted, photoshopped social media life of friends or peers. It’s the same with academics. I remember when GCSE results came out and my feed was flooded with congratulation posts, grades and destinations (and it was the same at A-level). I couldn’t compete with that, as the results in our house weren’t that good. So I just posted how proud I was of him, because I was. He had had a hellish year, and we were just beginning to come out of the storm. I didn’t (& still don’t) care about how many GCSEs he got. I just cared about him, where he was, and how he was.

There are some parents I know who are in the storm.  If you read this, and it feels like this is you, whether I know you or not, please get in touch, either on FB or as a comment here. Don’t ever feel ashamed or worried. Most parents will go through what you’re going through right now, and we need to talk about it more instead of hiding behind our social media facades.

Yesterday (10th October) was World Mental Health Day.  We have more things going on at the moment, which I am not ready to blog about yet, that means that this feels more relevant than ever. What I can add is that mental health is as important as physical health. If I had a bad leg that had been bothering me for 4 weeks, you’d notice my limp, and probably hear me moan. If, however, I had been feeling down for 4 weeks and had been struggling to get out of bed in the morning, would you notice? Would you notice me being a little quieter than normal? That I am not quite as chirpy as I can be? Would you ask me if I was OK? Would you press me if I said yes, but you thought I wasn’t being entirely truthful?

If I had a magic wand, I wouldn’t rid the world of mental health issues. Neurodiversity and all the problems and issues that come with it make the world a better place, and if we got rid of the problems that come with it, we’d get run the risk of getting rid of neurodiversity too.

What I would do with my magic wand, is make neurodiversity more acceptable. I would make mental health & well being as important as physical health and well being. Being anxious would be as acceptable as having arthritis, for example. There would be support for any mental health issue. There would be no judgement on parents or partners or carers for ‘letting this happen’, and we would all work together to make sure that the person who has a mental health issue gets all the help they need to get better and back to their own normal, whatever that may be. We would celebrate our differences, so that the child with ASD, that adult with ADHD, the teen with ODD or the older person with OCD is accepted for who they are, and their strengths celebrated, and their weaker areas supported. Society could then become an amazing multi-coloured multi-layered jigsaw where we all fit together, work together and support each other.

My magic wand would give us all a place to feel safe, love and respected regardless of colour, gender, mental health, physical health or anything else that may otherwise divide us. And together, we would be amazing!

#RUOK #ItsOKNotToBeOK

So, at the beginning of the summer we started CBT. I say we as I went into all the sessions (his choice not mine) and we both learnt & benefited. School starts tomorrow, and I have had good nights’ sleep for over a week. He stayed at a friend’s house on Friday with no drama or angst. At the moment he is singing in his bedroom after an hour of baking with me. This is the first last day of the holidays when I haven’t felt like rocking in a corner due to cumulative stress. This is an amazing breakthrough. I get that CBT won’t work for everyone, and I also get that he clicked with his therapist straight away, and she ‘got’ him straight away, explaining the science behind what he thinks & feels, suggesting pod casts and YouTube sites for both of us, and books for me. When the sessions end at the end of September, I’m going to miss them. I have learnt new words  – catastrophising and awfulising – and I also learnt that I do both of these far too much. I also learnt that I know more than I thought I knew, and all of the things and coping mechanisms I have done with him have been right, I just needed to teach him to do them himself. And, obviously, there have been lots of new things that we have both learnt too.

In a month, we will have been discharged from CAMHS (again). Whether we go back again remains to be seen. I would like to think that, at the moment, things are under control and we won’t need to go back at all, and if we do, it won’t be for a while, but I also know and understand that there are no rules to any of this. We will take each day, week, month and term as it comes, and deal with any issues that may come along.

I think the picture below sums up our summer quite well – this is what happens when your clinically anxious son has a summer of CBT……and we haven’t quite hit the teenage hormones yet!!!

Last week, a petition popped up on my social media feed. You can read about it here, and it is a campaign to get mental health on the curriculum for agriculture courses at colleges and universities. Agriculture (and associated industries) has an incredible high suicide rate, and the person who set up the campaign has pointed out that they were taught about health and safety when using machinery, but no one ever taught them anything about keeping their mental well-being healthy.

Surely this should be on every course, not just agriculture courses. I teach teens, and listen to the problems that they face every day. It can be a very different world to the one I grew up in, and we need to put mental health firmly on the agenda, we need to remove stigma, and the language we use every day to make sure we help our teens grow up healthy in every way.

But let’s not forget adults – men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women, it’s the most common cause of death in men, and it’s still a taboo subject. There is an interesting article from Esquire Magazine here, and, as it points out, we are cutting deaths from cancer and other physical diseases, but mental health numbers, and suicides, are rising.

Women aren’t immune either, and there must be hundreds of woman suffering in silence from the effects of mental health issues.

However, controversial bit coming up, we also need to be honest, and change our language. If I have a bad day and am feeling a little low, I am not depressed, I am just feeling a little low. If I have an exam coming up and am worried, this doesn’t mean I am plagued with anxiety (if I have anxiety, I might be, but being worried about an exam is not the same as being overwhelmed by anxiety on a day to day basis).  Just as a cold is not the same as ‘flu, feeling sad after you go back to work after an amazing holiday is not the same as depression.

Nevertheless, if it is us who is struggling and suffering, we need to be brave enough to speak out. If we run a company, we need to support our workers and recognise that there are times when a sick day may be needed to alleviate a mental health issue, and not just physical health issues (like this company have, and it’s gone viral).

We need to put mental health and mental well-being firmly on the agenda. We need to be there for each other, to understand that what may be routine for us is a battle for someone else. We need to be supportive of our friends, colleagues and neighbours. We need to listen, and if it isn’t time to talk, we need to sit with them in the silence and let them know we are there.

 

So, Scottish Higher results were released last week, A-levels this week and GCSEs next week. Tensions are high in so many households, and there are teens wondering and worrying about how the world is going to carry on if they don’t get the magic 5, or the grades needed for uni. We can tell them that whatever happens, the world keeps turning, and the sun still rises and sets, and life carries on, but right now that means nothing. Everything, every possible future, their whole lives depends on what is on that piece of paper. Except, sometimes not getting your magic 5, your predicted grades, or any grades is the best thing that can happen. These are true stories.

Story 1:

A young man of 18 went to get his A-level results so that he could go to the university of his choice and read accounting & finance. He was clever, top sets at GCSEs, so although he had enjoyed a few nights out with friends in the lead up to exams, he felt relatively confident that he’d done OK. And then he opened the envelope, and saw that the predicted grades weren’t there at all. There was no way he was going to get into his first choice (or possibly second choice). Determined to go to university, he got into a college (not uni) to do an HND (equivalent of a FdSc today), and he had the best time, came out with good grades and on graduating, got a job in accounting. Different route, same outcome. Today, he is the managing director of a successful IT company, has worked all over Europe and is now planning his next adventure.

Story 2:

A young teen wanted to do biology GCSE, but was told by her biology teacher that she was not good enough to get good grades. Fast forward to GCSE results day, and they were all fine, but no biology. A-level choices were compromises, and, again, she did OK, but not fantastically, getting quite a lot lower than her predicted grades. Realising that she was not on the right path, she chose not to go to uni, and worked, got married and had a child before finally going to uni at 26 to do a biology based degree where she came top of her cohort. She then went on to do a biology based masters, and was top again. Just because a teacher tells you something doesn’t mean it’ true. If it’s what you really want to do, you will find a way.

Story 3:

A skware peg struggled all the way through school. Exam results were never particularly good, and he got into a cycle of ‘I’m not going to to well, why bother trying’. GCSE results day wasn’t very good (2 passes above C), retakes were the same, but after getting Maths & English Functional Skills at level 2 (GCSE equivalent(ish)) he got onto an AS level course, got a place at uni, but, again, had a disappointing results day. He took a year out, found himself, got a place at a different uni, and has just finished his first year, but because of his determination, may not be going back full time as other opportunities have appeared.

These are all true, and happened to people I know.  I also know people who got their grades, went to uni and have fantastic careers doing what they wanted to do. There are others who didn’t go to uni, didn’t do A-levels, and they are successful in their chosen fields. And there are others who choose to travel, to have a family & be a stay at home parents, or to go from job to job as they see opportunities. All of these people are successful in their own way.

So, to the parents and carers of those waiting for results this week or next, my advice is this: in the long run, it doesn’t matter what that piece of paper says. It will matter on the day, and will matter for several weeks later.  But sometimes, not being allowed to take biology, not doing well in your A-levels and doing things the ‘long way round’ is a blessing. I am glad I didn’t take biology. I am glad my grades weren’t that good, and I am glad that the world kept turning and I found fantastic new opportunities that I would have missed if I hadn’t been pushed onto a different path.