2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Our psyche cannot stand uncertainty …
Children are sick. This is fine. ARI and ARVI, chickenpox, mumps, even meningitis, measles and scarlet fever - the diagnoses are unpleasant, but not very scary - there is an understandable treatment, and they usually recover rather quickly from them.
And there are really scary diagnoses:
- they look like a surname after the word "syndrome" - Down, Rhett, Williams, Smith-Magenis, Stephen-Johnson, etc.
- or as an abbreviation: cerebral palsy, UO, ZPR, ZPRR, ADHD
- or as familiar words like "autism", "schizophrenia", "imbecility", "leukemia", "lymphoma", etc.
- or as unknown and from this even more frightening words of rare diseases.
I have met very few people (but they are) who were not scared when they heard such diagnoses in relation to themselves, their relatives, and most importantly, their children. Fright. Shock. Stupor. Why? The answer is obvious - the first associations that come with these words: "forever", "freak", "suffering", "pain", "crazy", "death" and many others are not better.
To learn this about your child, especially for people who grew up in an aggressive, intolerant society, is a grief. Grief is a state in which a person falls when he loses something very important to himself.
When a terrible diagnosis is made to a child, a person often loses all or some of this:
FEELING OF SECURITY, falls into the experience of the danger of the child's life and his own;
A FEELING OF STABILITY AND DEFINITION, just now everything was clear and suddenly the situation changed, changed dramatically and radically, new unknown data appeared in it, many unknowns!
IMAGE OF THE FUTURE, gets into a state of uncertainty of the future, yesterday we planned something, dreamed, got together, and now how next?
THE IMAGE OF YOURSELF, YOUR IDENTITY. For example, such: "I am the parent of a healthy child", "I am a good parent", "I am a successful successful person", "I am the one who can cope with any situation", "I am the one who never becomes discouraged" and even “I am the one who is always lucky”, etc. There can be very different identities that suffer when faced with a terrible diagnosis. None of us have ever dreamed about the identity of a “parent of a disabled child” or “a parent of a terminally ill child” and even about the identity of a “parent of a premature baby”. Accepting such a role is very difficult and scary. To give up the old identity is bitter, creepy.
If a person has lost something, he begins to grieve. Researchers say that the process of mourning includes such stages as Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Despair / Sadness, Acceptance. They do not have to be completed in that order. We will not go deep into theory now.
After all, if a person is experiencing grief, he has no time for a complex theory, not for clever words. It is very difficult for him to remain calm and soberly assess the situation, to choose reasonable steps. A person loses the ability to think critically and begins to rush in search of a refutation of the diagnosis or a "magic pill" that will quickly save his child from this terrible diagnosis.
This is fine! Our psyche does not tolerate uncertainty, that is, it cannot be in it for a long time, it always seeks to find support, stability, clarity and a way out, a decision, a plan of action.
The more unexpected the news of the diagnosis turned out to be for a person, the less clear it is, the less clarity in treatment and prognosis, the higher the likelihood that the news will shock the parent and will be perceived by his psyche as traumatic. The main emotion in this case is fear. Fear for the child's life (now and in the future) and his own with such a child. This fear is animal horror. Such intense fear disables or weakens the planning functions of the frontal lobes. The control is intercepted by an older, which means, a stronger part of the brain - the limbic system and #Auntie_Amygdala, which has only 3 options for action: hit, run or freeze.
A person experiencing shock falls into one of these states or into each of them alternately. How does it manifest?
BEY: a person reacts to the words and actions of others and to events aggressively, excessively and inadequately to the situation, any little thing causes him irritation or a flash of aggression, or tears, sobs, which is difficult to cope with.
RUN: a person tries to get away from problems and daunting tasks, as if to run away, to hide his head in the sand “I don’t want to know anything, I don’t want to solve anything, I want to sleep and wake up, but all this horror has disappeared” or physically runs away - from the family, from the child, into own illness and helplessness.
Or, on the contrary, it gets involved in violent chaotic activity - urgently, faster, save, run away, time is running out! A person is thrown from side to side, he rushes in panic between doctors, healers, osteopaths, homeopaths, various specialists and charlatans, sells property, gets into colossal debts to pay for the services of all these people, sometimes rushes around the world, unreasonably squandering all his family resources and resources.
FREEZE: a person seems to be turned off from what is happening, reacts weakly to external stimuli, if he is persistently fiddled with, he answers “huh? what? yeah. With his body he is here, but with his thoughts somewhere far / deep or nowhere, in a ringing void.
From these signs, you can tell that the person is in shock or post-shock state in which they are stuck. He needs help, preferably the help of professional psychologists who can work with shock trauma. It is important for others to understand that the main thing that a person in such a state needs is the return of calmness, stability and the ability to think clearly and make informed decisions. It is rather difficult to appeal to his logic, to appeal to the voice of reason, to try to explain something and to (re) convince in something - the higher mental functions are weakened, tk. the limbic system turned on the SOS siren at full power! ALARM! Will you yourself be able to be calm, think clearly and make reasonable decisions in a room in which a fire siren howls and emergency lights flash? And if you have been locked in this room for a month, a year, several years? Have you presented? What is the main task in such a situation? Right. Disable siren and lamps.
In order to do this, you need to turn not so much to the mind as to the body. Only the whole body is a more powerful partner of ours, able to calm the limbic system, that is, to resist the ancient structures of our own brain and return us control and the ability to think clearly.
Therefore, it is important for a person to come to the maximum possible calm state at the moment before making any decisions related to the child. And the main task of a helping specialist (doctor, psychologist, other professional) or a loved one who is nearby is to help the parent return to a state of calm.
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