Raising Bipolar

One of the things we deal with on a nearly daily basis is Rye’s fear and confusion.

Despite the fact that he is very social, outgoing and somewhat daring, Rye has a lot of fears.  Many of them are common for children his age and many of them are exacerbated by the fact that he naturally struggles with mood regulation and impulse control and has also been through some trauma events with his bio-dad and been hospitalized as a young child – all of which he remembers with great clarity and seem to weave their way into so many of the emotions he processes on a day-to-day basis right now.  His fears are also compounded by his learning disabilities and processing disabilities and the muddled way his brain translates the world around him.

So, why is this important?  Well, to me it’s important because the way he processes the world and the fears that result of his mind workings have a great impact on his ability to feel safe, secure and calm.  And it is his ability to feel safe, secure and calm that enables him to regulate his emotions and minimize emotional outbursts.  So it is important for me to try and understand how he processes the world.  And it is important for me to help him understand and legitimize his way of thinking or correct his way of thinking and thus minimize his fears.  And it is important for me to try and teach him how to deal with the fear, anxiety and confusion he experiences and what to do when it wants to overtake him and control his life.

Anyway, this all came to mind because of what happened here yesterday.  Yesterday we were reading this book that he had brought home from the library.  The book is below his grade level but remember he is quite dyslexic so it is an appropriate level for him.

The book is about a soldier who comes home from war and makes a deal with the devil.  The soldier must kill a bear, skin the bear and wear this bearskin for I think 7 years, I can’t exactly remember. Anyway, despite the fact that the book in an award winner, it has some real creepy imagery and illustrations involving the devil and this was all too much for Rye.  We made it about a third of the way through the book and he got too creeped out and had to quit.   Now this could happen to any kid, no doubt.  The issue with Rye, however, is that it turns out through his confusion of what he had been taught at school, he thought the book was a real story.  He thought it was non-fiction, thus making it all the more scary.  And in his mind it never occured to him that is made no sense for it to be non-fiction due to the content.  At school he had been told to look for a non-fiction book.  He looked this one up, checked it out and took it home as a non-fiction book.  It never occured to him once we started reading it or even from the title that maybe he had looked the book up incorrectly or that it had been labeled incorrectly and no one at the school had corrected the mistake so there was no reason to think otherwise.

Luckily we figured out the miscommunication once he startet telling me why he was so scared and I was able to correct the incorrect beliefs.  However, things like this happen every day around here and it helps make sense of why emotions are all the more difficult to regulate with Rye.