Next Steps

Today DH and I met with the therapist who will be working with AJ. She is not someone we knew previously, but came highly recommended by someone we know and trust.

She is a former pastor's wife (a widow, I think) who has been in the ministry for many years and went back to school late in life to get training as a counselor at seminary. She has grown children and teenaged grandchildren, and loves working with kids. She seems to be well-qualified and knowledgeable. I've heard good things from several different sources about her work.

Her goal is to work with both the child and the whole family to teach the parents some things that will be helpful in dealing with the child. She said that parents are really the most effective therapists and part of her job will be to equip us to do that.

AJ's first meeting with her will be later this week. I'm excited to see how it goes.

I did feel a bit silly that after all this time I finally finished a blog post about what's been going on with AJ, and then posted it right around the time she drastically improved. She is still doing much better today. The improvement she's made in the last few days is significant, though not complete.

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AJ got to the end of the day today and said that the best thing about her day was hearing that she will get to go to the counselor this week. (We've explained very little about it to her, but told her that the counselor is a lady sort of like a grandma that likes to play with kids and listen to them talk about whatever is bothering them and try to help them figure out how to work through their problems). She said the worst thing about the day was "everything about today."

Still, though, she seemed so much less unhappy throughout the day. She still has not had any major meltdowns this week. That is a dramatic change from the last few weeks. It's great seeing the exact same situations that have been triggering huge meltdowns for weeks suddenly happening with no meltdowns. There have been a number of other positive changes as well.

It's been so hard to sort through all of this these last few weeks and months. For instance, a number of different people have made observations or expressed concerns at some point (or a number of times) about certain elements of AJ's behavior and social interactions. The first few times over the years we just brushed it off, but it's hard to continue ignoring such comments when they are coming from multiple people who know us (and AJ) very well and have spent a lot of time with her and with us as a family in many different situations.

It's also really hard to sort through what's just normal for our child, and when it has escalated to a level to become worrisome. (And who really cares if "normal" for her is somewhat different from the "norm", as long as she's happy and it's not hurting anyone--everyone is unique anyway.)

We weren't really all that worried until her level of unhappiness degenerated to a point where it was fairly constant and severe. It happened so gradually, and it fluctuated so much for so long, that it's really hard to pinpoint when the current situation actually began. It's normal for a 6-year-old to have occasional meltdowns. It's not normal for the meltdowns and moping to take over most of the day nearly every day. Her descent of the last several weeks into almost constant meltdowns and misery and the new things she started saying and doing made us decide it was something we couldn't just wait for her to grow out of.

Obviously, there has been something bothering her, and whether it's circumstantial, physical, something else, or a combination of factors, it's something we want to help her work through.

It's easy to look at something like dairy consumption and say, "Oh, that's interesting . . . she had that severe illness followed by the wierd regression in speech and other skills about 2 weeks after we first introduced milk into her diet as a toddler, and then after we realized she was dairy-intolerant and put her on soy formula she did a lot better. Her worst times seem to coincide with the times she's getting lots of dairy products and the improvements this week correlate best with taking her off dairy, so it must be milk."

Or, "She has the most meltdowns when things are chaotic and unpredictable, and instilling predictable consistent routines has been extremely helpful, so that must be the issue." Or, "She's been responding to the stress we've all been under the last few years." Or, "It's just her personality." Or, "She has a problem functioning in this or that area and needs some extra help learning the skills." Or, "It's a spiritual battle, and all the prayers and extra time seeking the Lord lately must be making a difference." But the truth is that it's almost certainly a combination of factors, not just one simple thing.

We're not particularly concerned with getting a "diagnosis" of anything in particular--just in figuring out what is bothering AJ and how to help her, and also how best to help her work on the skills that she will need to function well in various environments as she grows up. If she's just quirky and generally happy, great. But when something is making her deeply miserable and affecting her ability to function, then we feel it's time to take it seriously.

It's also important that we continue looking at the entire family as an entity as well as each child invididually. So far the changes we're making and the things we're doing have been good for everyone. We're all benefitting. That's good.

I'm just glad that something is having positive results so quickly. Hopefully the combination of changes we're making at home and the play therapy will be effective. What exactly is causing the improvement isn't nearly as important as that the improvement continues. And whatever the surface cause appears to be, I'm thankful to God for bringing about these positive changes. I truly believe that He is unltimately the one to bring healing.