In a way, resolutions are something we should do more often than once a year... that's a long time to go trying to meet the same goal. It's a long time to have to remember a goal and muster the energy to tackle it. Anytime I'm working in a clinical setting, a quarterly or monthly assessment of progress is required in order to gather a sense of what's working and what's not. And any time I start with a child or a family, the first thing I do is take a thorough assessment of both the good and the bad stuff- the stuff that's working and the stuff that needs a bit of a facelift, or major surgery.
So, the question is where to start? When there's a lot that contributes to human functioning and a lot that can go haywire, where do you go first? As a therapist, an approach that I learned years ago and that I still use all the time is Floortime™ . Its a model that can be used in the treatment of autism, but I have found great success in using it in most all of my cases. Anyway, without going into too much detail, Floortime goes by Six Developmental Milestones to navigate the course of treatment. The first milestone is all about encouraging interest in the world, which happens when the individual feels centered and regulated. Its amazing how out-of-sorts behaviors get when a person's internal system is totally out of whack. All us parents know this very well when we drag our kids on vacation. Case and point: what should have been a 9 hour drive to Missouri over the holidays somehow turned into a 24 hour journey, which resulted in two consecutive nights of taking 2 hours to get our daughter to bed. By Christmas night, she was so off her routine that she was running circles around the living room floor for literally two hours. We have a word for this in our house- berserko. When my child gets off her routine for several days straight, she goes berserko, and it takes several days to recover from it. We've been home for almost a week and we're still trying to recover. (By the way, I'm convinced that Berserko should be included in the next version of the DSM).
No one knows the importance of regulatory needs like parents. This is why, whenever a parent comes to me for help with their kid's behavior, I always ask early on about how the kid is eating, sleeping, and pooping. How these three basic things are going can say a lot about what might be hugely contributing to the problem. And this is true not just for two-year-olds, but for all of us. Our bodies are the best indicator for how we are functioning, how we are managing stress, etc.
So, as my first experiment in tasting my own medicine, I will ask myself to assess what is "off" in my own system.
Ok- I just asked myself and the response came instantaneously... SLEEP! Almost everyday after I've gotten my daughter's needs taken care of and can finally tune into how I'm feeling (which sometimes doesn't happen until much later in the day), I almost always feel tired. With as much as I work with parents to get their kids on a regular bedtime schedule, I am totally guilty of not keeping one myself. Learning how to sleep regularly is a hard skill to learn- for babies and grown-ups. Some fight it harder than others, and I'm afraid that my daughter has taken after me in this regard. Anyways, I feel like this is the best place to start because the rare times when I do actually get enough rest, I feel like a new woman the next day. Even though its not an easy skill to learn, its actually one of the easiest solutions in the book to feeling good, and the payoff is totally worth the discipline that goes into it.
With all this said, I'm gonna try to sleep better this week. This means that not only will I have to go to bed earlier, I'll also have to get my stuff done during the day rather than pushing it off for late at night. This will be realistic with some things and not so much with others. As the week goes along, I'm sure I'll figure out which things get done and which things I'll have to forget about until the weekend.
I'll let you know how all this goes... All I know is that my husband will be psyched about this plan. He's been trying to get me to go to bed earlier since we've been married. I hate to say that he's been right all along.
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