Heading to the School for Behavioral Disorders
And what does it mean when your kid reconstructs the truth
The kiddo had another evaluation via Zoom yesterday. This one was to go to a six-week program at a special school about 90 minutes away, a school for kids with behavioral health disorders.
Is that an easy thing to say or write?
Yeah, no.
Is it necessary?
Absolutely.
But during the Zoom meeting, the assessor asked the kiddo if they ever felt like they were in a situation where their life or another’s life was in danger. The kiddo looked at their dad, Shaun, and asked him to leave the room.
He did.
He didn’t even eavesdrop because he’s a better person than I am.
But he told me that it just happened, and we both thought and said, “What? What could they possibly be saying?”
The only thing we could think of was when they acted out at school and had to be restrained by their teachers, the incident that created this giant second change in our lives. The first being the kiddo coming to live with us all the time.
With this kid though? It might not be the logical thing at all that the kiddo was relaying then.
As their teachers have witnessed, the kiddo remembers traumatic events where they rage or exhibit violent behavior incredibly differently than everyone else there, or they will claim to not remember it at all
They’ll say things that are absolutely inaccurate like:
You yelled at me first.
I slept on a couch at Disney.
The teacher grabbed me first.
I did not scratch you.
I did not make that hole in my pants.
They will say this even when other people are right there, people who will call them out and say the opposite of those statements happened.
Memory Distortion
People don’t often talk about how trauma often causes memory distortion, and this is definitely true for severe cases of PTSD. But for most of us, Deryn Strange and Nathan Lents write,
“Our memories are not perfect reconstructions of past events. Instead, remembering a past event is a combination of processes, piecing together different details, and making inferences to fill in the gaps to create a coherent whole. Normally these inferential processes serve us well, allowing us to make fast and accurate decisions about what we’ve seen and done.”
For a lot of people with OCD, cognitive distortion and memory distortion can be huge symptoms.
Aaron T Beck wrote in his paper “Cognitive Therapy: Nature and Relation to Behavior Therapy”:
“Cognitive distortions are ways of thinking that negatively skew the way in which we see the world, ourselves and others.1 First identified by the seminal cognitive-behavioral therapist Aaron Beck, cognitive distortions are prevalent in many forms of mental illness, including mood and anxiety disorders.”
But unlike people with OCD who think they are super responsible and overestimate the consequences for the things that happen and their own behaviors, the kiddo thinks that they are always a victim of others and bear no responsibility for events. While being a great advocate for themselves and things that trigger them, they usually have no understanding that violent words, hyperbolic language, and behaviors that “triggers” a cause and effect for others and their own world.
The question for us becomes: How can the kiddo take responsibility for things they won’t or don’t remember doing? For moments where they felt like the victim though they were the one threatening or being violent?
It’s super hard.
And I can almost relate. Back when I was 18, I was raped, and the guy was contagious with mono. The Epstein-Barry virus impacted my brain and body in all kinds of unique ways. I had horrible rashes. I had Jacksonian seizures. I lost IQ points and some of my pretty stellar auditory memory. I could no longer remember conversations and lectures verbatim from simple verbal or written triggers.
When I was having tons of seizures in college, I was put on anti-seizure medication that ended up being toxic for my body and caused me to both hallucinate snipers in the apartment building across the street and gave me some false memories—horrible false memories, which I foolishly told my mom who then told others. Those memories hurt those other people.
As soon as the medicine was out of my system, I knew that those snipers and those memories weren’t real, but they had felt real—so real—when that medication was messing with my brain and before I went to the hospital.
It was like my brain knew that my body was in danger from the medication but couldn’t quite articulate it. So, it gave me snipers and horrible, life-threatening false memories.
And sometimes I wonder if that’s what’s happening to the kiddo, too. Maybe somehow their brain is trying to protect them from knowing that they’ve had some really negative behavior that has hurt other people’s hearts. Maybe by twisting their memories into making them the victim of teachers and systems and their mom and grandmother and grandfather, they are trying to keep themself okay, to not spiral into the truth and responsibility of who they are?
I’m not a psychiatrist, obviously. I’m only a bonus mom. And even as I write this, I have to wonder if I’m doing the same thing as the kiddo. Am I writing this trying to understand something, create a narrative, because I can’t quite understand it? Am I looking for similarities in our experiences because I want so badly for them to be okay in the same way that I’m okay?
I have no clue.
And you know what? That’s okay.
It’s okay to not understand everything, to not have an answer always, to not have a clue, to see nuance instead of polarities.
How Do I Stay Mostly Positive?
Being happy and being positive even when you’ve survived trauma or wounds or when you’re terrified about your kid’s future isn’t a one-size-all formula. What helps me the most is remembering that other people’s actions don’t get to define me.
When someone assaulted me, that didn’t make me bad. It didn’t make me a victim. When an internet troll yells at me that I’m some horrible disparaging thing? It doesn’t make me that thing either, not unless I let it.
Other people’s behavior and labels for you don’t get to define you. That’s even true when they are your family.
Back in third or fourth grade, during their first psych evaluation and when the kiddo lived with their mom (not their biological one, they’ve never lived together), the kiddo told the counselor that I was a demon.
A demon.
It sounds pretty powerful, right? But sadly, I’m not powerful. I’m just a person.
But that moment taught me something that I have to keep relearning in order to stay happy and that’s this: Other people’s thoughts don’t get to define me either.
Even when it’s my own kid thinking those things.
You will always get to be a hero in some people’s stories and a villain in others. All you have control of is how you treat others and yourself, how you want to define your role in your story as you navigate this amazing world.
And to me that’s the first step in living happy. It’s being who you are, who you want to be, and not leaning into other people’s ignorant beliefs about what and who you are. You define yourself. You know you’re a shiny superstar. Don’t be afraid of how gorgeous you are, okay?
An interesting link:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0005789416300910?via%3Dihub