Symptoms of dysfunction or signs of recovery?

Season #2 September 28, 2024

In this episode, we tackle a topic that resonates deeply with many families: recognizing the difference between dysfunction and signs of recovery when transitioning children out of the school system, especially those with PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance) or those experiencing burnout.
We explore the stages of recovery and why what might seem like problematic behaviors—such as changes in sleep patterns, resistance to routine, or shifts in eating habits—can actually be part of a natural healing process.

Key Points Covered:
- The expectations we often hold when bringing children home from a high-stress school environment, and why those expectations may not match the reality of recovery.
- How the brain and body respond to prolonged stress, and why the shift out of survival mode may look like exhaustion, disrupted sleep, or changes in behavior.
- The role of neurobiology in the recovery process: why children may stay awake at night and sleep during the day, refuse basic tasks like brushing their teeth, or experience shifts in food intake.
- The wisdom of the body and brain in recovery—how survival instincts help children find safety in unexpected ways.
- Shifting our perspective from seeing these behaviors as dysfunctional to understanding them as steps in the healing process.

We also discuss how family members can hold space for children during these critical phases of recovery, understanding that their needs are being met in ways that may not align with societal expectations but are vital for their healing.

Key Takeaways:
- Recovery from school-related trauma is a process, and the behaviors that may seem dysfunctional could actually be signs of deep healing.
- The neurobiological response to chronic stress can lead to sleep and eating disruptions, as well as resistance to demands—this is part of the body’s way of recovering from trauma.
- It’s crucial for families to trust the recovery process and provide a safe, supportive environment where children can heal in their own time.

Who Is This Episode For?:
This episode is for parents, caregivers, and educators working with children who are recovering from school-related trauma or who have a PDA profile. It provides insights into understanding what recovery looks like and how to support children through it without pathologizing natural healing responses.

Connect with Us:
- Website: ⁠www.kristyforbes.com.au⁠
- Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/_kristyforbes⁠
- Facebook: ⁠facebook.com/intunepathways⁠

Thank You:
A special thanks to our listeners for engaging with these important discussions. Your experiences and stories continue to inspire and guide us. And to my lovely friend, Alli Davies of Music and the Brain, for sitting alongside me as I infodumped about this topic, close to my heart.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] I liked your podcast topic this week. Can you please chat some more about the recovery phase when switching from school to homeschool, the stages of recovery? Yeah, I can. I think it looks different for every family. I think the reason I wanted to talk about that on the podcast last week is because I think We're so accustomed to the conditioning we have around what healthy looks like and what recovery looks like that we lose sight of when our children are actually doing really well when they have, say, a PDA profile or they're autistic or they're in burnout, whatever it is.

Sometimes We expect that when we bring our children home from school, if they have chronic prolonged stress associated with school or school associated trauma, we might bring them home and have this expectation that [00:01:00] because they don't have to go to school anymore, that they're going to be okay straight away or they're going to relax and their behavior is going to mellow out.

But actually it can be the opposite. Because the first thing is, If we have an experience of having to go into an environment, and I want to make this very clear that when I talk about this, it's never ever with judgment or criticism or shaming people whose children have been in the school system or are still in the school system.

I just like to talk about it factually and without placing any kind of, shaming toward anybody. When we've gone into that environment over and over and over and over and over, what happens is the tolerance for stress does its very best, the threat response does its very best to prepare us to be able to go into that environment as much as possible.

But then if [00:02:00] we really do have this incredible intolerance for that stress in that environment, it's going to wear thin over time. And when we're talking about primitive responses, we're working from almost the animal brain rather than our prefrontal cortex. And when we're in that primitive state, our prefrontal cortex is offline.

The part of our brain that is responsible for looking after impulsive behavior, regulation, staying calm, making rational decisions, those things are not accessible to us when we are children in fight or flight, what is accessible to us is the information that our primitive responses has stored via experience and history.

So if we've gone into that same environment over and over, that's the information the brain has, our neurobiology, our nervous system has. When we bring our children home, we might say, you never have to go to school again. Or that's it, [00:03:00] we're not going back to school. It's very hard for the neurobiology to trust in that.

So while we might consciously say, okay, great, I'm not going back to school. The threat response doesn't work that way. It's working off experience. Not language, not affirmations, not words that are said to us, but history and experience. That's why we have dreams. It's why we have nightmares. Because no matter what our conscious brain thinks, we have this other state of being, our subconscious, that has this experience that it has its own language for and needs to process in other ways.

When we bring our children home from school, as much as they might say, that's great. No school anymore. Fantastic. They have to go through this process where their threat response, their subconscious memories and experience needs to go through its own process, which is separate from our consciousness.

There may be nightmares. Coming out of survival [00:04:00] mode means that our bodies finally start to relax the way that we've been tensing our muscles. We were talking today about cortisol and adrenaline flooding through the system. That is a recipe for absolute exhaustion. When we come out of that state, people think that we're going to relax, but it's exhaustion. If that's the first time in a long time that you've not had to tense your muscles up and brace yourself for that chronic prolonged stress, the body relaxing, is then in a place where it can finally start to process what has actually been happening.

Because when we're in survival mode we put aside the processing of emotions, we put aside the processing of reality, and we just stay in fight or flight. We're suspended in that I've got to survive this, I've got to do it, I can't let myself know about the reality of how I truly feel. When we come out of survival mode, That's when [00:05:00] all of that processing starts.

The memories about things that teachers have said or done, they might seem really insignificant to us as parents, but for our children, they might have had a really big impact, so they might start talking through situations and scenarios a lot. They might start again with the nightmares and the dreams.

Their sleep may shift into a cycle where they are awake all night and sleeping during the day because their brain in its wisdom is looking for the safest way for them to have their needs met. We do a lot of talking about this being dysfunctional, where children with a PDA profile, especially when they've come out of survival mode, start sleeping through the day and being awake all night.

But it's actually a really clever way for their neurobiology to be able to find a time of day where they feel the safest and can actually sleep. Because when you're asleep during the day, [00:06:00] no one's making any demands of you, and you're safe. The rest of the world is awake, keeping watch over you. There's people there to keep you safe and secure.

But during the night, It doesn't feel like it's a good use of our time to be sleeping, because if we are awake during the night, again, there's no demands put on us because everybody else is asleep, and we can use that time to game or do whatever we need to do. So it's not, so much that a child is refusing or saying, no, I won't sleep.

It's a neurobiological process and it cycles. It needs to move through that cycle of trusting. We're not going back to school or we are safe. It's not so much we're not going back to school. It's, there really is safety. Along with that process is the resistance to comply with anything, because if you have a neurobiological [00:07:00] response, that is, I'm now out of threat response and I'm out of survival mode and I can relax, any tiny hint or indication of you having to comply with something again could be a threat that indicates that this is all starting again.

It might be starting with It's time to brush your teeth. That might have been a part of a routine to go to school, but it could also just be that taking orders, which is what it feels like for a PDAer, would be completely unsafe because we've been doing that for all of this time, and now we're chronically stressed or chronically ill or burnt out.

So again, the neurobiological process is really wise. And there's a really important reason that children are not able to bathe. They're not able to brush their teeth. Their hair becomes matted. Their sleep is disrupted. If they were toilet trained before, they may start bed wetting. These are also signs [00:08:00] of trauma.

They can be signs of trauma. All of these things are things that we expect of PDA children when they come out of prolonged stress. And what happens is we get caught up in what's happening and we only see that all these distressing things are happening. They're not sleeping when they should, their food and their eating

will probably change as well because their need for food changes. If we strip away the consciousness and look at the fact that humans are animals and we think about the fact that this person has been in a state of stress for a really long time and then they come out of it, The types of food that they're going to choose will probably change.

The times that they eat and how much they eat becomes more about survival than it does pleasure or comfort. So there may be food restriction or cutting back, they might be eating more. There's this [00:09:00] fixation in Western society to really hone in on what is the problem here. And we're so good at looking at symptoms and thinking they're the problem and missing the bigger picture, which is that the person has just come out of prolonged chronic stress.

What we see as symptoms or problems, are actually steps to recovery. When we know that somebody has been sleeping all day and awake all night, and their sleep starts to change so that they're sleeping all the time, then we might start to panic about that. Oh, at least they were awake during the night before, now they're asleep all the time.

But actually what that could mean is that they're more relaxed, And less stressed and they're able to sleep more now because that's the rest that they haven't been able to have for all of this time. We can still see things as problematic when actually they are improvements. It's really [00:10:00] incredible how human beings can find ways to survive and move themselves through things.

Symptoms of dysfunction or signs of recovery?

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