Category Archives: Uncategorized

Being attached to the outcome is bad for relationships!

Posted on by
1

This started out as a Facebook post, but I thought it worthwhile to share here. This is an example of using son-rise principles. The principle I’m trying to teach is this:

You can be happy, even when you don’t get what you want.

January 4th, 2012
Lunch Time 
I’m in the process of teaching my kids how to eat food they don’t like without complaining. Today Granny made pea soup with potatoes. NOT my favorite. So I made a big deal out of the fact that I don’t care for the texture, the look, and the taste, but that I would choose to be grateful anyway because she made. (By the way I used lots of exaggerated facial expressions, and a bit of slapstick, because my kids are motivated by that. They think it’s funny). I I taught them the shoulder shrug and how to say “Meh, it’s not my favorite thing, but it’s OK.” Then I tasted it and said, “It’s not that bad. Not my favorite, but not that bad.” It worked! I mean, IT WORKED!!!! They both ate it, no complaints. However, I did have one food in there that they both really liked which was potatoes. I just put them in the soup and they realized that the soup tasted OK. Not great, but OK.

Dinner Time
Just to follow up with the same procedure at dinner. They were in full complaining mode about the salad. I explained to them that they could choose to complain all they wanted, but it wouldn’t get them what they want, and it wouldn’t have any effect on my happiness. I repeated the shoulder shrug lesson. It worked AGAIN! Yay! They ate the salad and then got to eat their preferred foods.

January 5th
Today was another story, and illustrates well what the key factor is to success of above model. Tonight’s dinner: Quinoa with coconut curry pork chops. HIGHLY delicious. However, there were two downsides. There was no food that Ezra really liked. Ezra started his usual routine of yelling at the food, throwing himself on the floor and saying he wouldn’t eat it, and then going to punch Micah. I figured this is just his usual “warm up” and after it’s over he sits down and eats. This time however, I was attached to the outcome. I wanted him to eat (which he never did by the way). He ended up not eating and having a 40 minutes screaming, sobbing, and banging doors melt down in his room (where we sent him to, because he wanted to physically take out his anger on Micah.) I went with him to help him calm down, but when that didn’t work and after discussing it with Aaron we decided that Micah was the one who tried and ate his food, and he was downstairs getting no attention, while Ezra was getting all the attention. So I went to Ezra told him that I loved him, and knew he would figure it out by himself, and that I was going downstairs with daddy to play with Micah, and he was welcome to join us as soon as he felt ready to. It took him 4 minutes before he showed up completely calm and ready to play with us. I remembered several lessons I thought I had already learned.

  1. If I am attached to the outcome, I’m empowering my kids to act out and my relationship with them is no longer important. Getting “the outcome” becomes the most important thing.
  2. Give attention to the behavior you want your children to have. So we went to play with Micah, instead of “helping” Ezra through his tantrum. Really why were we trying to help him anyway? So that we could feel better?
  3. Trust my child to figure it out for himself, and make his own choices. If he would rather be hungry than try the new food…OK. I didn’t want him to be hungry because it means he gets cranky, wakes me up early, and whines a whole lot more for food.
Alright. Carry on everyone. Thanks for letting me share.

 

Brain Scan

Posted on by
Reply

I wish I had another $3000 lying around to get one myself. It is very fascinating to see how the brain works. Typically when people go for a treatment they get two scans, one before treatment and then one after implementing some strategies. With Ezra this wasn’t really possible, because he had to be sedated and because he is so very young.

One of the reasons we had to fly to California is because Ezra could never hold still for 2 minutes, let alone 15 minutes of absolute stillness necessary for the scan. The California clinic is one of the few clinics that administers anesthesia. While talking to the doctor she explained that very few people do this kind of anesthesia, because it is very difficult to get them to sleep while still maintaining the brain function necessary to yield results for this specific scan. Thankfully all went well.

Ezra was injected with a radio isotope before the scan which travels through the blood stream into his brain and imprints on the brain showing the areas of activity. It was a bit funny, because they wanted to do a concentration test with him to see how the brain looks like when concentrating. The test consisted of him looking at the computer and hitting the space bar every time he saw a letter, except when the letter X popped up. He was really freaked out by the whole doctor’s office and people trying to put needles into him, so he couldn’t do the test at all. The only way I got him to calm down is by giving him my iPod and letting him listen to Wicked. It was slightly hilarious to me that we couldn’t explain the simple test to him, but that he knew how to scroll through the iPod interface and find the songs he wanted, which has at least five more steps in directions then just hitting the space bar.

Always so precious when asleep. I was very impressed by the clinic itself. This is Ezra in the wake up room. It had a comfortable couch, muted colors, a nice painting, and basically looked like a tidy home office in someone’s home. The staff explained that Dr.Amen wants his patients to be comfortable, and not frightened by a sterile, mechanical environment. The waiting room for kids too had a big bean bag, a TV with videos, games, and toys. I thought they did remarkably well.

The doctor gave us a picture of a typically developing 4-6 year old brain, and then showed us Ezra’s scan to compare. In the scan the brain functions have three colors: blue for medium activity, red for high activity, and white for extremely high activity. A typical brain is mostly blue throughout with a red part in the rear of the brain (cerebellum) that looks sort of like a bat seen from the top. Ezra however had several red centers throughout his brain, and some big white spots for extremely high activity. You might think that extremely high activity means he’s extra smart, or a high activity is good. It isn’t. It means the brain is overworking, which explains for example his repetitious behaviors, compulsions, and accounts for his ADHD. It also explains why he can’t sleep through the night and wakes up every day at 4 am. He can’t figure out how to rest. In the front part of his brain the ACG is lit up like an oval red disk the size of the thumb. If his ACG wasn’t so overactive he would be able to easily switch focus, and wouldn’t fixate on counting numbers and asking the same questions over and over. Another part that was overactive were his temporal lobes, which explains his temper tantrums, and anger outburst. The scan also showed that his cerebellum has problems analyzing sensory data which explains why he makes loud noises, jumps up and down etc. And finally there was some brain trauma evident probably from birth. The strategies he gave us to help all of these areas were:

1. Continue Son-Rise program. He was very impressed with how well Ezra was doing. Just looking at the scan he was surprised to see how functional he really was. He hadn’t expected that.
2. Continue with Gluten Casein Free Diet, find out the other food in-tolerances, and implement a higher protein, high vegetable diet.
3. 30 minutes a day of high aerobic exercise to boost blood flow in the brain
4. Take various supplements to help calm overactive areas
5. Do an interactive metronome therapy to help synchronize the brain halves (we can’t do that here in the Netherlands)
6. Get sensory integration therapy to help his brain learn how to process sensory information

Am I glad we got the scan? Yes, very much. I highly recommend it to anyone considering it. As of now we have not seen huge changes, but that is because its’ rather difficult to get an autistic child to eat what he doesn’t want to eat, and Ezra is a self-declared vegetarian who shuns all form of meat, and insists on potatoes, rice, pasta, and fruit. We also haven’t figured out how to get Ezra exercising aerobically, unless we get a dog, in which case he’s very motivated to run after doggy in the forest, but that means more work for me. We’re working on the sensory integration therapy, but haven’t yet found a therapist in the Netherlands who has time for us. The Son-Rise program is coming along now that we have some volunteers. I wish I could implement everything all at once, but I have to learn patience.