All good things…
…must come to an end. And things were going so well that I knew it couldn’t last forever. How quickly things can change. That’s what happened tonight.
In a rather public setting at my work, Samuel lost control of his temper. The thing that is the hardest part for me is my inability to understand it. I can’t get inside his head. While there are many emotions Samuel might experience that I can relate to, loss of control isn’t one of them.
Don’t get me wrong—I get angry. Anyone who knows me at all knows that. But I don’t lose control.
One thing I can relate to is what seems to make Samuel angry—the loss of control. I’m a control freak. I like to be in charge. So I try to make sure Samuel is in situations where he feels a sense of control by giving him choices (would you like a or b?) and not imposing my will upon him unless it is necessary. The problem that I struggle with is that the world doesn’t work that way…especially not for an 11-year-old. I don’t want Samuel to get a false sense of reality, but I also want to provide a setting in which he can continue to take those baby steps toward real progress.
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Some perspective may be helpful here. You don’t really know how often Samuel was out of control in the past, but he just made it over a week doing well. It could be the first time in his life that he’s done that. You also don’t know how his loss of control was handled in the past, although you can guess that perhaps it led to him getting his way. It almost certainly gave him a sense of power, even if it led to loss of privileges. Finally, and this is the hardest thing to get, I really believe that there can be a biological-chemical component here. Rage seems to give some kids a rush or a high. In the absense of some other way to get that feeling, they will resort to what amounts to a big kid, big league tantrum, and it is very difficult to structure the environment 100 percent of the time to avoid that possibility. At some level, Samuel knows that. He is using it to keep his distance because he does not believe that his actions are driving the results that he is getting. To him, the world is built on a totally random set of outcomes until he takes charge through rage. Stay calm, stay clear, and at every chance you get, point out how the good things he has done allow him to experience good things in return. Finally, I would like to remind you that Samuel may not see it, but he is unbelievably lucky to have found his way to you. God works in mysterious ways.