To bring you up to date, we have now begun to have Adam reassessed. Over the last 8 months, the progress that Adam had made, seemed to disappear and we want to know what is going on. We noticed an increase in aggression, as did the teacher, vice principal, and principal at his school. This escalated to point of an incident that ended in a 3-day suspension for tipping a desk over on the principal and throwing a chair at her. NOT a good way to deal with frustration!
This is a very good example of poor impulse control. Adam lacks the resources to think a situation out clearly before he acts.......in his mind, if he is angry, he will not stop to think about the best course of action, he will go with the "gut reaction". Because of this, he has a tendency to "hit or hurt" when he is mad, rather than stop and cool down before he does something that he ultimately regrets.
Similar incidents at home, usually directed toward immediate family members, left us at a loss. How do you cope with a child who regularily expresses his anger through violence. One very frightening incident left one child with bruises and another shaking with fear. We contacted our family Dr. with our concerns and asked them to help us get Adam back into the hospital program where he was originally diagnosed. As with many programs, the waiting period is much longer than we want it to be, but we have now had our first appointment at the hospital, and are encouraged that they will be able to help.
The school has supported us throughout this, as they too, are concerned about the levels of aggression that were experienced by them. They want to see Adam get the necessary help, but they also need to focus on protecting the students and staff at the school. The staff expressed their deep concern for this entire situation and we are pleased that they were able to recognize that some sort of intervention was needed, for all concerned!
Adam has now been seeing his new psychologist for about 2 months, and we are pleased with the results. The Dr. is focussing on anger management and has been helping Adam learn to recognize the feeling when it starts and giving him different ways to deal with it. So far we have seen a reduction in the number of violent outbursts, and for that we are very grateful. We still have a long way to go, but we have seen a big change and the number of behavioural incidents at school have also decreased.
Lack of violence is great.......but we are now concerned with the direction that Adam is dealing with his feelings. We have mentioned to the Dr. that Adam has been stealing objects from the house, and he has also been binging on food at any given opportunity. He is not binging in an eating disorder kind of way, but he is constantly sneaking (mostly) junk food. This is something that we are very familiar with, as he has done this all his life, or at least since he was old enough to get into the cupboards ;), but it is becoming more frequent. The Dr. believes that this is a non-violent way of projecting his anger, but it can be a very frustrating thing to deal with! (Well, the good thing is, that noone gets hurt, but still.......!) Hopefully we will be able to find another way of venting, but progress is progress. One really good thing that has come out of Adam's therapy is the fact that he is learning to express his feelings through words.......he's never really talked about how he feels before, but he is learning to do that. It's nice to finally understand a little bit about what goes on inside his head.