Hi and Happy Thanksgiving! I am not recording a “read-aloud” version today but will try to upload one later. It’s a busy season, so congratulations for finding this email among the holiday ads and end-of-year reminders filling your email box. It’s a very good thing for me that you did, thank you!
One night last week, as I was putting the vacuum away after cleaning under our kitchen table, I noticed that my son had gone into his “apartment” (the side of our house that is designed as his own suite of rooms) and had closed the door.
Closed his apartment door. This is something I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him do on his own, without our suggestion or request.
He shut the door to get away from the noise of the vacuum. Without protest, without freak out, without even a complaint (although I was running the vacuum so it’s possible there was a complaint I didn’t hear). He just stepped away from a noise that bothers him, and naturally closed the door as a buffer.
I doubt I’ve ever felt so happy while pushing a vacuum.
It sounds like such a silly, easy thing. But in this house, it is not.
Our son’s daily actions and reactions are fairly predictable. We see him performing the same behaviors every day with little variation, and along with everything else he “arranges” in our shared household, he prefers to leave his apartment door open. Always.
We have been showing him the benefits of having that door closed when it’s appropriate – when our TV competes with his, when household appliances or visitors are louder than he prefers, or when his own volume (especially at the end of the day) is rubbing against his parents’ need for quiet. We’ll close the door, explain the reason, and he’ll tolerate the change. For a bit.
I stood there for a minute, on the other side of that rarely closed door, and smiled. This wasn’t what I expected a “good fact” to look like.
I’ve been trying lately to note positive moments throughout the day, even if they’re tiny, to try what Dr. Rick Hanson says is a way to counter our brains’ natural negativity bias. Hanson, a psychologist and expert on “positive neuroplasticity,” says that our brains grasp onto the problems in life to protect us from potential threats – our ancestors “needed to get some carrots, food and so forth, but they really needed to avoid those sticks. Because if you fail to get a carrot today, you’ll have a chance at one tomorrow, but if you fail to avoid that stick today, that predator…? No more carrots forever. So, we naturally look for bad news, over-focus upon it, over-react to it…”
But, Hanson argues, if we practice seeing the positive aspects around us, even the smallest things, and pause to take them in, we can “re-wire” our brains to pay attention to the good.
The good, like an unexpected, closed door that shows my son is taking some initiative to manage his stress on his own.
I want my son to practice seeing these positives, too, so I knocked on his door and cracked it open. I let him know I was done with the vacuum and told him how smart he was to close his door and that I was so proud of him for taking care of himself.
He looked at me with almost a shrug, as if to say, “Well, duh, you were being loud.”
I closed his door again and noted that his nonchalance about this momentous achievement is a little joy, too.
That closed door is why we keep trying. Why we give him opportunities to grow and stretch beyond his anxieties. We can’t eliminate all his triggers, but we can hopefully help him learn how to better react when they arise. Even if some weeks it feels like we are struggling through those lessons with him over and over and over.
As strange as it sounds, I was hoping I might see him close his door during our recent Thanksgiving gathering. I mean, the main reason we offer to host is because our son can have access to his “safe space” if needed to escape from the group chatter.
He didn’t close his door, or need to retreat at all, and I’m taking that very much as a positive, too.
Oh yes, my negativity-biased brain wants to grasp onto the pre-party anxiety that washed over our house on Thanksgiving morning – the tears, frantic pacing, loud body, louder voice – and the similar post-guest come-down as he decompressed from keeping it together so well while everyone was here.
But I am choosing to overwrite those memories with the also true good that he stayed with our family, smiled, sat at the table with us, filled his belly with pumpkin bread (if nothing else), and seemed to enjoy being part of the group, despite all the re-arranged chairs, over-lapping voices, and non-preferred foods.
I am proud of him, and grateful, for all he is still learning to do. I hope you, too, can find the small moments of goodness in your day. They are there, even in the tiniest amounts. We just have to pause and pay attention to see them.
So many good things! It is hard to notice the small (to others not to us) achievements sometimes but it is the one thing that keeps me going. I still feel so completely lost some days but the little things definitely remind me that there are positives even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Thanks for sharing, I loved reading this.