Raising Resiliance | Ilanit Gerson

Ilanit Gerson, guest · [17:20]So the example I always give, and I'm sorry if you've heard this before, is imagine if you've been hijacked. One night you came home and you were hijacked in your driveway. After that, you carry on driving, you're a little bit traumatized, but you now know that you're scared to stop, and every time you get to Red Robot, you do what we only do in Joburg, you, at night, you stop and you look both ways and you cross, right? Because Red Robots, at night you don't keep them. Say there's a traffic cop just across from the Red Robot as I drive through it and he stops me and he says, you've broken the law, you just drove through a Red Robot. I believe I was gonna get hijacked at that robot. So I don't say, I'm sorry, officer, please forgive me, I made a mistake. I say, what law? If you were doing your job, there wouldn't be hijackers at every place. I didn't break the law. You're not making the law. You're the problem, not me. You can't do. And I would get exceptionally aggressive and manipulative because anxious people make their own rules in the world. They decide what their rules will be to manage. So manipulative children get every possible way to sleep in parents' beds, to get out of doing homework, to get out of doing deadlines. They cry, they sick, they, every single test or deadline is an ordeal, and they start to learn how to manipulate to get their needs met. So manipulative doesn't mean malicious, but it means trying to get their needs met.

Ilanit Gerson, guest · [19:13]My best analogy of anxiety, which I use all the time to, for parents to understand, is if everyone's been anxious at a certain time. So think for a minute of a time when you were really anxious, something, you, you knew something bad would happen. Usually it's imaginary, but whether it was or wasn't. When children and teenagers are anxious, imagine it's like a hole over here. You've got this anxious hole that even us as adults can't handle. That's why adults self-medicate, we drink, we take tranquilizers, we smoke, we do something to get rid of that feeling. Children and teenagers hopefully can't access that all, let's just say. So they've got this terrible feeling and they have to try and get rid of it. So they learn from a young age, and this I'm talking about is genetic anxiety, children who are anxious, they can't sit with that feeling something bad is going to happen. So they learn that if they can't Control their mom or their safest caregiver, they're going to feel better. So they then control mom, and what they say is, I'm not bathing now, I'm not eating supper, I'm not whatever, I'm only going to do it when daddy's home or when I decide, or I'm not hungry, or I hate snackages, I've eaten them for the last three weeks, but tonight I hate that and I'm never eating it again and you have to make me another supper. We as parents have limited energy and ability to cope with our child getting very, very fixated on something. So we usually give in. We give them a later bedtime, we let them sleep in our bed, we make them a different supper, and our kids feel great because that hole has closed for a few minutes until they've done or got what they wanted, and that then becomes a hole of, oh my god, I'm in control and I'm the adult in my home, so the hole gets bigger, so I get more controlling. And that's why if you want to find an anxious child, you say to the parents who's in control of your family, the anxious child is controlling everything because they've got so much more energy than us, and we don't realize we're making it worse. And that's why there are actually very specific parenting ways to get an anxious child to reverse that and close that hole.

Ilanit Gerson, guest · [32:33]So then I'm very, very cruel, and I say to the parents, I really want to meet your kid, but we're just going to get a few things in place first, and as soon as you've got that in place, I'll meet your kid. And I do four or five sessions where we get parents to take control again, where there is a bedtime, where there's a supper time, where there's a bedtime routine, where there's a time in the house where everyone switches off phones and has to look at each other, and the fathers find that the hardest of everyone. The children don't mind it as much as the dads do, usually. And all the moms who all say they're off their phones, and the dads are like, just check on her settings how much she used her phone, you know, so that kind of thing. What's interesting to me is not only are the children, but as adults, we're oblivious of how much we're on our own phones at times when we could be with our children. So the first thing with parents is unless you are going to be in control of your child, you're not going to be able to help him or her, and you've got to get control back. And parents will fight it, they will say, well, what am I supposed to do? Okay, fine, you want my child to go to school, what am I supposed to do if he won't go? And, and they mean that they're not being silly. They have lost control of their child when their child was four or five years old and set the rules in the home. And it's a very hard thing to get back to consistent rules. You only have four or five rules. So my first advice to parents is you create three to five rules in your home and you dial those rules. You say yes to everything else because your kids are going to beat you on everything else. But on these, if you've made a bedtime, that's the bedtime. If you've made a wake up time, if you've made a meal time, if you've made a rule. And quite interestingly, once you've got to that point, parents stop being scared of their own children because usually you're scared of a very anxious child. And already by then, our sons don't even meet the kids that originally were coming. Sometimes by then, the parents have already managed to shift things a lot.

Ilanit Gerson, guest · [58:49]There's a Professor Daniel Siegel, who if any of you haven't heard of, is worth looking at. He's got a lot of YouTube videos, and his expertise is emotional regulation. He has a model called the hand model in flipping the lid. Have any of you heard of it? So can I explain it quickly? What he's explaining is if you imagine this is the brain, whereas our brain is the size of our two fists, and you would look at it like this, there are three parts of our brains that are reactive, that react emotionally. There's our thumb, which is the trigger, something happens that makes us react. And that reaction automatically flips our brain, and our brain separates into our feelings, which are here, and our thoughts, which are here, similar to what I said before of our heart and our brain, and that actually separates. So an example is somebody is hijacked. I just want to use that as an example. The trigger is you see a gun pointed at you. You straight away go into the feelings part of your brain, which is survival, and you stop breathing. You don't, you do whatever you can to get out of that dangerous situation. You're not thinking, is that a Glock or what model is that? I wonder where he got it. You're not thinking anything. You're thinking survive because your brain is separated. When later, when that happens, adrenaline surges through into the brain because of that trigger, and that adrenaline takes 72 hours to drain again. So just to explain what PTSD is, because that comes in with anxiety, is every single time You think about that gun for that next 72 hours, a surge of adrenaline comes through. After 72 hours, the chemicals start to drain, and that's why we no longer debrief immediately when somebody's in a trauma or a tragedy right away. We know we work through the body in the beginning, we don't work through the brain for the first 72 hours. It's a total shift from how I was trained to how we work now. So what we do know, though, is that adrenaline starts to drain, and that goes back down to what we call wise brain. Wise brain is where you can think, think and feel and make a good decision with all parts of your brain together, and that's the ideal way to function. When you get flipped, people don't always go into only feelings. You've ever spoken to people who are totally logical, and actually you want to say, do you have emotions? Are there any emotions there? They can get stuck in their totally analytical thinking brains. They also are all actuaries or engineers or accountants. No, sorry, I'm just joking. I'm just joking. they're not in education, the ones who get stuck in their thinking brain. But this now, every time you'd, after the hijacking, let's just say you've got back down to wise brain where you're making better life decisions, And you go to a robot where a beggar comes at your house, at your window, at the exact place where you see the gun. It's a month later, you get that exact trigger if you're being hijacked. Your brain flips like that, and you're like, this person has been at the robot, I know his name, I give him lunch every day, I can't believe I got such a fright, what's wrong with me? But that surged another 72 hours worth of adrenaline into your brain, because your brain treats it the same. And that then has to go down. Just by the way, post-traumatic stress disorder is more than six months of adrenaline that just doesn't drain,

Ilanit Gerson, guest · [67:36]The other big thing, big step to tell parents is don't let your children avoid. Anxiety is about avoiding. So you say, you know what, there's this new craze, mental health days. I've told my child they're allowed three mental health days a term. So today he's very stressed, there's two vocabulary tests and this or that. So I've told my kid, okay, you're entitled to a mental health day, you can have that. And I hear it all the time from parents in every community, from every place. What does that do? I've got something I don't want to get to in school, so I'm going to avoid it and stay home, with mom and dad's permission, never mind. But now I have the whole weekend to worry about that test that was on Friday, and Monday I have to face everything I missed on Friday, plus the tests that I thought I was so clever to miss, plus whatever else I missed, and I've had the whole weekend build up, and that mountain, which in my mind was this big, is now this big. And that mountain gets bigger, so we think we're helping when we let our children avoid. We feel like the worst parents in the world, but you take them out of the car crying, and you frog march them into school. School refusal is one of the biggest slippery slopes for parents when they're losing control, and that starts with these mental health or shame. Today's going to be hard, just stay home and avoid it. The minute we let our children start avoiding external deadlines, we're on a slippery slope. The rule we always say is, I wish You don't have to go to school, but we live in South Africa. The rule of the government is that you have to go to school. It's not my rule, it's the government's rule, so get in the car, we're going to school. And it actually works because it's a rule and children listen to rules. But the minute we start letting them avoid, everything gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and by the time it gets to me or to some professional intervention, it's so much bigger than it ever had to be in the beginning.

Ilanit Gerson, guest · [104:21]The other one is you can use a pocket money system, which also works. What that means is, let's say you can't get our kids to school on time, so we put a system into place with very concrete steps. If by 7.20 in the morning, you are, have had breakfast, you've brushed your teeth, your shoes are on, and your school bag is on your bag, you're going to get 10 rand. If you're not ready at 7.20, you don't get the money. That way, when they start fighting at breakfast and everything goes everywhere, they refuse to eat breakfast, you've got a consequence. If you're not going in the car, you haven't eaten breakfast, but remember, if you're not ready on time, you're not getting your money. First few week, first week or two, that kid's like, I don't care, I don't want the money anyway. If you're lucky and you've got more than one child, when their sibling gets more money than them on payday on Friday, it kills them. It's not the point of the money, it's the point that brother or sister got more than them, and that makes them take the system seriously. If you've only got one child, will you actually still do a payday? You have a family meeting, and it goes once a week, and you say, let's add up what you've earned. Okay, you could have earned forty rand, you could have earned a hundred rand, but you've ended up with twenty rand. Well done, there were two times that you were ready. And often they will put on that whole teenage I don't care thing, but children do want approval and they do want to please their parents. When we are consistent and don't keep changing the goals, they actually lack to do things right when they can. The problem is when we keep changing the goals. So what parents can't resist doing is now you've got the money system, and then the money system is only to be in the car at 7.20, let's just say, but that afternoon, that night at supper, he's eating with his fingers and you say, that's it, buddy, I'm taking away 10 rand. You've just, the whole system's just shifted, the goals changed, the system, it becomes, I don't know if anyone's on discovery, if you try figure out vitality, it becomes vitality, it's so complicated, you don't know what you're doing, so you just pay every month and don't give, don't do it anyway. So I don't know if anyone is doing that. But the system has to be so easy and so transparent that it works.