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| RDI Consultant, Melissa Reiner |
Dranxiety /draeng ‘zaieti/
n. 1 a mixture of dread and anxiety.
2 great fear and apprehension combined
with concern and excessive unease.
A friend of mine who has five children (the eldest of which is diagnosed with Autism), just invented this fabulous new word to aptly describe the feeling that she and her husband wake up with each morning. Dranxiety. Always, of course, immediately lessened by anyone’s advice to, “...just calm down,” or to, “...relax.”
Now, we all know that it’s impossible to ‘get’ someone to no longer feel whatever level of dranxiety that they may be feeling at any given time. Any attempt to impose the imperative, ‘to calm’, or ‘to relax’, is about as effective on parents as it is on their children, that is to say, not at all.
While I was pregnant with my third child, I often dealt with bouts of dranxiety, myself. Periodically, thoughts would creep in and leave me feeling very stressed out about how I was going to successfully juggle the demands of having three children under the age of 5.
Upon giving birth to our third son, I was given no choice but to slow way down. I have been known to take as long as 45 minutes to get everyone out of our minivan. But, often, I have carved out that amount of time and more in order to cushion the blow of the blessed circus that is having three children.
I have learned that by taking my time, and building in that breathing room, I afford myself an opportunity to release some of that pressure cooker of life that may build up throughout each day. This isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of times when we have to hustle and be somewhere sooner than later. There may not always be the luxury of time.
It’s not always realistic to take all the time in the world to accomplish the simplest of tasks, but if I am at all able to create even the smallest amount of slowed pacing in my life, it turns out that my life is better. My children and I all find ourselves, then, to be much more relaxed and filled with calm. The opposite of dranxiety.
This same friend of mine gave me some stupendous advice. She told me that she likes to look at her life with her kids as playing out in phases. She slows down her interactions with her children by breaking down each element of the interaction.
For example, if she decides to attempt to take all five of her children to the park, she likes to look at the time it takes her to gather everyone together to leave for the park as phase 1. She then views the time spent at the park as phase 2. Leaving the park, all together and in one piece, ends up being phase 3.
Inevitably, one of the phases is bound to experience a breakdown or glitch of some sort or other. Likely, at least one phase will not end up being as successful as the others. The experience then, in actuality, becomes a total success. If one or even two phases end up being a debacle, the experience as a whole will still have been a complete success.
As Dr. Gutstein says, if you’re “batting 1000” and writing your own paycheck in the business of baseball, it’s because you’re hitting a homerun every one in three times up to bat. One third of the time is a thorough success....in baseball and at the park.
Parents can readily lose sight of the big picture and we can often find ourselves caught up in the rush of the world as it grabs us by the bootstraps and hurtles us ever forward. It is our imperative as parents. We owe it to ourselves and to our family to connect in with the RDI way and utilize the pausing and slowed pacing in our interactions with our children. Doing so will help ameliorate our dread and anxiety.
This is no small feat, but it beats the alternative. We either live each day with stress weakening our immune system, as well as, our resolve; or we live each day, on a moment to moment basis wherein unhealthy input is abated by breathing through and slowing down in our welcomed moments of connectedness with our family.
I endeavor to choose the latter.
Posted
13 Feb 2012 8:14 AM
by
Elizabeth Alford