Here we go again...

It's been an interesting(!) few weeks in our house. Our daughter had a perforated ear drum, which caused her to vomit (all over our carpet!!!) - and this happened while both my husband and I were out of the room.

What happened after this makes absolute sense - she started to really panic whenever a parent wasn't in the room with her. She felt hot, tearful, worried, anytime we left the living room, or put her to bed, or took her to school.

It's almost exactly a year to the day when we had this exact same problem. She was sick and then she had an anxious response to this. This year it is less severe, thank goodness. But I have to admit that initially I just felt really gutted. Here we go again! We put in all this hard work last year, and she made incredible progress! And now we're back to square one! It's so unfair! But here's the thing...

It has been a really useful reminder to me that:

Anxiety is still there

Children can and do "relapse" or seem to go backwards

But

She has better skills of overcoming it than this time last year

And so do we

And it's a handy reminder of EXACTLY what I always tell parents that I work with: progress is not linear. We can't expect our children to behave like computers (if I do this, they will do that) because they are humans! Things happen, like perforated eardrums, that we just cannot control. And it is natural that initially she felt unsafe without us. But we know the steps to take to help teach her brain that she IS safe.

So yes, here we go again....but we've got this. Bring it on!