We just had our second to last counseling appointment for this Parent Child Interactive Therapy. I nailed it. One more to make sure things are going smoothly and then we are going to move onto the Parent Child Psychotherapy. With me. This is something that under the best of circumstances she would do with her mom, as her mom is the cause of the trauma and inner turmoil, but I will start it to hold her place while mom gets life under control. When we first went into all of this the counselor suggested that C would need both PCIT and PCP and we decided to start with PCIT to get her behavior under control. Which it is! Holy crap-oli. A month ago I could have told C to do something and we could have a 2 minute stare down of wills. Now I tell her to do something and she'll start in on it within 5 seconds or I can threaten a time-out and usually that gets her hustling to obey. And if the timeout doesn't work there are steps to take to make sure that it works and it has been relieving to my soul. I can breathe. I can take the girl in public and expect obedience and good behavior. No more tantrums, staredowns or stress that comes from a child that flat out won't listen to expectations. It is a miracle. I have put so much hard work into her. More work than I have my own children. And the payoff is finally coming.
This has been such a long time coming and I still feel like the phase 1 stuff was a little bit of a waste of time. I mean, I was so good at it and so far from it all at the same time it was frustrating. But it's good now and I am so good at it that today the counselor came to the house for our appointment and I was able to use my PRIDE skills on Talmage, Alaska and C, all at the same time. And it wasn't even hard. I was all in. All right there. And I exceeded by a million. Nearly doubling the requirements of 10. I was hitting numbers like 17 and 18.
We had to come to the house because the last appointment we had, C did exactly as I asked her each time, no time-out threatening needed. Which is fantastic, except that I needed to show that I could follow through with a time-out threaten and she never gave me the opportunity. So we amped it up by coming to the house where Alaska and Talmage could take some of her precious attention and I knew she would flip out. Which she did. The counselor noticed and is definitely going to focus on anger management type techniques to help her keep calm in frustrating situations in this next therapy we do.
This past week we have struggled hard with house rules. Things like hands to self and talking quietly. I asked the counselor about implementing my timeout techniques for those and there is a whole section on it in her big fat book. I am relieved. We will start doing that this week.
C's hardest things are not interrupting and giving people space. The counselor let me know that I could insist upon these things. Insist that she wait until I am done talking to someone and insist that she takes 2 steps back. This has given me some much needed breathing room and I don't feel like C needs to rule the house when someone is over. It is so amazing. So so so amazing.
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