"My Brain Didn't Be Good to Me"

As Beatrice gets older, I see more and more ways in which she is very much like I was at her age, both for better and for worse.

Unfortunately, Beatrice can easily become anxious and depressed, as I used to.  But one way in which we are different is how she deals with it.  When I was little, I mostly just accepted that I would often be scared or sad and didn't do much to combat it, but Beatrice is constantly working out practical strategies to manage her own emotions.

She often repeats phrases to herself to remind herself to slow down and not panic.  For example, she's afraid to walk into my dark bedroom on her way to the bathroom on the other side, so now every time she gets ready to enter the bedroom, she takes a deep breath and says out loud, "Monsters are make-believe" and then walks in.  She also makes up songs that remind her of good behaviors and make her feel more in control.

But I discovered the most striking example of this the other day, when out of nowhere she told me about her technique for managing nightmares.  As she describes it, when she is caught in a bad dream (her examples were "a bear eating a duck" and "a bookstore where all the books have flames in the middle of them") she will forcibly drag her face along her pillow, making a loud fabric swishing sound, which allows her to partially wake up and reset her dream to one that is funny or happy (like a walking, talking candy cane).

Usually this works for her, she says, but then a few days ago she told me she had tried it the night before and it didn't work - no matter how many times she made the swishing sound and reset her dream, another equally bad dream would take its place ("my brain didn't be good to me").  So, she told me confidently, she had decided to draw a picture of something happy (she and Arthur going sledding together) and sleep with the drawing, so that if she got scared in the middle of the night she could "show it to [her] brain to remind it."  And the next morning she said it worked!

I have to say, I am really impressed by that level of active emotional self-management in a four-year-old.