He wanted to go, but he couldn't

Watching William (7) slowly emerge from burnout brings up a lot of old memories.

Mostly flashbacks to my older son Cooper’s burnout from seven years ago.

One image keeps surfacing: 

It was a warm spring evening and we ordered pizza.

Jake put baby William in the wagon to walk over and pick it up.

I was planning to stay home with Cooper for ten minutes because he was still in burnout. 

Suddenly Cooper ran out of the house, dysregulated, and said: "Stop. I want to go!"

Jake stopped pulling the wagon down our driveway said, "Ok, jump in!"

And Cooper's body almost jolted backward. He growled. He started to move away from the wagon.

Jake said gently, "Okay, it looks like you don't want to go. We'll be right back."

Cooper then grabbed the wagon and tried to keep them from leaving.

I attempted to facilitate him going, by saying as gently as I could, "Honey, if you want to go, you can."

But as I tried to help his body into the wagon, he fought me. He wouldn’t get in, but he couldn't let them go without him.

It resulted in an enormous panic attack right there in the driveway.

At the point that this occurred, I had already been trying to understand Cooper's behavior for a long time.

First, there was the behavioral lens, then a sensory lens, then autism and ADHD lenses.

That day with the wagon, we had prepared him verbally. Gave him choice.

We had done so many things "right."

And yet there we were, in our driveway, completely stuck.

What I observed in that moment hammered home an intuition that had been percolating inside of me: 

There were two parts of Cooper driving his behavior, and they were warring with each other.

Cooper, his actual self, wanted to go.

He wanted to join his dad and his baby brother and walk over to the pizza place.

That desire was real.

It was coming from his Thinking Brain, his heart, and from what I now understand as intrinsic motivation.

But his threat response would not let him.

When the wagon started moving away from him, baby brother in it, his nervous system subconsciously registered a loss of control over his safe people.

His Survival Brain fired.

And in that activated state, he was equalizing, trying to control what was happening around him, to get back to felt safety.

Not because he was being manipulative, but because he was perceiving danger.

This is what I now call a cognitive loop.

And it is one of the hardest things to see in a child, teen or adult who is in or near burnout, because the level of cumulative nervous system activation tends to obscure everything but their panic.

When the Survival Brain is running the show for months on end, it can be hard to see what is behind it.

For example, the things the child, teen or adult’s Thinking Brain and heart actually want to do, learn, participate in, share, etc.

Before that moment on the sidewalk, I had been looking at Cooper's behavior and asking: "Why is he doing this?"

Through the wrong lenses, none of the answers made sense.

PDA was the missing piece for me and truly understanding this is not under his control.

That shift did not change what Cooper could do that evening. He ended up melting down and I spent time de-escalating him.

What it changed was how I understood who my child was. Not as a bad kid ruining my life on purpose, but rather as a child who was suffering too.

When you finally see this clearly, something in you stops trying to manage the behavior and starts trying to lower the threat instead.

The goal changes.

The energy changes.

And for many families, over time, that change in the parent's acceptance and energy is part of what creates enough felt safety for the child's window of tolerance to slowly, slowly grow.

Of course, It is a long game and doesn’t happen overnight. Some days the cognitive loop is all you can see.

But knowing it is a loop, and not just a wall, can make a meaningful difference in how you show up.

You are not alone in this, and you are not crazy.