overcoming anger {day 27} physical discipline

Within about 30 hours I will have: 

Attended a training on Alternatives to Physical Discipline

Spoken for the first time and scheduled my first appointment with a counselor
Attended a training on Reactive Attachment Disorder

(and attended a foster parent family night). 

Busy day & a half! 

Since, as of this writing  I have not attended the RAD workshop, I am going to focus on the first workshop.  

I signed up for this a month ago because I need to complete 12 training hours to keep my foster parent license active.  I was, of course, interested in the topic.  When I found out some foster parents would be required to attend, I was a bit worried.  The session was better than expected.  

It was set up in a bit of a round table format.  Instead of being lectured to, the majority of the session involved learning from one another's experiences.  Instead of the session being conducted by a 22 year old case worker who has never parented, it was conducted by two long-time veteran foster parents with about 50 years of parenting (and a zillion kids) between them. 

The take home lesson for me was abusers are not always bad people.  Most of the time a child abuser is a relatively normal person who snaps under pressure.  This is excluding sexual abuse and relates to instances of severe physical abuse.  

One foster mom discussed two kids she had.  One was burned on the back with an iron.  One was thrown, resulting in numerous skull fractures.  Both situations involved one instance of severe abuse and in both cases the mother lost her child.  Obviously, because of the snap, the women's lives will never ever ever be the same again. 

A little more than a month ago I had reached a breaking point with Catie.  She was screaming for an hour or more, instead of napping.  Obviously, she was not going to stop screaming without me.  I did not want to go in and get her.  As I sat outside her room, my anger was only escalating.  I did not see how this situation was going to end good.  This was my breaking point.  My husband came home, I asked him to come into the room, we cleared the children and had a mini intervention.  I contemplated my future on my current course.  Injured child?  Jail?  Loosing my kids?  I am in CYS world, I know what happens.  

That was the moment that led me to this series.  

In our session today we did an activity where we all started with a balloon.  As the veteran foster mom labelled stressors that we may have faced we added air to our balloons.  As we looked at our full balloons, she challenged us to remember the stressors were not entirely our children.  As she listed some possibilities to take the air out of our balloons (exercise, prayer, doing something for yourself, etc) not many of us lost air.  

Finally, a resource that we all brought home was a little book called "Think Twice: The Medical Effects of Physical Punishment."  

For other parents who struggle with the topic of physical discipline, it may be a book worth buying off Amazon.  

Flipping through the pages it makes my heart sick.  "Abusers are not bad people.  They are normal people that snap under pressure."