I asked my spouse, who is an exceptional reader, thinker, communicator, and editor, to give me some feedback on what you are about to read, and her single question was, “Who is your audience?”
Who is my audience? It’s a critical question, and one that I hadn’t, to that point, considered.
I could say, “It’s anyone,” but that requires unpacking and fleshing out because, ultimately, it’s not ANYone. Even though it is. Follow me, will you?
First, it’s me…a pediatric speech therapist and trauma-informed social-emotional (TISE) clinician who is neurodiverse with a handful of additional mental and emotional health contributions. I am a person who professionally supports younger people struggling with assimilation to and success within their daily environments. Younger people who cannot independently or consistently meet the IMPOSSIBLE standards required by caregivers, peers, families, classrooms, and society to successfully integrate and participate in community. AND. *I*…am a person who struggles with assimilation to and success within and across my daily environments. I am often confounded, frustrated, or overwhelmed by the standards required by the people, systems, interpersonal hierarchies, and society in which I attempt to successfully integrate and participate in community.
I struggle with the very existential endeavors that I am attempting to support in younger people.
I am my audience.
But not only me.
Next, it’s anyone in a similar position to me. A caregiver of ANY sort who endeavors to support a younger person over whom they wield power and influence. Furthermore, a caregiver of ANY sort who carries trauma, experiences disability, neurodivergence, and/or any significant mental & emotional health contributions that require REAL WORK to persevere and healthily succeed across daily interpersonal environments.
People like me in specific ways are my audience.
But not only them.
Finally? It really is for anyone who is a caregiver, supervisor, relatively powerful or influential being of any sort. One who is prone, in any way, to experiencing a reduction in the ability to function in a manner that other, more powerful or influential people, expect of us. And that relative inability to, “hold it together” is exacerbated by any number of factors including exhaustion, illness, disability, sensory discomfort (e.g. pain, headache, nausea, joint discomfort, hunger, thirst, etc.), or simply feeling DONE.
So really, who’s my audience? It’s truly anyone, including you.
And that brings me to the essay, proper.
Restraint Collapse: When We Can No Longer Comply, Assimilate, and “Hold It Together.”
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Restraint Collapse, (…actually, After-School Restraint Collapse is the full term…) coined by a Canadian school-leader and writer, Andrea Loewen Nair. Recently, a veteran early childhood educator and longtime colleague shared with me the blog post in which it appears (linked later in the essay). This educator indicated that it was particularly helpful in their guidance for parents struggling to understand and support the after-school social and emotional dysregulation challenges children experienced. It struck me immediately that what the term also, and perhaps universally, captures is a shared experience for all of us across our entire lifetimes. Nair, as you’ll soon see, agrees. Additionally, the experience of restraint collapse becomes particularly debilitating when we travel with trauma, mental health contributions, any disability, or existential cross-section of social and historical marginalization/oppression.
While reading Nair’s post discussing After-School Restraint Collapse, several short paragraphs immediately stood out to me, expanding my thinking beyond the children I serve…to their teachers, their families, and myself.
“It takes a great deal of energy, mental motivation, emotional containment, and physical restraint to keep ourselves at our best while at work, daycare, or school for other people.
We push ourselves to not be snarly, crabby people where doing so might have seriously negative consequences like losing our jobs, getting sent to the principal’s office, or missing sandbox time. How many times during the day do you wish you could just tell someone off or walk away and cry in the bathroom? But we don’t – we do what we need to in order to ‘be good’ or keep the peace.
After we’ve done that all day, we get to the point where we just don’t have the energy to keep this restraint, and it feels like a big bubble that needs to burst.”
Does that sound at all familiar to you? It certainly does for me.
You see that Nair IMMEDIATELY elaborates restraint collapse beyond “after-school” and expands the experience of restraint collapse to “after-work” to clearly communicate a universality that resonated immediately with my lived experience.
Remember, I am a neurodiverse clinician working with disabled, neurodiverse, and otherwise struggling children.
To elaborate on a point I made above regarding the impact of restraint collapse for certain communities or groups, some people are required to utilize MORE restraint MORE frequently. Anywhere there is a power-dynamic and an expectation of assimilation, compliance, and/or dominant cultural “respectability,” the person/people who are relatively less powerful will need to practice more restraint. Factors include: race, age, sex, gender, disability status, socioeconomic status, weight, neurodiversity, as well as intersections of these factors and/or others unmentioned.
I would like to share two examples of restraint collapse that occurs in two communities, stutterers and people with ADHD and/or mental health contributions like complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Anxiety, and depression.
The first example, stuttering, comes from decades of experience as a speech/language pathologist working with stutterers. Additionally, I am a person with a motor speech disorder. I attended speech therapy until 5th grade and to this day, particularly if I am tired, undernourished, thirsty, or otherwise agitated, I experience dysfluencies and sound distortions.
Stuttering impacts the timing, fluency, and oftentimes the overall understandability of spoken speech for stutterers. Teens and adults who utilize fluency-enhancing techniques across their days or certain contexts (e.g. talking on video phone, interviewing for a job, engaging in novel conversations with strangers, giving a presentation), and/or who avoid social interactions or predictably challenging contexts, experience a distinct fatigue across those days and contexts, particularly as they focus so intently on remaining as fluent as they believe a situation demands. Or avoid the context altogether. Often at the end of the day or when there are moments of respite and relaxation, folks who stutter will experience increased dysfluency and emotional relief from having that “fluency enhancing” filter or governor, or avoidance born of fear and trauma, removed.
In the example case a person is restraining from stuttering to comply or assimilate to a social context. In other cases, a person may be restraining social anxieties. May be restraining a brain that wants to shift attention. May be restraining a body’s internal drive to move, or fidget, doodle, rock, head nod, etc. All of this restraint, and particularly for younger people, as mentioned above, who are contending with multiple layers of existence that require them to restrain their core feelings and existence in order to comply, assimilate, and appear to be “a good X/Y/Z,” is taxing and the “collapse” is real.
Not only for younger people, of course.
I recently learned that I have ADHD as well as what has been described by Bessel Van der Kolk in his exceptional text, “The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body In the Healing of Trauma,” as Developmental Trauma Disorder. I received diagnoses of anxiety and depression previously. Many of us have mental and emotional health diagnoses. And all of us are humans living in an unprecedented and incredibly challenging, traumatizing time. And all of us experience restraint collapse at some point, even if we don’t realize that is what we are experiencing.
We…as adults who must work, interact with neighbors, negotiate with various people across our days, given our own levels of alertness, hunger, sleep deprivation, hydration, as well as mental and emotional health contributions, disability, and systemic/historic intersections of oppression? We…are all restraining so much. We are “holding it together,” code-switching our language, approaching specifically challenging contexts, juggling responsibilities, and the collapse? It will come. And it often comes at the end of the day, unfairly but understandably poured out at our friends and families.
Also? The restraint collapse doesn’t exclusively happen at the end of the day. Here I’m thinking specifically, given my life experience and current work, of early childhood educators. These are adults who are managing and facilitating the social, emotional, and early-academic growth of a diversity of children which all requires restraint and a “putting on hold” of personal feelings, instincts, reflexes, and ways of being raised/trained in order to remain the caregiver in a relationship where the power dynamic is always educator with more power, children with less. I’m certain anyone can imagine across-the-day restraint collapses that happen for them and/or in their non-early-childhood-education fields.
How do we take care of ourselves and each other while also caring for others? How?
It’s a task that often feels impossible, and almost always insurmountable. It’s a process. A journey. It is not a product nor is it a goal, per se. It is daily work because well-being is not a static point, mutually exclusive from anything.
We have to engage in awareness activities. Awareness of understanding our emotions and where/why/how/when/where they emerge. And then regulating OUR emotions while likely still carrying unresolved traumas, biases, and indoctrinated values. It’s a lot.
Restraint collapse…is a thing that happens for ALL OF US. And while we may be the more powerful in a dynamic and thus must understand that our behaviors and inputs have distinct influence on the person/people across from us, we still need to practice SELF care and care of each other.
The following article, from Andrea Loewen Nair, offers supports that parents can offer to their children, themselves and their partners, at the end of a (school/work) day. And all of these suggestions to support our children in being able to emotionally and socially regulate through periods of restraint collapse? They apply to adults.
“There are seven things we can do, and teach our children to do, to release this restrain bubble that bursts when we get home. You might even try these with your partner.” (This list includes rationale and examples within the body of the linked article.)
- Re-connect positively
- Create Space
- Feed Them
- Reduce Household Clutter and Noise
- Stay Connected Throughout the Day
- Provide Decompression Time
- Have Fun
I will add that there are many ad-free guided meditations available through YouTube and music/podcast apps. These can support us in understanding and regulating our emotions through challenging moments with the people we are influencing. Additionally, we can calm ourselves in a simple breathing practice where we come back to our breath to reground and establish ourselves in the present moment, allowing time to EXPERIENCE feelings and body tension. Validating emotions instead of punishing is also incredibly important for all of us. That we don’t punish ourselves, our partners, peers, friends, and certainly not the children and less-powerful people in our care and under our guidance…but rather validate feelings. Just that process of validating a feeling helps us and the people with us to settle, return to the moment, and perhaps name feelings and then regulate them.
Two absolutely tried-and-true techniques for awareness, emotional and body regulation, and self-care are breathing exercises and body-scan meditation. Both of these can be done in well under five minutes if that is all the time one has.
I’m going to link an article and a video for both. With regard to breathing, I’m using my first “teacher,” Thich Nhat Hanh, whose book, “The Miracle of Mindfulness” really impacted my life in my early 20s.
1. A reading: https://www.lionsroar.com/mindful-living-thich-nhat-hanh-on-the-practice-of-mindfulness-march-2010/
2. A video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J62F0Y6PKes&ab_channel=SoundsTrue
The body scan reading and video come for two separate sources and I find them accessible and easy to practice.
1. A reading: https://www.mindful.org/a-quick-calming-body-scan-to-check-in-with-yourself/
2. A video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7OAlcyE5M8&ab_channel=MountSinaiHealthSystem
It is important that we all recognize the restraint that we are HOLDING as we move through our days, so that we can regulate and perhaps even ameliorate the collapse that will assuredly come if we do not attend. And in doing this, for ourselves, we can then better support our friends, families, colleagues, students, clients, partners, employees, cashiers, and everyone across whom we come in a day.
My audience? Is anyone interested in well-being. In authentic empathy. In offering grace and unconditional positive regard. To ourselves. And to each other.
My audience? Is anyone interested in reducing harm in their immediate vicinity and, thus, the world.
My audience? Is anyone.
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