Panic attack at school leads to wanting to come home

[Ohiomom01]

I  will admit I have not yet gotten the chance to read all of the lessons on the right hand side yet however I was hoping someone could give me some advice. My 15-year-old BPD daughter often suffers from feeling physically ill at school and starts asking me to bring her home early. We have been working really hard on making sure she stays in school and for the most part she has improved. However recently she has been suffering a lot of emotional dysfunction and is at it again. I'm never quite sure how to encourage her to stay at school without her feeling judged and therefore raging at me. Has anyone else had experience with this and any suggestions on the best ways to help defuse the situation

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[Thursday]

Hi Ohiomom-

I wrote a long response to you yesterday, then hit some button on the computer and it all went away... .

But I want to try to recreate what I wrote.

My BPDSD is 23 now but she used to be a teenager (!) and we had a lot of problems with her concerning her wanting to stay home from school or wanting to leave school once she was there.

Anxiety drove so much of this behavior. She would not want to go to school if she had a pimple, if her hair didn't look right after she slept, if she got on the scale and saw she had gained weight. I suspect that a lot of it had to do with being bullied.

Once at school she wanted to come home if anything "bad" happened- if she had a disagreement with a friend, if someone teased what she was wearing, if she dropped food on herself during lunch and had a stain. She often, often, often claimed she was sick.

I caught on that most of the time she said she was sick, she wasn't really sick. I tried to always take her to the Doctor after school if she claimed to be sick in the morning- figuring the Doctor visit would deter her but she loved the attention she got at the Doctor's office and never minded going unless she was missing out on something social. So we then had a rule that unless we witnessed her vomiting or she had a verifiable fever she had to go to school. I'd say she tried to not go to school twice a week.

I work from home- about five times during my first year in the home (9th grade) I got a call from school that she was not there (the school didn't always call so who knows how many times she did this). She would act like she was going to school but would hide in our yard until I left to go do errands and then would sneak back into the house and go back to bed. A lot of her wanting to staying home, especially as she got older, was in order to sleep- she liked to stay up all night until we figured out to take away her phone.

We gave consequences for this behavior. Always with SD she would do her best to get around our consequences so for her teen years there was SO MUCH CONFLICT and so much going behind our backs-so we had to be pretty vigilant to make sure she wasn't tricking us or lying to us.

Wonder if this sounds familiar to you or others reading. We are only now rebuilding the trust that was destroyed during those years.

I guess my advice is to try not to let your DD's raging and anger at you get you upset. She must go to school- this is non-negotiable. My guess is that if you stick to your boundaries about this she will eventually quit the raging and be resigned to it. There might be a lot of negative behaviors for awhile but this gives you a chance to get stronger and more solid with your boundaries.

It sounds like your DD cycles in and out of her dysfunction. This was true for my SD- to a certain extent it is still true. I think it has mostly to do with the way her brain works and I think her hormones feed the intensity.

I would try not to frame the rules around any judgment of her being "good" or "bad"- or perhaps as in my SD's case a "lie" or the "truth". Rather the rule is simply because it is her job to go to school and get educated, it is a state law, maybe even an arbitrary statement like "kids have to go to school" or "you need an education for your future life" and leave it at that.

Even though our BPD kids hate hearing NO, they do need to learn to tolerate the NO's they will hear in their lives from others because they WILL hear it. This is a worthy battle to fight... .not one you should put to the side in order to "choose" a better battle. This is the type of skill (working through their anxiety) that can really serve them well after they graduate and are working- you get fired from your job if you don't show up too many times, right?

Good luck! It's hard, isn't it?

Thursday

[peace in steel town]

If your daughter is actually getting panic attacks, letting her stay home from school only reinforces her attacks and will make them worse. Cocooning herself at home will relieve the symptoms short term, but only reinforce that there is something out there to be genuinely afraid of. The smaller she makes her world, the smaller it will become. She needs to learn that she is having an unpleasant reaction to something that doesn't exist, and this feeling will pass.   

[DisneyMom]

I'm fortunate my 15 year old BPD dd goes to a small charter school. All of the staff is fully aware of all of her challenges (and exaggerations). In the past she has texted me in cases she wanted to come home. I found that ignoring these texts worked the best. If she knows she has my attention, she will full-on text campaign to come home until she works us both up. Now she doesn't text me with these kinds of situations much anymore. I trust the adults at school will make me aware when it becomes necessary. She has learned to rely on other adults for help, not just me. The school staff help her through while keeping her at school, even if they have to let her take breaks from the regular classroom environment. She's allowed to work in the special ed office as needed. She's learned that having mental health (or other exaggerated medical claims) does not equal coming home. I only excuse for illness if there is fever or vomiting (which I must be there to observe the physical evidence) If she has a significantly challenging day, the school staff will email or call me at the end of the day me so I am aware of her behavior. The staff makes sure she takes her mid-day anti-anxiety meds. We try to empathize with her when she is home for the evening, sometimes I relay the information to her therapist.

[Ohiomom01]

Yes - initially my daughter was harassing me via text messages every single day all day long and I ended up making it so that she could only text me during lunch or study hall so she at least had a couple times in the day she could release some tension and touch base with me. Then things got really much better - we got new phones and I didn't institute the little software trick I used to stop my phone from notifying me when she texts. It seems like she is trying the behavior again and I will have to go back to ignore all texts from her while she is at school. My daughter absolutely REFUSES to go to a guidance counselor or nurse for any support from anyone else. Says she would rather die than walk to the nurse's office. Can't quite figure out why she has such a block about them. But I have been trying to set the rule that if you want to come home, you need to walk to the nurses office and call me from there rather than text me from school - which is unallowed after all. She gets so frustrated that she thinks I don't believe her when she is feeling light headed, dizzy, fuzzy minded, sick to her stomach etc. I have explained over and over that I believe she does feel physically bad. So being "ignored" by her, gives her more justification for her black and white thinking about us.

Thanks everyone for your replies.