The joys of sleep issues….

Our daughter just turned eleven years old last month.  She is a bright, intelligent, funny girl who has great creativity and commitment to her studies.

The big problem is that she can’t sleep. She has not been able to sleep in her own bed for consecutive nights for probably two years now.  We start her off in her own bed, but she inevitably ends up in with us.  She is too scared to sleep by herself.

We sent her off to ten sessions with the school psychologist last year but that was a waste of time.  The feedback was that she was scared of the bad guy in the Incredibles 2 movie and that was allegedly the root of the problem.  But she had not been sleeping properly for some months prior to even watching that movie.  So to me, that was not the underlying cause of the problem.

I took her to our amazing crystal healer.  Our older son had responded really well to this treatment but for our daughter, it didn’t work.  This just goes to show that what works for one child isn't going to work for the other.  We found that our son responded really well to the school psychologist and the crystal healing, as well as EFT tapping but none of these techniques have worked for our daughter. 

I tried EFT tapping with her and this was a little bit hit and miss.  When carried out every day, it would more often than not have a positive impact but then it got to the stage that she didn’t want to do it because she was too tired.  There was no point trying to get her to do it when she flatly refused.  It then became an argument to get her to do the tapping.  I did at least manage to dig a bit deeper with some of the tapping sessions, and discovered that she had a poor opinion of herself and felt like she wasn’t good enough.  I thought finally! I at least have a baseline of where to start in trying to help her.  The psychologist appeared not to have been able to identify this.

We also identified that attending school was a great source of stress for our daughter.  She does not like going to school, doesn’t like the classroom setting and finds math difficult to understand.  This was difficult to reconcile as when we spoke to her teacher and the school principal, the feedback we keep getting is that she’s fully engaged and interactive at school and appears to enjoy being there. Yet at home and at bedtime, her stress levels about having to get up and go to school are through the roof.

We’ve swapped bedrooms for her, we’ve used a diffuser, we’ve tried the essential oils, the crystals, melatonin (which seems to help a little) but nothing has worked.  The nights she does manage to sleep in her own bed, she wakes up exhausted and barely has enough energy to get through the day. 

At this point in time, we relent and allow our daughter to sleep with us because we all need to get sleep and she needs to get sleep.  We are at the point of “we just need to do whatever works, even if it’s enabling her”. And we know we should go hard, but we’ve tried that too! One night she was adamant she couldn’t go to bed so we told her to stay up all night, certain that she’d just get tired enough eventually and fall asleep.  Well she did, but not until 8.00am the next morning!! So that backfired too!

I don’t know what the answer is; we feel like we’ve tried everything but she is so determined that absolutely nothing will work, so it doesn’t. The upside of remote learning is that it’s one less thing for her to stress about as she functions perfectly learning from home.  But she still beats herself up about not being able to get to sleep and about always being tired. 

It’s too exhausting to keep fighting, so for now at least we will just keep doing whatever works so that we can all at least have some sleep.  I’ll try some fairy lights in her bedroom as someone suggested (they don’t cast shadows so hopefully won’t make the room scary!) and some relaxing tea.  She’s not a fan of tea but that might be one of the few things I can think of that we haven’t tried.  It sure is a tough journey but that might be the one good thing about this entire lockdown: we now have another six weeks to try and get this sorted! And then maybe another few weeks on top of that if face-to-face learning ever returns this year!  All we can do is keep focussed on being the peace, being the calm and being kind 😊