Gavin just had another catastrophic meltdown. Right now we are trying to figure out what to do. The whole thing happened because his play was getting darker and he knows he's not aloud to play like that with his brothers.
Not only did he lie when we questioned him about this but he freaked out upon receiving the consequences for his actions.
The punishment was that he lost the TV in *his room*. That means we removed the Netflix box from his TV so it would be rendered useless. We told him he could still watch TV, just not in *his room. *All we did was take away a bit of his freedom. That was it. We wanted to make sure that we had more to rake away, should we need to.
He completely lost it.
I physically got him upstairs by walking very closely behind him and in a very firm voice, tell him to *move it*.
Once in his room, he proceeded to meltdown. He banged his head on the wall and floor. He punched his door and stomped his feet, shaking the entire house and rattling all the windows.
As we are trying to find ways of addressing this behavior, I decided to try something different.
During this meltdown, Gavin stopped several times to fix the sheet on his bed or move something out of the way. I told him that as long as he's not following the rules and safely being angry and frustrated, I was going to take one object out of his room (at a time) until he was safe again.
He's allowed to be angry and frustrated. However, he's only allowed to kick, stomp or punch his mattress. He's allowed to screen but only into his pillow or mattress and not the air. He knows this and I reminded him several times before beginning to remove items from his room.
I made about 5 trips before he decided to take my words seriously.
He, of course, self-injured. We, of course, didn't react. Not reacting makes him angry because he can't control our behavior through his violet actions. The problem with him is that instead of just stopping the behavior, he escalates to a point that we eventually have to intervene.
Thankfully, that wasn't the case today and removing items from his room did the trick.
We didn't call the police because honestly, I'm afraid to take that step because there's no going back. Plus, I'm concerned about how Elliott and Emmett would react to that. That may totally freak them out and I know that Elliott would lose it and his anxiety would become even worse.
This is a really shitty situation to be in, pardon my french.
A huge part of me wants to drag him back up to the hospital but that requires a huge commitment on our part and it's a great deal of traveling. As bad as this sounds, we simply don't have the resources to waste on another pointless hospital stay.
I have to figure something out. I know that almost no one will take him because he's got so many medical issues. Our options are very, very limited.
This was posted via WordPress for Android, courtesy of Samsung's Galaxy S III. Please forgive any typos. I do know how to spell but auto-correct is working against me.
