This simple, concise little guide book steps beyond a basic understanding of high sensitivity, looking at the challenges and distress that meltdowns can cause for highly sensitive children. And for you.
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A meltdown can be a terrifying experience for a highly sensitive child and for people witnessing it. This book helps you to navigate the reasons why meltdowns happen and how to prevent them where possible, as well as the vital need to be compassionate and caring with the child and yourself.
What is a meltdown?
Imagine a pot of metal shavings heating up in a forge. Each individual curl of iron gradually loses its shape and colour, eventually becoming an oozing blob of liquid ore, melded with its counterparts. Everything that was once solid has now lost its form and cannot hold its own shape any more.
Imagine a child bombarded: by requirements and requests from others, by sensory overload, by their own expectations. Every part of their brain is furiously firing away, trying to keep up with the demands. And then there is suddenly one more ‘ask’ of them, and this becomes the catalyst. All of their thoughts and feelings conflate and they are completely overwhelmed by these emotions, which then burst out as fear or rage or sadness or frustration.
This is how a highly sensitive child experiences a meltdown.
Making Sense of Meltdowns gives you a brief overview of meltdowns, how and why they occur, and how you can support an overwhelmed child. This will help you to better understand the highly sensitive children.
This is what Lisa Nel, children’s therapist MBACP (Accred), said about the book. Lisa has 30 years’ experience of working in education, counselling and training. She is a practising therapist and counselling trainer.
“Compassionate, guilt-reducing, informative and well-illustrated, this concise guide offers insight and practical support for any parent or professional ever faced with a child in ‘meltdown’ i.e. most parents and all children’s professionals!
Though written with specific reference to the highly sensitive child, as I read, many of the vulnerable children and young people with whom I’ve worked as a therapist kept popping into mind…Safely supporting meltdowns takes its toll on us too and a key strength to this guide is the emphasis and ideas on compassionate self-care.
A good thing should always be shared! I hope that you will find this wonderful little book as helpful as I have and will pass it on to other parents and colleagues alike.”