Thread by @mamabea99351914

This query was one of the first responses yesterday, & it's a particularly useful place to begin. Everything that went right (and wrong) has a lot to do with how I communicate...
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https://twitter.com/lacroicsz/status/1217623199288119296

I am, by nature, pretty blunt and outspoken.  I've had a lot of teacher training, though, in how to talk to kids without emotionally escalating them or myself; how not to take kids' lack of social skills mastery (aka "bad behavior") personally.  When I look back, I can see
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how these two coin faces of my communication style affected my response and approach.
Filia came out to us after a 6 month secret social transition at school.  In that time, she'd asked for gender non-conforming clothing and hair and we had supported her self-expression.
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What I remember about the first revelatory discussion was just listening as she talked for a long time about what she had been feeling and experiencing and what her beliefs were about her identity.  It was a very long monologue; it had been carefully prepared. 

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There were phrases that her dad and I recognized had been lifted from other sources (ex: a semi paraphrased chunk of Dear Evan Hansen).  She wound down with a list of her desires/expectations of us: a systematic timeline of transition that began with us cooperating with

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name and pronoun change and her search for a gender therapist, and moved from binders to testosterone to mastectomy.  When she was all talked out, we just held her and asked her if she was ready to hear our thoughts.  

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I should interject here that between our two professional backgrounds, Pater and I are especially attuned to non verbal communication cues (he's dialed in to signs of dishonesty and radicalization; I'm hyper aware of cognitive developmental stages).  

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So, it was very obvious that there was an abrupt shift in Filia's state  - from calm to anxious - when we told her that we believed that she had dysphoria but that to fully and accurately assess her needs, we all had to begin with her preexisting conditions of anxiety and OCD
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We reminded her that she already had a therapist, the one who had helped her learn to manage the self harming impulse of trichitillomania.  Step one would be sharing all of this new information with her.  Panic response ensued.  Filia had a litany of reasons her therapist

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was the "wrong" kind and she had to get a new one.  I was in dispassionate teacher-mode and just repeated that we heard everything she was saying, but that with any health problem, you start with the caregiver who already knows your history so that the treatment plan

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includes all the personal variables that are known to exist. Her face and body telegraphed extreme distress with our position, but she didn't argue. The next day, after setting up appointments with her therapist and pediatrician, I had a follow up discussion with her. 

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I was trained* to describe observed behavior, then describe the social skill that needed to be taught/learned, then list the steps we'd do to master the skill. So in this second conversation, my communication style followed this pattern - my ingrained approach.

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I didn't literally refer to anything Filia needed to unpack as a "social skill,"
but I did explain to her that what we noticed was that she had finally opened up about being dishonest with us, and that dishonesty was very uncharacteristic for her personality.

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The dysphoria and gender identity ideas seemed to have coincided with a shift from her baseline of openness about her days & relationships
to many months of choosing to fictionalize parts of her personal narrative and conceal  from both her parents and her therapist.

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Nobody (at any age) is comfortable with being confronted with critical observations, so of course this upset her.  I also was trained to ask a lot of questions when trying to help kids explain their point of view about behavioral or emotional issues - so I asked about

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where she had read or heard a lot of the (ideological) assertions she'd made the day before.  Being questioned clearly made her feel attacked.  She was able to articulate hurt/frustration that I was asking the "wrong" questions.  My curiosity about the path that had led to

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the self ID was invalidating;  I should have been asking what she needed me to do to support her. I said I was sorry that it made her feel bad, but I was curious why she thought we'd be able to support plans she had calmly described to damage her body. 

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What stands out the most clearly to me when I look back on all this is that the communication style and techniques that had always been effective with her (and my son. and all my students.) was very emotionally triggering for her in addressing the self ID. 

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I wasn't immediately concerned about it in the earliest days, but from my vantage point now, I think this was the earliest and biggest sign that trans ID that presents rapidly in adolescence is a mental health issue complicated by social conditioning. 

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The heretofore successful strategy for making a kid feel understood and thus willing to listen did. not. work.   And although I wasn't conscious of it at the time, I can see now that the bigger picture of professional response to our outreach became a stressor for me that

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began to break down my ability to successfully autopilot my way through these discussions.   My baseline blunt outspokenness began to surface more and more as I struggled with searching for ethical professional help.  That will be its own thread, but for this one,

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it suffices to say that doing what I was trained to do to help her actually made her dysphoria and distrust worse.
Finally establishing a relationship with a new therapist was the key to stop the relational unraveling - we were able to trust her psychologist to work around
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the mental impediments that our approach hadn't been designed to deal with. That let us back off for a time so that Filia could talk and listen to someone more emotionally neutral and more experienced (thus more trustworthy) than her unaffirming parents.

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Quick pause to go back to a reference* I made about training.
I had completed both the educational and parenting versions of this program boystown.org/parenting/Page…

designed to create developmentally appropriate expectations and troubleshoot interpersonal challenges

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resuming from yesterday:
When Filia came to us midsummer of '18, she described becoming questioning over the course of her 6th grade year ('16-'17).  This coincided with two things: her school launching its GSA, and her becoming intensely interested in creative writing. 

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We weren't concerned with her participation in the former or her preoccupation with the latter; but the writing did cause a sharp uptick in time spent alone in her room.  Thus the onset of what seemed like developmentally typical adolescent personality changes -

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less sharing, more angst,  change in style, etc. Filia said by the begining of 7th grade, her concept of herself moved from Questioning to gender fluid (I'll go into more detail when I write about toxic friendships).  In December she initiated the secret social transition

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with a circle of friends, and by  the end of the year she had confided in one teacher. During this phase of secrecy & intrapersonal wrestling, Filia was still discussing her life with us, but with less transparency and frequency.  Then our response to her self ID triggered

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a shut down because we did several things that felt like betrayals.  1st, we talked privately with her older brother about it. He hadn't yet matured into being reliably kind to her, and we felt like he might need the chance to express his thoughts and emotions openly...

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... his developmental capacity had to be considered too.  Next, we told our work supervisors, because they needed to know a major family disruption was the reason for probable stress coping mechanisms at work.  

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Then we set up a meeting with her school administrators to find out whether there were policy that would conflict with the boundaries we had to assert around her self ID.  She perceived all of these "outings" as assaults on her right to self determine who knew her identity,
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when they knew, and how they would refer to her  - because we told the adults that they were not permitted to affirm via pronouns or masculine name of our underage child.  We didn't make any attempt to interfere in language choices other people's children were making, but

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Filia couldn't process the ethics of the boundaries we were creating to support her. So, as we moved through several sessions with her original therapist, a wall went up and she refused to discuss anything about her ID or our response unless we were in a therapy session. 

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Then the therapist felt unqualified to tackle trans identity, and unable to continue with the original work of guiding Filia through her anxiety/OCD/trich. She advised us to find someone else.  It took 2 months to find a psychologist who passed my trustworthy approach evaluation

Then it took about three more months to systematically remove the bricks from the wall of reticence Filia had erected.  During those weeks, it was very challenging for both me and her dad to modify our own communication style and habits with her.  

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We had to respect the request to stop asking the "wrong" questions, stop voicing the reasoning behind our approach, be super mindful about using her nickname.  We mostly ignored the gender elephant outside of appointments, except for times when Filia would broach the topic.  36/x

That only happened when she wanted something, like clothes, & we had to decide yes (outerwear) or no (underwear).  I remember choosing to be complimentary when I sincerely thought she looked oolwell groomed, & choosing not to say anything when she looked disheveled. 

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I remember getting to the bottom of some deep, long-term maladaptive coping mechanisms that caused her brother's superiority complex and hyper critical attitude toward her (he had been projecting a lot of his perfectionism onto her for years), and how much work & coordination
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between Pater's communication style and mine had been required to successfully unpack all that. And I remember the effect of improving that sibling dynamic had on Filia: a sudden and marked aura of relief and relaxing back into how she inhabited herself "before."

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As the space that good therapy created began to thaw a bit, and Fi was less defensive about things like clothes, an opportunity arose to ask her if she wanted help pulling together an outfit for her middle school graduation portrait.  I told her that if she already had

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an outfit planned, that was fine.  But she didn't, and she was open to shopping together.  I asked her what she wanted to look for - she had a mildly angsty expression as she realized she didn't know.  So I asked if she wanted to hear some brainstorms I'd had, & opined that
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her style at that time seemed to be comfortable-but-cool. Maybe a new graphic or plain white tee under a knit moto jacket or blazer would authentically convey the 8th grade version of herself?  She lit up, got excited to shop, and we found clothes she looked great in...

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...without any storm or stress.  It felt like a miracle. probably to both of us.  
That modest bit of progress coincided with events that unfolded around her birthday - a confluence of events that created an opportunity to have a frank discussion with Filia

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that seems to be the point where she pivoted to desistance.  That part of the story also needs its own thread, so I will wrap up this one with these values that we are still applying (as best we can) to communicating with Fi:

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-active listening.  If she wants to talk and I know I can't pay proper attention at that moment I ask her if we can talk in a few minutes or if she really needs me to pause what I'm doing.
-reflective listening.  Paraphrasing things back to her to make sure I actually...

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fully understand what she's saying before offering any of my own perceptions about the topic.

-often asking if she wants to know what I think, b/c sometimes she might want to inform us about something but not necessarily want to internally deal with our opinion about it. 

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- describing what I perceive her to be emoting & inviting her to share if she feels up to it. "You look kind of bummed out. I'm here if something's bothering you"

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This one ^ seems like an adolescent upgrade of the toddler technique of naming emotions to teach kids vocab for feelings...

Even when we've acquired the language, it seems we still require relational cues to notice and process our emotions.