misspatticake

Sometimes my Mom got extremely overwhelmed with her emotions. This would often look like crying, but sometimes it presented as hysterical laughter at inappropriate times. This would often cause accidents and embarrassment for her, so once I realized that it was just overwhelming emotions we would just stop and breathe. We would hold hands, count to 10 together and just breathe. It helped her self-regulate and it helped the situation not escalate if I could stop her before the anxiety really kicked in. Being a person is hard. Being a person living with a neurocognitive disorder is even harder and reminding myself (and her) to breathe can help. Also reminding myself that she was never giving me a hard time, she was HAVING a hard time.