Everyone has impulses: urges to say or do things: there is no shame in this.
Problems occur when our impulses cause us or someone else a problem. I tell kids that impulses become a problem when we or someone else gets hurt, and we discuss the many ways people can be hurt.
Understanding Impulsivity and Making Plans to Address Needs
When working with impulsive kids, I start by helping them understand why we’re impulsive: there is an interaction between part of our brain that responds quickly and a part of the brain that slowly helps us make the right decisions. The part that responds is much faster than the part that helps us decide what to do.
Next, we work on identifying the situations that cause impulsivity to be a problem: not to make the child or teen feel bad, but so we can make a plan. I use a fish-bone diagram to help track this information. The bones in the diagram are labeled “What”, “When”, “Who”, and “Where” to capture their most common causes of impulsive responding. We then make a plan to address those specific needs using a two column chart: the first column is labeled “When” and the second is labeled “Then” to capture when impulsivity is a problem and then what he or she can do differently.
Impulsive Urges are Hard to Control!
Along the way, the children and teens I work with learn that because the impulsive urges are hard-wired in their brain, those urges are to control. We discuss two possible choices:
- We can either resent impulsive urges every day, fight them, and try to get rid of them.
- We can willfully invite impulsive urges in, be aware of them, and not get pulled into fighting with them.
Students quickly learn that the best choice is to try to accept impulsive urges and learn to address those urges in another way.
Accepting Impulsive Urges
In my next posts on this topic, I will share these suggestions for accepting impulsive urges:
- A Rock in Your Shoe
- Using Your Values to Accept Rocks and Impulsive Urges
- Identifying Valued Activities
- How to Measure Success
- Learning from Mistakes and Missteps Along the Way
- How to Evaluation Your Progress
Need Help Applying These Concepts?
Call 817.421.8780 to make an appointment. Dr. Davenport is happy to help you and your impulsive child or teen.
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(c) 2010-2015, Monte W. Davenport, Ph.D.
