I am desperately hoping for some help in how to support and cope with my child's behaviour.
To pre face this, he is a wonderful child. He is quiet, polite and incredibly gentle and kind. He's naturally arty and shy, in fact he is suspected to have had selective mutism as a toddler so extreme was his shyness.
He made huge leaps in reception, really started to come out of himself and develop a lovely group of friends. He is very popular, even though he finds the louder boys very hard to cope with.
When he was 5 I was diagnosed with cancer. We all dealt with it as best as we could but no outside support was offered. He had a rough time of it with my hair loss and was quite vocal about that, but we coped and he was okay.
He is now 7, in the intervening 2 years he has become more and more insular. Unable to tolerate minor inconveniences, more and more OTT reactions at home but still nothing too bad. He finally got a space in play therapy back in January and has had weekly sessions since.
The therapist did warn he may get worse before better, but he seems to be at crisis point. He's begun kicking off at school, punching people, throwing chairs etc at the slightest provocation. School are being amazing as due to his normal nature it is very clear this is an emotional crisis. He has begun to have big chats with me, crying about me dying, about the death of our dog a few years ago, about his fear that is constant.
But the anger terrifies me, I don't know how to help. He goes from 0-60 over nothing. Yesterday I asked him to get dressed and he freaked. Had a huge meltdown screaming he hates me, but mostly he hates himself and wishes he was dead. It is devastating. I am trying to let him vent his feelings, we encourage him to squeeze a pillow, stamp hard, scream into his duvet etc to get it out and he does eventually calm down and we get back to the sadness and fear underneath, this leads to more talks about death. He says he hates himself because he couldn't help me when I had cancer. I try and resssure him he did more than enough by giving cuddles etc.
I just don't know what else to do. My instinct is to cheer him up but his therapist says let him feel his feelings and just be there. However when my 7 year old wants to be dead that is incredibly hard. I am doing my best to simply be there, offer cuddles and an ear, we look at happy memories and we talk about how we should try and remember the happy times not the sad ones but I don't know how to make this better.
To complicate matters, unbeknownst to him my cancer is incurable, currently stable but obviously very probably returning ti cause further trauma during his childhood. If anyone has any advice on this I would be so grateful.
(School are being good, but are unable to offer intervention while he is under play therapy, which is another month)