I have a 9 nearly 10 year old dd. She has been angry since the day she was born and I'm at my wit's end. I desperately need somewhere to vent.
That is basically the bottom line of it but to give a little more context, she is going through puberty (body changes but no period yet), lockdown hit her hard, we moved city last year and I'm divorced from her extremely difficult dad. All of those things explain why her anger has ramped up in the last couple of years, but not really why she has been prone to anger from the beginning of her life, which is what I want to tackle.
She's currently in play therapy because I broke down to her teacher about it and school recommended play therapy as a first step. Her play therapist has suggested it's a relationship issue between dd and I, her SENCO has suggested possible ASD and heavy masking, her dad is saying it's because I moved her away from him (we moved 45 mins away for a fresh start and she now sees him regularly whereas when we lived near him it was inconsistently and on his terms).
She used to cry fairly constantly as a newborn and she'd wake up from naps and scream angrily which I put down to reflux. As a toddler she would stomp around angrily and have huge meltdowns which I put down to age/stage. When she started school she would cry before school and explode after school which I put down to tiredness. Now she's 9 she talks to me like shit, still has off the scale meltdowns, and rarely seems happy, and I've been putting it down to lockdown and, more recently, puberty. I can't keep putting it down to external things - this is the way she is.
She has friends in both old and new cities, we see them often. She does 2 after school activities per week that she enjoys - she can't handle doing more or she gets overtired. She has a fairly standard, easygoing life. I would say I'm more relaxed than strict - I've had to become relaxed over time in order to maintain my own sanity. I used to try and implement consequences around the behaviour/meltdowns but it just made things worse and she would scream that I was trying to control her.
On her dad's side of the family there are mental health problems. Her paternal uncle is undiagnosed (not in UK) but looks to me to be schizophrenic. He doesn't function at all and has spent the last 20 years in one room. Her dad also has undiagnosed issues, again to my very untrained eye, I would hazard a guess at ADHD or, at a push, bipolar disorder. My concern is that she has been born with a predisposition to poor mental health.
When I talk to her about her anger, she says there's nothing wrong and that I'm making her feel that there is something wrong with her.
Please please please - if anyone has any experience of an angry-by-nature child, I need to know if there's anything I can do and if not, how to live with it.