Oppositional Defiance Disorder is described below on an NHS website in the UK:
ODD is a behavioural disorder, usually diagnosed in childhood, that is characterised by uncooperative, defiant, negative, irritable and annoying behaviours towards parents, peers, teachers and other authority figures. Many children, particularly adolescents, can be oppositional. However the oppositionality of ODD persists despite reasonable parenting strategies.
It always strikes me as to how far apart we have really come to be from our children when reading things like this. If in this description I were to replace the word child with for instance partner/spouse what would be your reaction about what was going on in the relationship? Let's say you noticed some of these traits in your relationship and then you found out about this disorder and you approached your partner/spouse and said something like:
'look, I've just discovered ODD. It's when you are uncooperative, defiant, negative and irritable towards me. I think it's a disorder in you. Maybe we can look into getting you some help?'
Now don't get me wrong, I may have at some points started to think this way in my own relationship, but I absolutely know the response my wife would have and I'd be drawn back into our relationship as a whole and not just the symptoms/behaviours that you notice on one half. But that is exactly what we are guided to do with our children and unlike adults they might not have the resources to stick up for themselves. I think this happens in many areas of our relationships with children but one of the most evident is with a diagnosis of ODD.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these traits don’t exist in some of our children and it’s one of the hardest to engage with but I’m saying that there is a constricted viewpoint here in focusing in on just the child when we notice these traits.
The treatment for this disorder in children is maybe therapy of some kind, or looking at parenting techniques to mould behaviour (taken from NHS website), or medication. How do you think your partner or spouse would react?
What if ODD is not a disorder within the child? What if it's a signal of a failing relationship. A relationship in which you have completely lost the cooperation of one side. If you were to approach any marriage counsellor then they wouldn't just be curious about one part of this relationship having a kind of disorder they would be curious about the relationship it's self.
So the question is how have we got to a place as a society where seemingly so quickly we jump to the problems being solely within the child? Maybe it’s efficiency, because medication and behavioural techniques do sometimes work, but there is always a cost here and it’s usually around a loss of connection to their own authentic feelings that are suppressed in order to save the attachment.
Because for me, if we looked at these set of traits as a signal that this is a relational issue instead of a disorder within the child then as a parent that's much more empowering than providing therapy, changing parenting techniques to push and pull at the symptoms and medicating our children. So the question is what can you do to 'win' back your child, to bring her back into right relationship with you? We’d be more curious about the inner states of our children and taking these as cues of our relationship? We might be curious about what we are bringing to the relationship because just because we are a parent it doesn’t mean that our children will want us to parent them. We have to bring them into right relationship for them to want us to parent them.
Compassionate Inquiry is a psychotherapeutic approach that uncovers what lies beneath the way you interact with the world. To find out more about my therapy or my work as a parenting coach please contact me on mail@joeatkinson.co.uk or check out my website www.joeatkinson.co.uk