Night Terrors

I’ve written that the word “nightmare” is a word I now reject.  Nightmare is a loaded word that aims to reject the productions of our unconscious (and admittedly, sometimes quite disturbing) dreams. 

Night terrors is a little different, don’t you think?  If someone, particularly a child, is experiencing regular, upsetting nighttime experiences based on fears, dreams, awakenings, it seems to me that calling this experience “night terrors” is attempting to be empathic and present for this trying experience. 

Your friendly WebMD says this, “Night terrors are episodes of intense screaming, crying, thrashing, or fear during sleep that happen again and again, usually in children ages 3 to 12. New cases peak at age 3 1/2.”

WebMD goes on to say the following:

Night terrors tend to run in families. Most of the time, they have no specific cause. But certain things might play a role, including:

Stress, Depression or anxiety, Fever, Too much caffeine, Sleeping in a different place or away from home, Lack of sleep, Medications that affect the central nervous system (the brain), Restless legs syndrome, Sleep problems like sleep apnea, Recent anesthesia for surgery

WebMD’s disempowering conclusion is “There’s no treatment for night terrors, but they tend to stop as a child gets older.”

I find much of the material on WebMD on this topic to be troubling.  Do you notice, as I do, that nowhere in this effort to describe and assist with a condition where a child is intense and upset, that the writers of WebMD consider that the experience may have MEANING?  And of course, all experience does have meaning. 

From the vantage point of WebMD the suffering child is approached with an eye to finding what things “might play a role” and the assumption is that all of these things are negative.

Instead, I wonder about parents and caregivers believing in the young, suffering child.  Kneeling next to them and emotionally holding sturdy … “what you are experiencing is painful and intense AND you make sense always.”  “Something inside of you is having a reaction at night, when all the usual daytime barriers are down, and it is telling you and us that there are some things you are concerned about, probably feeling fearful about.  This is a normal and healthy part of human experience.  I feel for you in the discomforted feelings and I trust you will grow to understand this more and feel more at peace.”

Indeed, as I consider this, I wonder about also rejecting the phrase night “terrors.”  It seems to relegate the discomforted, upset experience of a child to something to be decried, to be worried about, rejected. The word terror is, after all, rather terrifying. 

I have recently had a patient reporting a young child having difficult nighttime fears and awakenings.  My adult patient, a thoughtful parent, dutifully searched for information and began describing their child’s painful experiences as “night terrors.”  And again, we can welcome the effort of concerned parents to empathize with the troubling experiences of children.

In this case, when my patient became interested in the MEANING for their child, when intense, disturbing nighttime experiences are normalized as part of the human condition, when we attune ourselves to listen for what disturbing experiences might be saying that are important for the child, then something begins to change.

My patient wrote to me: “I invited [my child] to talk about his nightly dream. We had a great conversation. He asked if he could draw the things he saw – his pictures were awesome and we were able to talk about what he might be saying to himself in the dream.” Several weeks later my patient reported that their dear child has not had one instance of the painful nighttime experience reoccurring!  Isn’t that just amazing?  It might give one cause to resist the WebMD conclusion that “there is no treatment” for this situation in our children.