Quote:
Originally Posted by fishsandwich
Incidentally, I'm always impressed you try to help your son so much. All my mother ever wanted was for me to be drugged to the hilt, and I was never violent. I think she wanted that because it was easiest - it was what the doctors wanted - and she was frightened.
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I don't know your mom, obviously, but speaking about parents of mentally ill children in general: People don't know what to do. And parents have lots of conflicting emotions. Fear for their child's future. Grief. Guilt. Anger. It's very difficult, very painful. It requires the courage to look at oneself and ask very hard questions and try to be as honest as possible. There's almost a reflexive need to protect oneself from blame and self-blame.
"Mental illness" doesn't just happen within the person with the dx. It happens between people - in relationships. Maybe for some people it's more within the person and for others it's more between people. I can't pretend to quantify it. But the interpersonal part is there, and it's the only part I can really hope to change, so I have to play it for all it's worth.
You know, when I adopted my younger son, the lessons I learned were such a gift. Maybe I've said this here before, but I'll say it again. We saw so many therapists, and I always approached it as family therapy because he invariably manipulated the situation. So I'd go into the sessions too. And within the first few sessions, they were always talking to
me. And I'd be thinking, "WTF?
I'm not the one with the problem here." But, of the two of us, I was the only one willing to change. So I learned that if I change, he'll change too.
It was a gift, because if you take a parent with a screwed up kid and say to him or her, "You're going to have to change," the parent is going to hear "You're a
bad parent" - which may or may not be true. That's maybe what that parent's thinking anyway - which is why parents
love the medical model. No blame for moms and dads! But if you have a kid you didn't even meet until he was almost 13 years old, the blame bit goes away, and with it the guilt and shame and the reflexive need to protect yourself and the message can get through more easily.
I eventually ended up finding
Beyond Consequences - which is a program with
beaucoup problems, don't get me wrong - but it also has some good stuff I could use. I liked that it was love-based.
Anyway I used what I learned with my adopted son on my bio son - kind of the reverse of what you'd expect, eh? The issues are somewhat different, but it gave me a place to start.