What will be will be I keep telling myself.. nothing I can do to help him.
Jude, this is true in one way, but in another way, there are some things you can do.
You are his mother.
You hold incredible influence in how your child will see himself as he comes through this, and in whether he believes he can turn this around.
How you see him matters to him, very much.
Here are some words. I needed other moms to tell me words to use too. They did that for me. They supported and honored me and my pain and confusion in doing that for me. That is the spirit in which I offer these words that are mine, to you. Not from an above you place, but from a "this helped me so much" place.
"I love you. I am sorry this is happening to you. I know you, and I believe in you, and I know you will come through this. I don't know. (This was such a huge collection of words for me to speak to my children or grands.) I don't know, honey. I know you can do this. I love you so much. I want to know how you are. I want to know how things are with you. Challenges come to all of us. You can do this."
"We all get to make ten thousand mistakes in our lives."
I almost forgot that one. I had to edit it in.
:O)
Stuff like that. That is how I learned to pick my words to say to my child facing something awful.
It has helped my children for me to come in to a place where I am responding, not reacting. When I reacted, I responded to them from that desperate place a mother gets to when her children are endangered. When I learned to name my emotions, I could then learn to separate them from how I responded to my child.
I reach for steady state. I reach for saying the words that will strengthen and balance my child ~ whether he hears me or hates me right at that minute, or not. Recoveringenabler posted for us the term: FOG for that whirling, scary place we get into when the kids are in danger.
FOG
That is where I am. It will pass. I will come through this and into steady state. Then, I just have to wait for that to happen. Whatever my brain tells me to scare me half to death, I just name it FOG and wait for it to diminish a little and then, a little more.
Pretty soon, I come back into rational presence within myself.
"Oh. I am just in a living, moving nightmare, again."
It sounds so simple, but it helped me so much to think about my own emotional states in that way.
***
Understanding the kids are going to use every tactic they have to get us to do what they want, and that what they want, what they need more than anything, when they are addicted, is to service the addiction ~ that kind of thinking helped me, too.
***
One of the hardest things about parenting an addicted or troubled child is that none of the pieces fit. That's okay. We need to learn different parenting skills, that's all. We need to learn how to manage our emotional responses so we can stay steady state. We can do that.
Once we have, we can teach that set of skills to our kids.
We can model and mentor the kids into seeing themselves as people who can handle themselves well, whatever their situations.
Even when they are messing up big time, we can do that. We can find a way to do that.
For ourselves, we need to learn how to do the best we know and let go of outcome. We cannot make our kids do one blessed thing. We can do the best we know and learn more stuff about how to do the best we know...and that's all we can do.
That's okay, too.
If we could do more than be our troubled kids' moms, this would never have happened to them.
So, that's a good place to begin, and to stand up from.
Our Seeking Strength tells us, when we are in hard places with our kids, to stay close to the site through this time. That is good, good advice. We will have heard pretty much everything already. The site is anonymous. Whatever you need to post about, one of us will have come through something like that, too.
I am glad you are here with us, now.
Cedar
