Hi and Welcome! I know how hard it is to live and walk on eggshells. I haven't done it with a child that old. My oldest child was very violent and could not live with us from the time he was 14. He had already made serious attempts to harm/kill his sister and he was large enough to throw me across a room. It was just too much. We had 2 younger children who had to have a safe place to live, and we were blessed enough to have grandparents who were willing to take him in and work with him.
I STRONGLY suggest you start going to Alanon/NarcAnon meetings. Your son shows signs of substance abuse problems and you show some signs of codependence. This is something that most of us here have battled with, so you are not alone. I am not judging you. This is something that helped me greatly. I only had the strength I did with my son because I had already come to terms with this some time before as I have a brother with sub abuse issues. The meetings are in most communities and are offered at many different times and locations usually.
Therapy would also be helpful as you deal with this. Find a therapist who says things that make sense to you. Therapists who tell you that you MUST keep you abusive child in your home need to be dropped immediately. It can take some trial and error to find a therapist who is the right fit for you. Sometimes the problems don't show up until a couple of months in. Trust you instincts. Most counties have low cost mental health clinics that are very helpful. Given the way you feel, you might also get help from the local domestic violence center. I got help from our DV center after my son was out of our home. They hadn't had a parent abused by a teen before, so they came up with a program just for me, free of cost. I
f you live near a university with a psychology department, they often have clinics that offer therapy on a sliding scale. It is often a really great deal. They charge less than a private practice to start with, then discount based on income. You see a student who is supervised by a professor. Usually sessions are videotaped, but it is NOT intrusive, even back when it was done with VHS tapes. These are reviewed by the professor and then when you are done, they are erased. This gives you a MUCH better chance of good therapy than you otherwise have. You have proof of what is being said and done. The students are very conscientious because they are being graded and they want to do well. They get feedback and can revisit issues with you if they didn't say something or they said something really wrong, so you also get the input of a licensed psychologist. I have had FAR better therapy from the clinic at our local university than from many of the private therapists I have seen. Plus if anyone does anything truly wrong, there is proof and you can sue. I wish I had that with one private therapist I had many years ago. He was just an absolute inappropriate crackpot. No jury in the land would hesitate to give me everything he owned if I had videotape of any of the 2 sessions I had with him. He was that bad. He got a 2nd session because my mother convinced me that I misunderstood him and he couldn't be THAT bad. She was right. He was worse on the 2nd visit! Trust your instincts.
I highly recommend reading Parenting Teens With Love and Logic by Fay and Cline. I like their books. They use logical consequences to reinforce responsible behavior. They don't insist you give warning after warning before you give consequences - one warning ever is all they recommend, even with younger children. Kids can remember things even if adults think they cannot. (Oh, my stars the things my daughter remembers from when she was a little kid!) The methods in this book worked with some very difficult teens I knew. Our school district uses the L&L methods more than other methods for discipline. Every other year or so they will get sold on some new method that is being pushed and it will fail hugely. Then they will go back to L&L and retrain everyone in that again. This has been going on since my 22 yo daughter was 6. Or maybe longer, that is just as long as we have been in the district. Some teachers just give lip service to the new methods because they know L&L works with the little kids and with the medium kids and the big kids. It works with the gifted kids and the normal kids and the autistic kids and the Down's Syndrome kids and all the other kids. I have spoken to various teachers and counselors at 2 elementary schools, the middle school, the junior high and the high school. They have all said this. Even the resource officers (city cops who are permanently stationed at the school) from the middle, junior and high schools have said that they have a much better, easier year when the school is using L&L. Why? "It. Just. Works." Direct quote from one of the resource officers. He raised his kids with L&L (and one of them was adopted with drugs in his system at birth, and had a rough road).
I went to one of the 1 day seminars given by the people who wrote L&L. Dr. Charles Fay spoke. Lots of schools sent teachers. One fairly new gym teacher burst out "So that's why you did it!" all of a suddent. Dr. Fay was talking about the teen refusing to do a chore and how a parent should handle it. Apparently this gym teacher (GT) was a handful and a half. His mother was a teacher and had learned the L&L methods from her job, and had gotten a book to help with GT. She had hired someone to do GT's chores. When GT didn't have the money to pay the worker, Mom pawned GT's stereo to get the money. This is all what the book recommends. GT only then realized what happened when he was at the lecture. How do I know it wasn't a setup?? I spoke with GT and his mother separately at the break. On hearing my last name, they asked me if I knew or was related to a vice principal with the same last name. Yup. That is my father in law. The L&L people are way in another part of the country. I also spoke with my father in law and he told me that if it had been a setup, the mother would have told people that she got free admission for her story. She is apparently "in your face honest" as he put it. He also remembered the son and how he turned around when she used L&L consistently with him.
I don't know if L&L will fix everything with your son. Please remember that throwing your son out of the house does NOT mean you are throwing him out of the family. My parents kicked my brother out of the house when he was 19. He wasn't just out of high school because he has skipped a few grades, but he was still very young. He had just decided to blow off college and gamble and drink, though my folks refused to see it. They did see he was not doing the bare minimum, and they said enough was enough. He was still part of the family even though he was not supported by them. Their rule was that after high school, we had to be either working full time, in school full time, or doing school and work each part time. Usually they liked school FT and work PT because we were NOT rich. That was if we wanted to live at home. He chose to go into the Army rather than live on what he could earn working minimum wage jobs. I was surprised he made it, but it helped him grow up. He was angry with my parents. but he was still part of the family and he knew it. Your son will too, though he may use not contacting you as a way to try to punish you. Do what you can to not let him see you sweat. (Isn't that the hardest part of parenting? Seeming confident and not sweating or laughing about what your kid is doing? It was for me!)
Your son may be angry with you, but letting him break the rules and run roughshod over you won't help either one of you. I know how hard it is to stand up to a raging teen, especially when they are so out of control. My son was much bigger and stronger than I was. He was incredibly violent and had a history of doing very violent things with the intent to cause permanent lasting damage to people. Standing up to him often took every ounce of courage that I had. I know that inside you tremble and quake and want to run away and leave it all to him rather than deal with him in that moment. I truly do understand.
If you stand up to your son, you are not throwing him out on the streets. He has a place to go. He can go to his father's home. If he cannot, it is likely because he has done something to make himself unwelcome. As for rock bottom, until he has to face some consequences, that won't ever come. Right now he has food, shelter, all bills paid and no reason to change. Sadly YOU have to hit rock bottom before he will hit rock bottom. Unless he breaks the law away from your home and gets caught. That is about your only hope, and it is probably a very long road to get to that point. Especially with weed so close to being legal.
We have all outlined things that might help. Before you can take any steps at all, you need to do some reading and figure out what you want to do. You need to consider going to some meetings (at least they are someplace to go that isn't home for a little while, hmmm?) and find a therapist. Look at the various books we have recommended and pick the ones you want to buy or check out from the library. Then go ahead and get them and start reading.
Once you have done some of that, you can start to figure out what you want to do for your first steps with your son. Don't start until you decide what you want to do and you make a plan. One thing I learned from L&L was to make a plan and to run it by another adult to make sure it made sense. Dr. Fay described it as checking to see if your boat had leaks. Sometimes you don't see the leak until the boat is in the water. Having someone else look at the plan helps before you get to the water (face your kid with the plan) because they can see angles that you cannot. Be sure that you will follow through BEFORE you tell your son that you will or will not do something. The worst thing possible is to say you will do something and then not to do it when he puts you to the test.
Know that we will be here for you no matter what. If you throw him out tomorrow or if you never throw him out and you work with setting limits and modifying his behavior as you can, we will be here to support you. We will likely tell you what WE would do or have done, but we understand that you can only do what you can do. We are NOT judging you or bashing you. It truly is a soft place to land.
Many hugs,
