Stands, you are right about needing to detach.
At the bottoms of my posts, there is a detachment site I found so helpful. If you have not accessed the detachment site yet, please go to the bottom of this post and have a look at it.
It helped me.
For us (for all of us here, I think), detachment is so difficult because in the normal course of events, it is not necessary to consciously detach from our kids.
We have friends with "normal" children. In those families, the parents are proud or frustrated ~ and the kids listen. As the kids learn how to navigate in the world, both parent and child learn over time how to let go. For parents like us, this normal process is disrupted. Our children, for whatever reason ~ drug use or some other challenge most parents never have to cope with ~ our children do not listen. Not to us, and not to anyone else. Our children have to learn the hard way, through consequences. What we need to learn is not to save them from the consequences of their actions. For our kids, the only way they will learn to make a better choice is to experience the pain of the choices they HAVE made.
This is so hard on us. We wonder whether we were bad parents, whether we missed something, whether we forgot to tell them not to use drugs or run with a wild crowd.
The thing is that we DID tell them.
Now what you need to learn is how to tell your son what the consequences of his behavior will be from YOU. (These are the rules. Follow them, and I will help you put your life back together. Choose to follow a different course, and you are on your own.
You cannot do that from here is another thing I have said.
I will never help you destroy yourself, I will never watch you destroy yourself ~ these are also things I have said to my son.
This is very hard to do until you do it.
And then, all at once, it is easier than always trying to pretend everything is normal.
Know that you are not the only parent who has needed to learn these kinds of parenting skills. None of us wanted to have to learn them.
But you have to tailor what you give your son in the way of guidance to what your son will hear.
I know how painful this time is for you and for your family.
You will learn how to do this, and how to be happy again, in time.
For right now, I think you will find comfort in learning about detachment. There IS a way to go. There IS a way to survive this.
We can set our own boundaries, but we cannot do a thing about what our kids are going to choose except to tell them we will not watch them destroy themselves.
Also, I love the phrase "You were raised better than this."
The kids will try to convince us that what they are doing is somehow our fault.
It is not.
If you had raised your boy to do what he is doing now, you would not be here on this site.
Please do check out the detachment site at the end of this post.
Keep posting.
I don't know where I would be today without the other parents on this site ~ but I suspect that our thirty-two year old son would be living at home, not working, and using.
He was becoming very abusive, very manipulative.
We needed to stand up.
Again, StandsWithCourage, none of us knew how to do this. It is hurtful to speak to your child as you will need to learn to speak to him. But we all DID learn. And we all are walking, at our various speeds, along the path of our own recovery from the trauma of having something like this happen to our children.
You have been, and are being, traumatized, right now. You need to be strong and certain enough to survive it.
Keep posting and posting. No one here is judging you. We ALL needed to learn how to parent a child who refuses to be parented.
You can do this.
Barbara