I am now thinking it is all Dr. Spock's fault. All of it. That our kids cause us grief and that we are wired as to feel it so deeply and to think and feel about ourselves as responsible, and broken...because we cannot tell happy stories about 100 percent of our children. Dr. Spock's fault. My mother's copy had dog-eared pages.
That is what husband says, Copa.
Dr Spock, and Dr Lee Salk. And there was another one too, about raising healthy children, but I can't think what it was.
And for the longest time, I thought that might be it, too. But now I think that the heart of the matter is that our children are troubled. I believe now this is genetic. I even believe, now, as I heal, that we may have been stellar moms.
I do.
I did feel so responsible, at first. I do still, if the truth be told. I have to fight very hard, with every interaction, to believe in my kids enough to say the words I have learned, here on this site. We do that ~ believe with everything in us that we are responsible ~ I think we do that because if what is happening to our kids is somehow our fault...we can help them.
It's very sad, what is happening to all of us.
It was shocking, horrifying, as it is for you Copa, and for Feeling and New leaf and for all of us here, to realize I was hurting my children by helping them.
To realize I had to let go. It was the only thing I hadn't tried.
But I did it. I listened to everyone here on the site, and I did the best I could to change myself, to help myself and to help the kids.
When I did that, when I passed responsibility for their lives over to them...I was left with nothing, at all.
No role to be; nothing to help me know how to accept what was.
Not even determination to fix it; to heal us all.
I was left with Radical Acceptance and the words I'd learned here, and with the horrible loss of what is.
I would rather it had been something I had done, something I could address or at least, apologize for. There would be some way then, that we could know how this happened and unravel it and set things right. It took me the longest time, to acknowledge and accept the why behind what was happening to all of us. And when that happened, I lost whatever was still holding me up. Hope, faith, belief that loving them and ourselves enough mattered; that love would get us through it ~ gone.
We weren't going to get through this.
But here we all are, the parents on this site, and the kids, and we are ~ maybe not so much coming through it, as coming to terms with it.
If I did it (and I am) we all can.
There is like a slow motion horror to all of it.
We have to be very strong.
I cannot detach because my schizophrenic son is not in touch with reality.
One of my children copes with mental illness, Feeling Sad. For me, detaching came to be about learning to detach, not from the child, but from the horror of my own emotional reaction to what was happening without going numb.
I say dorky things when I am coming from a place of numbness instead of real.
I had to learn to detach even from the slow motion horror of anticipation.
Repeated trauma builds on itself.
Somewhere Out There gave us the concepts of "emotional flashback", and of Complex Post Traumatic Stress. Not just PTSD, but Complex PTSD. that is the name for what happens when we have survived repeated trauma. Each reaction builds on the one before it. And if we've made ourselves stand up to it, that feeling ~ that being so scared and staying right there with whatever it was that was happening ~ the only thing we are left to stand up to it with is that stupid complex PTSD reaction, snapping us directly into horror and freezing us in place.
I don't even know how we function through that stuff, at all.
So, now we have a name for what is happening to us.
That was helpful to me. It helped me know what was happening to me; it helped me name why I could not sleep, why there were times when the disreality was so intense I felt disconnected from my own self as I watched myself interact, like I was watching from a distance while the real me was focused on my child, and on the horror of what was happening.
***
Child of Mine posts about the concept of a tool box. For each of us, the tools we find of value will be different. Posting here is a tool box item. Meditation or one centering breath or journaling can be tool box items. Quotes can be tool box items, or spirituality or yoga or exercise.
Or travel.
Or Anne Lamott's prayer: "Help! Thanks! Wow!"
Knowing that we have a tool box can pull us through those first moments (or, months) when something horrifying is happening. That lost, whirling place we tumble into when something bad has happened is called: FOG.
Recovering Enabler gave us that term.
When we can at least name where we are, then we have a tool.
We can stand up.
We can get still, and function.
We can respond, instead of react. Maybe, it will only be for one minute. Then, we will have to begin again with our breathing or with something else in our tool box. And minute by minute, we will learn to nurture and respect ourselves
and our children through it.
That's the thing. The kids are scared, too. They do not want it this way any more than we do. It is so easy to forget compassion for their humanness; for their hurt and confusion about why these things are happening, to them, and to all of us.
You have been through major trauma, Feeling Sad. Responding as you have is normal and healthy. Grieving is normal and healthy; and hope.
It has made all the difference for me to understand that I need to believe my kids
can do what is required to create their own best lives. It is my belief, backed up by pretty much nothing
:O)
that when our children do not fly strongly into their adulthoods, we mothers don't stop seeing them as children; we see our thirty and forty year old offspring as toddlers, or adolescents.
We see them as they were before the bad times began: we protect.
I think this is genetically and hormonally mandated. We worry and celebrate and concentrate on them to the exclusion of our own further development. We begin to help too much and loving turns into enabling and we don't know why or how this happened to all of us, to our families.
We reach the point where we know only that lovingkindness is not helping our children, who have somehow come to be in their thirties and are still dependent on us
and who resent us for that.
Something has to change.
Us.
That is how I see detachment theory.
Emotional and personal survival.
I know there are parents who claim we can and should turn away and celebrate our own lives and let the chips fall where they may. I never could get there. I hope I never get there.
But to love my troubled kids close up was destroying me and them. Enabling gets to be such an ugly, ugly thing.
I am so very sorry you find yourself in this place in your life too, Feeling. It is downright crazy-making, I agree. During some of the worst of it for us, I worked, I went back to school, I did all kinds of things. It was eerie how I could function as I did. As you said, we smile, we converse, we say Good Morning; we discuss things like carpeting or gardening.
And the next day, somehow, no matter what is happening in our children's lives ~ in those lives that matter to us more than our own ~ we do it all again.
The last time something bad happened to us, I went through a true crisis of faith. All I could know to do was to say, "Yes".
So, I did.
I just said yes to pretty much whatever came along.
And somehow, one day and then, the next, I got through the worst of that time.
It was like everything was in slow, slow motion.
Terrible, terrible things kept happening.
But here I am today, with all of my parts and mostly intact.
The thing about schizophrenia is that we know, as their moms that they talk to about it, how that feels for the kids. And it's horrifying to know it. The confusion, the rages, the overweening certainty and the fall, and the hurt of it for them. Our child is not schizophrenic, but those aspects can, and have, appeared.
I am very sorry this is happening to you, and to your child and your family.
***
The first step is to decide you will heal. This is an act of will. It goes further than holding everything together so we can function. It comes real over time through repetition and determined intent. For me to choose to heal, guilt had to be overcome, and a sorrow ~ really, a living, breathing sorrow that came to be so much a part of me that I can easily touch the core of it to this minute.
I had to make myself larger than I was to encompass the pain and confusion, Feeling.
I had to open other facets of self.
It is like performing the Heimlich Maneuver. Performed with determined intent, it can save lives. We are about saving our own lives, here.
This time, these times in our lives, and in the lives of our children, have been ~ I don't have words.
It is not over. Not for us, and not for them.
It may never be over.
We have somehow to come into balance around that understanding. And there is no way to do it.
But we are doing it.
Each of us will have found her own way of seeing what is happening to her, and to her child and her family. I am glad you found us. We have been where you are and we can help you, and ourselves, to stay present. That is what detachment theory parenting became for me: a way to stay present; a way to be real in my own life. Real for me,
and for my kids. Everything is not going to come out all right, sometimes.
Ouch.
There came a time when extraneous pain ~ issues from my own childhood ~ had to be resolved and the toxic leak of strength once devoted to those hurtful things reclaimed.
I need every ounce of energy and presence I can command.
This is a choice.
This is a way to respond, not react.
Our lives are what they are. Our children are troubled. I think there is no worse pain, and for us and for them, the pain is unremitting.
We will all be right here with you Feeling, learning and holding strong and sometimes, just listening. And you will not be alone.
And that will make all the difference.
It's like in the poetry about For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Sometimes, it is tolling in my life.
Sometimes, in yours, or Copa's or for New Leaf.
Or for any of us, here.
For those who don't know what I know, I pray with all my heart that they never come to know it.
One of the mom's here described the way she felt as that painting, The Scream. That was real. But what she told me is that, though that imagery of The Scream is a very real part of her life, it does not define her life.
That helped me.
Another mom told me to repeat the Serenity Prayer until I got it.
I still do that.
Grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
the Courage to change the things I can;
and the Wisdom to know the difference.
Repeat it until it helps you. I do that in the night when I awaken worried, and my thoughts circle around and around awful things.
You are doing just fine, Feeling. I still have nights when I cannot push away what I know. I am no longer victimized by the trauma of what is happening in the same way because I recognize now, where I am when it begins.
I fight back, now.
Clearing useless guilt or shame or remorse is the reason we began Family of Origins threads, Feeling.
My daughter is 41.
She has four children.
***
And I am so grateful for this site, and for all of you.
I had to post and post and post, to get where I am, Feeling. The site is anonymous. No one here is going to judge you and if they do, understand they have not been where you are and pray they never know.
I can't think of anything else to tell you. Hold faith with yourself, and with us. Together here, we have come through.
Somehow, we have come through it. For the most part, we are still standing.
:O)
Cedar
Maybe I do have one more story to tell, Feeling. There was a mom here, when I first came to the site, who learned to take the actions we take when we come to understand detachment parenting. (And for each of us, that will be something different.) She made her addicted son leave.
He died, Feeling.
She was on the site again for her second child.
Even after knowing what had happened to his brother, even after watching his mother go through it, the second son had developed an addiction that ruled his life, too.
She made him leave, Feeling.
And his was a success story. It took a year, maybe two. Slowly, they built their lives again. She does not post with us here any longer. She does not need to.
But when she did, we were here.
(I was Basketcase City at that time. It was the other moms who got her through it.)
