Interesting thread Barbara, thank you, as always, for your insight and thoughts.........
This entire situation with my difficult child has taken me to the limits of my own abilities, to the absolute border of my sanity and my heart's ability to absorb pain, so I understand what this process of detachment and acceptance does to us. What it has also done is to push me to understand much more fully, how my own issues, my own hurts and expectations, my own fears and shortcomings, my own disappointments and sorrows ..........have an enormous impact on my parenting of my difficult child and how I respond to her and the choices I make about her. I think aside from all the remarkable pain in losing a child to her own darkness, is separating myself and my "stuff" from my ability to parent my difficult child in a healthy way. So, for me, first I had to really uncover my own darkness in order to effectively deal with hers. This has not been easy.
With difficult children, over time the focus gradually shifts from a normal, healthy balance to an almost complete focus on to them. That complete focus for most of us, including me for sure, becomes extremely challenging to now ride that very thin line of enabling and rescuing and healthy loving parenting, in other words, it becomes an unhealthy situation, not only for us, but for our difficult child's too. Some innate balance has shifted in the big picture and the lack of that balance point disrupts everything. All those expectations we have, all of that help and trying to fix it that we do, sends a very clear message that we believe that our difficult child's are not okay and cannot handle their own lives..................they can then become professional victims. Even if they are mentally challenged, this message is clear. How to define what our part is in all of this, without our GUILT, without our ANGERS, without our NEEDS to have them be okay so we can eliminate the shame of believing somehow this is our fault and their successes mean we are successful and their failures mean we are failures. We have to separate from them, we have to learn the boundary between where we leave off and they begin, we are not joined to them, they are separate human beings.............they have their own destiny, their own fate.......
Trying to draw some kind of line in the sand, when to step in, when to step back has been a difficult path............only now, with the help of a lot of therapy about my own issues do I see that once my own enabling tendencies were (for the most part) banished from my thinking, it was then that those choices of when to step in and when not to, began to become much, much clearer. Those choices were shrouded in my own "stuff" my own NEED to rescue my difficult child out of my own FEAR. Once my issues calmed down some, that fog cleared and I could see more truth, I could see myself being manipulated, I could see the power I gave my difficult child to continue to use me to keep herself stuck in her own victim stance. I could see, very clearly, that all of my suffering did not change anything at all. My misery did not impact difficult child, I now see that that misery is indeed, as the saying goes, optional. I also have begun to love and accept my self more deeply so that my life has become more enriched.
I work on making a different choice every day, training myself to bring myself back to that balance point. Learning to accept what I cannot change, like the serenity prayer states, that acceptance, is what brings peace. That peace the spiritual books talk about, the peace beyond all understanding............... Buddha claimed our greatest source of suffering is our attachments.............what greater attachment do we have then with our children..............if one can learn to accept, to let go, to find peace in a horrific, crazy, upside down world like the one we all live in, then truly, you are walking on a spiritual path, learning to find compassion, peace, grace, understanding and love in the midst of tragedy.
Well, after all my ramblings, what has helped me the most has been discovering myself, putting the focus on me and from that vantage point making better decisions. Secondly, I now look at this as a spiritual path, one that some of us, (probably most of us here) are engaged in to learn this thing called acceptance........I see that as a distinct and clear journey our kids pushed us onto, however, it is separate from our kids (in my opinion) it's about how we can learn, as Frankl does in his book, a deeper and more meaningful understanding of love, compassion, forgiveness and.............acceptance.