Good Morning All!

Alttlgabby

New Member
Have not been back around for a long time. Just been generally busy trying to get myself through school and deal with LIFE around here! Things with difficult child are not much better. We seem to deal with the same stuff, different day without remorse or shame. We get the same "I don't know, No, I forgot, etc"... any excuse she can come up with to avoid having to speak. We have just finished round TWO of behavioral in the local hospital of choice. I think we might see a "change" for a few days but then all this will go right out the window again. She does NOT like being confronted with her issues by me at all. Upon discharge, she had a "journal" that they gave to her. Well, apparently NOBODY bothered to monitor a darned thing she wrote in it! One of the rules that they tell these kids when they go in is that there is to be NO ROMANTIC involvements with the other patients. I specifically asked about this again this time around because we had the issue the last go round where she fixated on ONE boy...the kid turned out to be Bi or Gay and had many issues himself. What did she do this time around, again???? Fixated on a boy in group that she got to see for maybe ONE hour for a max of 6 days!This one I looked up on the internet to make sure he didn't have a MySpace or Facebook that she might try to find...oh, but he comes up as a missing person back in January. He was also on drugs and overdosed. Just the kind of person she needs to fixate on and try to get to know? She was writing in her journal how she was in love with him! How she dreamt of him every night and wanted him to take her out of her depression, etc... Drawing those little Mew Mew characters again (she is OBSESSED with certain things..and this is one, aside from Vampires and Werewolves, etc). I do have a call into the therapist that was over her in there and I will be asking some questions..not to mention that I still have to go back for some of her belongings that were never given to her, nor were they returned to me either. I now know for certain that she has been like this since she was VERY small. Defiant, not talking, stubborn, etc... When I took her in, she was telling them that I just didn't understand her when she talked to me or her moods! Would like to know just HOW I am to understand a child that doesn't SPEAK! Trying to get her to even answer simple yes or no questions is like pulling teeth! I finally started walking away from her when it was time to do math. I get so tired of spending 15-20 minutes (several times!) with her arguing with me that HER answer is right and mine is wrong and how I don't know what I am doing and that it isn't the way the teacher showed her how to do it! I told her finally that I was DONE checking her math. When she is made to get her book or notebook from class and look at the examples..wow, I did do it exactly like her teacher showed her. And, when she finally stops arguing and does it the way she should, she gets an A on her paper. But, when it comes to the tests.. she gets an F every time. She wants to make up her own rules about this stuff. We still have the issues with the picking. She takes no pride in herself at all. Is totally defiant and doesn't want to do what she is told. When she has chores, she wants to take the lazy way out and do them in a hurry and then tell you she did them right when it is right in her face that she obviously did not! Then sits there and argues with you about it. Sometimes she is just totally defiant about doing them. Last time she did that and I ended up doing her chores right along with everything that I was doing, she ended up with no dinner and slept in the dining room floor that night. I told her that if she didn't want to do what she was expected to do around here as a member of this family, then she didn't reap the benefits of anything. Next day, she was doing them! I have come to the point of telling her that if she doesn't want to be a member of this family and do what everyone else is doing, then that is fine. I will wipe her chores off the board and she will not go to the movies, shopping, out to eat, etc.... because she isn't deserving of it because she doesn't want to help out around the house. She doesn't have a lot to do either. She and her sister share the chores 5 days of the week. Daddy and I do the other portion of chores on the weekend to give them a break. They alternate kitty litter and dog mess. Vacuuming is done 4 times a week. Cleaning the bathroom is done 2-3 times a week with one time being sanitized and the other two just wiping things down. Dust their room one time weekly. And they have kitchen duty to help after dinner (we have a dishwasher!) and dishes to be put away as needed. That is about the extent of their chores! The other kids have chores as well, and I do the entire house myself on Mondays. This child just wants to butt heads with me on a continual basis! We have all kinds of diagnosis and they dealt with the ADHD and the Mood Disorder not otherwise specified while she was in this last time. She is GREAT for them. She talks to them..does whatever is needing to be done, but get her home and she is totally different! She trusts strangers but not those that are close to her and love her the most! That scares the hell out of me! And, trying to get her the excess help here is like pulling teeth. Called one place yesterday that my oldest handicap daughter is under to get her a Life Skills Coach and she doesn't fit their criteria because she is not physically handicap or mentally retarded. Her IQ is 78, so she is on the very low range. And from reading the journal entries she makes at times... she is smarter than she wants to appear! She thinks she is snowing people by saying things like "I don't know" when she does. It is just her way of trying get out of having to discuss anything! I have talked to one doctor over at another place that is Residential Treatment Center (RTC), and that is the next step for us if this continues. I told husband that I cannot continue living under this kind of stress for the next 2-3 years with her being like this. The kid needs some serious help and she needs to be somewhere for awhile where she will end up having to live with RULES and BOUNDERIES and she shows them exactly what type of behaviors are being exhibited. This go round, I have my video recorder ready for her little episodes to show these people exactly how she is acting. Some how these kids really are "smarter" than the average bear and snow the people in these treatment centers. They want to go home, so they will do what they are supposed to do, but in my opinion... a week is NOT long enough to treat them.. all they are doing is stabilizing them, then sending them home! These kids tell them exactly what they want to hear so they can leave.. then act like they don't know what they are doing at home? Sorry if this is so freaking long. It is just so darned frustrating! Makes you want to tear your hair out! LOL
 

Marguerite

Active Member
A young man at difficult child 3's drama class had serious problems a few years ago, with "falling in love" with various pretty girls he saw. It happened every flippin' time we were at a get-together and his parents were going crazy. An example - he and his parents would arrive at the party. The purpose of the party - either a seasonal get-together, or a birthday party for one of the drama kids. ALL the drama kids are difficult child in some way, mostly with autism, some with developmental delay. Because it's a party, a lot of siblings, friends and family are there too. Non-difficult child with lives they have got on with. This guy would see a pretty girl who was either someone's sister or sis-in-law and then would convince himself that she was the one. Then he would find out that this girl was already attached - and the bottom would drop out of his world. His mother would generally have to take him home, him threatening suicide because "my life is over - she will never love me, she loves someone else."
This guy is actually very good-looking but also a bit vain. He's actually a nice guy, but his mother looks and dresses like Posh Beckham and so he has his own very high standards. In vain did we try to say to him, "You need to get to know a girl first and get to be friends, before you fall in love for real." He said, "I don't WANT a friend, I want a girlfriend!"

We saw an amazing change in him when his parents found an anti-anxiety medication that calmed down the obsessive side of this. He still looks around for girls, but no longer catastrophically falls in love within seconds of seeing a pretty girl across the room. Meanwhile without realising it, he has a lot of female friends who he is close to. He just doesn't really understand yet what romantic love really is. He never did - he was instead, in love with the idea of being in love.

I suspect your daughter is doing the same - in fiction, all our problems are solved by the end of the book (or movie) when love finally blossoms. She knows she has problems, but love will cure it. And likely-looking lad will do. It's pure fantasy, and also a childish attempt at problem-avoidance. Pure immaturity.

We need to remember sometimes, that our difficult children can take a lot longer to reach their emotional milestones. In the meantime, they reach for the goals and miss by a mile.

Hang in there, it's going to be a bumpy ride. But possibly a change in medications might reduce the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) side of things.

Marg
 

Alttlgabby

New Member
Thanks. We have added Lexapro now to her medications but won't see any type of change for a bit. We are hopefully going to Residential Treatment Center (RTC) this weekend or next week. I am waiting for a supervisor to call back. Yesterday in our therapy session she claimed that she heard a voice that is mean and it tells her not to talk to us because then bad things will happen to her. She made a claim in her first acute care stay that she heard voices telling her to do bad things, and that she has been hearing voices since she was about 6 years old. The picking is still pretty bad too. Her obsession only seems to happen while in acute. I haven't seen any evidence of an obsession other than the regular "I like so and so" but it is one boy. I think she fantasizes a lot about these relationships, but it goes a bit deeper than that.
 

Marguerite

Active Member
I would be wary of the "hearing voices" given her history plus her past tendency to be manipulative. She's been around people who jump and react when a kid reports hearing voices, she knows it gets attention. I usually avoid describing a difficult child as manipulative, but she's desperate to cling to hr fantasies (all of them) - actually, she's desperate to cling to fantasy as a coping strategy, and part of the fantasy can be having a more exotic diagnosis, one that gets her more attention, more therapists to pay court to her.

I'm not saying she isn't having psychotic issues, but I wouldn't automatically accept this at face value.

It is too easy to either misinterpret the "hearing voices" or for a kid to over-state their own conscience-pricking as 'hearing voices". I remember as a kid sometimes feeling tempted to do something naughty, just for the reaction. Sometimes I acted on that temptation. I have a vivid imagination - given the right circumstances (ie being surrounded by people who indicate tat hearing voices is a serious matter) I could very easily have talked myself into believing that voices had told me to do something bad. I also remember trying to analyse the 'sound' of that inner voice, the one that reads books aloud in my head, when I prop a book up in front of me. Again - this could so easily have tipped over into a very unhealthy area if I had not been in a balanced environment. Looking back now, I know what I was observing was perfectly normal mind function. I was just over-analysing it (because I do tend to over-anayse!).

Go carefully.

And please - use the occasional RETURN. It makes it easier to read your posts, if we have some white space between the occasional paragraph break!

Marg
 
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