held hostage in a bizarre alternate universe where none of my ideals and
values matter.
Yes. Just lately, I've begun to understand that the person holding me hostage is me. Maybe because if I let myself see what was really happening, I would have to compromise pretty much every value I think I hold to respond appropriately to it...I never let myself understand that the difficult child meant to take the actions he or she took. I have to (we have to) stop pretending the difficult children in our lives didn't mean to do whatever it is they did this time. We all make mistakes, have bad days, say things we don't mean. But the difficult children in our lives act out routinely. Patterns are created. If you watch for it? You will see that the difficult children in your life intentionally push every one of your buttons in sequence; that they routinely elicit from you exactly the reaction they intended to get.
Every time.
They do mean it.
They meant it the last time, and the time before that, too.
"...a bizarre alternate universe where none of my ideals and values matter."
That is exactly what it feels like to love a difficult child. I am stepping up regarding my family of origin, too. The thing is, it doesn't matter whether the difficult child is a child, a parent, a sister, a friend, or a husband or wife. There are always the craziest, most unanticipated bad things crashing in out of left field. There are always hurtful consequences hanging out in the ether somewhere. We refuse to allow the ax to fall (or to grab it and take after the difficult child ourselves) because our primary value, superceding even our own health and happiness, is to help everything be the best it can be.
I think this is especially true for those of us whose families of origin are dysfunctional. Somewhere along the way, we decided it was going to be different for us. We decided that whatever it took, we were not going to abandon or mistreat or whatever the issue was, as we were growing up.
We have to stop believing the difficult children in our lives do not mean to do what they do because
we would not do those same things.
They mean it.
We need to hear that.
When they tell us who they are, we need to hear what they say.
but if the person is unwilling to seek help or to change, then I am
compelled to remove myself for my own well being.
A key piece here is that we need to relearn valuing ourselves. Over time, the guilt and frustration take their toll on us. We begin routinely to put our interests aside for the sake of the difficult child child, husband, wife, mother, friend. That becomes our pattern, that kind of guilty self-devaluing. That is why it is an important piece of our own recovery to take care of ourselves, to begin doing things for our own health and happiness.
Recovering is correct in telling us to begin with ourselves, to begin with making a commitment to cherish and care for and be kind to, ourselves.
Once we recognize that all of our efforts to change our difficult child's, to help them, to make it better for them, to bring them over to our way of thinking, fail.........that door closes and now we're left with just the reality of who they
are and how that impacts us.
What's left to do then is to accept that.
My pattern is to beat myself up for that, to try harder to understand what happened, to try harder to find something different in future. Here again, cherishing and taking care of ourselves is the first concrete step we need to take so we can learn to revalue ourselves and stop beating ourselves up by focusing, over and over again, on things we cannot control or even, change very much.
We have become sick ourselves, over the years spent trying to shepherd our difficult child kids, friends, or family members to some kind of safety, to some kind of sanity.
These are hard realizations, but necessary ones if we are to live in any kind of peace again.
It is important to recognize that changing our own pattern of response is going to be hard. It is going to feel really uncomfortable. Our efforts to take good care of ourselves will leave us feeling guilty, at first. If we expect those feelings, we will not find ourselves trying to "make up for" the times we were "unkind".
That is a big piece for me. I make a correct response. Then, I feel like I have been so hard-hearted and mean spirited that I backtrack.
So, we just have to be aware that those feelings are right and good and a normal part of the change process. We know now that those old patterns did not help. From all that we post here, we can be pretty certain that these new ways of looking at things will be helpful. At the farthest edge, we can know for sure that the old patterns weren't working and that we are at least creating change, that we are opening a space for something new to happen.
It isn't an easy thing to do.
it is important for you to stay the course and continue detaching, because now it's about
you and how you respond. It is not about difficult child.
Whoever the difficult children in our lives are, now that we know better, it is no longer about the difficult child.
Use all the toolsyou have in your arsenal, limit your responses as you've been doing and
make sure you take very good care of you every single day, all the time.
Take the focus off of him and put it on yourself now.
Every single day. Celebrate every smallest step toward learning to cherish the gift of your own life.
That's what we're talking about, here.
We must grieve it, work through it, recognize it, detach, and then finally
accept. Sometimes we have to do it over and over again.
I am reminded of my aunt who I wrote about a few days ago, who is 75 and her difficult child is 42 (I think) and they are stilldancing the sick dance. There was another new person who wrote here
who is older as well dealing with her son who is in his 50s.
These are important lessons for me to hear and see and bear witness to.
I do not want that for my life. I am working so that is not my life.
To the good things everyone else has said, I would add that removing the consequences of their actions does not help any of the difficult children in our lives learn to be and do better. Even a 42 year old difficult child can take responsibility for and create his or her own life.
After our lives fell apart, I went back to school. I graduated cum laude. Though I had already lived one whole life, experienced one whole identity, the world, a whole, different world, was mine for the taking.
I was 42.
The younger the difficult child is when he or she is made to confront the consequences of his or her actions, the better the chances are for them to come out of this independent and strong.
My kids are (or have been, until recently) BOTH dependent on husband and I in ways adults should not be dependent on their parents. Somewhere along the line, the nature of our interactions slipped over the line, slipped into a weird kind of hatred...but though we resented it, we kept paying, kept trying, kept having them home to live, kept trying to get back on their feet. Somewhere along the course of those years, we had lost so much respect for our own children that we began excusing angry outbursts, nasty conversations, money gambled or drugged away, because the need to save the difficult child from the cold, or from hunger or homelessness was not something we could turn away from. Based on my experience, I believe that while any one of us could find ourselves in a place where we needed help, if we are loving and helping someone who repeatedly needs help...then the best help we can give them, the best (and maybe the only) way to help them become the strong and independent, truly human beings they have the capacity to be is to change whatever it is we have been doing that hasn't worked.
If it isn't working, then it is the wrong thing to do, however responsible we feel for where they find themselves, and however badly we want things to be okay.
It is very hard to do what needs to be done about any of the difficult children in our lives and feel good about ourselves. It is hard to stand by, hard to "let" them take the consequences of their actions and choices. And there again, Recovering's contention that we need to begin by relearning how to cherish ourselves and our own lives is so important.
We have been twisted a little, by our interactions with the difficult children in our lives, into people who can't celebrate our own lives, any more. There is always that underlying sadness, that nagging worry that we call waiting for the other shoe to drop.
That stupid telephone, ringing late in the night and you just know something bad happened.
You just know it.
We are always braced for that phone call.
COM posted once about learning to view our situations by seeing them as both the cloud (what we see) and the silver lining hidden away inside the cloud. That's the future. For us to come back into some kind of balance in our lives, whatever is going on with our difficult child friends or relatives, if we can learn to see it like that cloud with its hidden silver lining, if we can learn to hold that imagery in our minds, then we can do what we need to do for our difficult children.
Let go.
No one knows the future. If the difficult children in our lives continue living the difficult child life, that bad things will happen is more likely. But none of us has a guarantee, not about anything. It is right and good that we should cherish and enjoy the gift of our own lives.
Being alive, being right here in this moment, that's an incredible thing.
Even when the days are really cloudy.
Cedar