the problem I have Is keeping my feelings at bay my instant reaction is my heart sinks because she sounds sooo pitiful!
Hi sooootired....I'm so sorry about your daughter and her behavior. I know how hard it is to "unhook" yourself from your grown child.
Your line I quoted above is at the heart of it all. They call, they push/pull/manipulate, we react. This is the cycle that we have to interrupt.
We have to interrupt the old ways of doing things. How to do that?
Change just one thing. Start there.
When the cycle starts, do something different. Let the call go to voice mail. Don't answer the text for 24 hours. These are examples of new boundaries you can begin to consider and set.
If/when you do respond or talk with your daughter, have a list of responses ready---typed out on a sheet of paper. Read the paper verbatim if you have do.
I did have to, for a while. I couldn't trust myself to simply respond back and forth with my son, because I could not help from getting engaged, reacting, doing something I didn't want to do, and live the same tired cycle over and over and over.
I finally realized it was up to me to change it. He wasn't ever going to change it. I had to change myself.
So....what to do with feelings? The feelings are still there. Over time, I have learned to separate what I did from how I felt. That was SO HUGE for me.
For all of my life, I had the philosophy that my feelings drove my actions. I felt it (upset, scared, disappointed,etc.) and to make the feeling go away....I would take action---some sort of action. Action made me feel better. I would engage, and then I would DO SOMETHING.
I didn't know how to do nothing. I have had to learn how. And I am a very slow learner.
Since my son's rapid descent into addiction, I have had to learn a whole new set of skills. How to wait, How to do nothing, How to let him feel the consequences of his actions. How to feel my feelings but not act on them. How to detach with love. More and more and more change---change inside myself.
I have also learned that we should not make any decisions concerning our difficult children when we are in reaction mode. It is never going to be good when we are doing that.
We have to take a step back, think, let time go by, and then with a clearer head, make a decision.
Start doing this for yourself, and your life will improve, no matter what she does or does not do. It stands to reason that we are not going to be able to fix them.
We have to fix ourselves.
Warm hugs.