She is still young and maybe just needs some time.
She is young. It is possible that by changing your responses, the dynamic of the relationship can change. Even just a little change is a welcome thing, when we are trying to help ourselves and our children.
One thing I do is adopt a child through my church
I have found that adopting a child that is less fortunate really helps
Helping others does turn our pain into a different kind of energy. The hurt is still there, but we begin to feel less hopeless.
Try not to dwell on it, if I remember she doesn't treat you all that well when you are in contact so maybe this was a blessing in disguise.
There are two great points here. One, that we can choose to push the pain away and two, that
the problem may not be of our making. If there is a disorder of some kind at the heart of this, your child may not be able to change her behaviors. Our best response has to be to learn all we can about why this is happening and then, to change our responses.
I'm sorry this is happening, sorry for the pain of it.
But you need to be strong, now.
You know where we are, if and when you are ready to talk feel free to contact us. Until that time I will respect your wishes and not contact you.
Again, two great points. Acknowledging the child's right to erect whatever boundaries he or she feels are appropriate, and loving the child and ourselves enough to let go of the need to control the situation.
With love.
Its hard I want to believe that we will have a better relationship in the future but my son is a difficult child and while I see some changes some things are very much the same and I can't but prepare myself for that fact that in the future he might suddenly cut us out again.
I like this because we parents need to know, in our deepest hearts, that our children may not be responding to us. They may be fighting an addiction or a personality disorder or a downright mental illness. Our job is to love them
and ourselves strong and unshakably enough to get us all through this. A piece of that is to let go of judging either the child or ourselves.
And that is a very hard thing to do.
My first step seems to need to be to let go of my defensiveness, to let go of judging
myself. It is hard to trust our core selves enough to love us all through it when everything seems so dark and I feel I should have been able to prevent it, somehow. We need to stay present. We need to learn all we can and then, proceed on that basis.
It's a matter of faith.
Faith in ourselves.
A very hard thing, when our worlds are collapsing around us.
I read on a borderline personality disorder website called Borderline Central that a "cut off" is the most cruel sort of abuse somebody can do. Yes, it's abuse. It is done with malice and bad intent tohurt you to the end.
True.
With malice.
I never got that until this minute.
They can literally cut you off like they cut a pieceof paper and just move on, smugly knowing how
they hurt you and not always hurting themselves because of it.
"Smugly knowing how they hurt you...."
This is probably exactly true, MWM. I never thought of it that way before.
People who do this kind of thing probably know exactly what they are doing.
Huh.
It never occurred to me that a cut off was abuse, but can you think of anything more hurtful than that?
I had not thought of it as abuse, either.
Of course it is.
You have to learn why they do what they do and then you don't feel so bad. It's them, not you, and they are sick. But meanly sick...you have decide how you want to respond to it.
"You have to learn why they do what they do...."
Much of continuing to interact with an abusive person has to do with how responsible we feel when something goes wrong. We become guilty. We begin to explain how that wasn't what we meant
and they will not hear us because that is exactly what they want; that is the nature of the game they are playing.
Man, what a power dynamic.
This is an excellent thread.
Cedar
