How to recover ourselves after difficult child-induced trauma?

[scent of cedar]

An update on shame work vs positive affirmation:

I ordered Bradshaw's book. (Healing the Shame That Binds You) This is an old book. While I am probably going to try to stick with it, I'm finding it depressing. Rooting around in the past, seeking out old trauma without ever being sure you are really accomplishing anything hasn't left me feeling any healthier. I get myself all riled up, journal the heck out of everything...but I don't know that all this work is changing anything for me. Everything seems darker and heavier and more hopeless while working in this book. I am, however, finding it of immense value to journal through the in-the-present-moment anger and/or betrayal I feel over what difficult child is doing. I even think I might actually be recovering myself. It does make sense that I would stumble a little when we first came back to the city where difficult child failed and fell and still lives. (Homelessly, that is.)

Ew.

I also ordered a number of books from Joel Osteen. (Currently, am reading, "Become a Better You.") The result has been immediate and quite dramatic. I feel like I have the juice to face what is so painful, with compassion. At the same time, I feel less singled out, less "there must be something intrinsically wrong with me, or with my family, and that's why this happened."

So I am stronger.

:O)

This is one of the things Joel Osteen says about loss: "If you have been through a loss or one of your dreams has died, of course there's a proper time for grieving. But at some point, you have to get up, dust yourself off, put on a fresh attitude, and start pressing forward in life. Don't let disappointment be the central theme of your life. Quit mourning over something you can't change."

A few weeks back, I read "I Declare." (Joel Osteen) I felt stronger and happier while reading that. In that the book is broken into 31 declarations, one for each day of the month, it was especially helpful in countering difficult child-related fear, pain, or anger.

I definitely prefer the Joel Osteen books to the Bradshaw books.

Barbara

 

[witzend]

I don't know if I can ever get past the hyper-vigilance. I'll be ****ed if I know what it is that I am protecting/preventing/helpng. The explosion that's bound to happen someday?

I admire your sharing this with us. I think that many of us have PTSD, too. I don't know how we recover. I hope we do. Being this way is scary, and being whatever it is that's "not this way" is scary too. Life is a funny old thing, I guess.

 

[BusynMember]

If anyone is near a Codapendents Ananymous group, they are REALLY into talking out loud and sharing shame and the shame we feel. I think we critiqued almost every book mentioned here (not all...I have a few to read). It was a brand new thought..."I didn't cause this; I don't deserve to feel so ashamed." It was hard to unlearn it. I still feel it at times.

It is so hard not to take it personally and to feel it is not our faults when our children don't turn out to have the values we tried to teach them and when our families do not have that white picket fence that we wanted so badly. I know it first hand. I have learned significant things from CODA so that I am in a better place than I would have been without it, however I am still glad my most problematic child, 35, lives so far away so that I don't have to explain him to anybody. Nobody knows what he is doing...nobody except you and Al-Anon. He is a secret.

My ex and I spent YEARS keeping him afloat, before I ever heard of this board so the worst of it was over by the time I found you and he was married and leaving us alone. But I made him leave the house after he almost slapped me and he walked around that night homeless. And he found refuge with his "friend" who he mistreated, but who had a liking for him and the family took him in and called to yell at me for kicking my son out in the cold. Tears ran down my face. The mother asked me, in a really nasty way, if I didn't want to speak to my son and ask him to come home. I told her I did not. I was afraid of him. She laughed meanly and hung up on me. I felt about one inch high. The fact that sh e ended up kicking him out about two months later didn't make me feel any sick sort of "ha,ha, told you so" victory. He was on the streets again. I and my ex felt we had to at least make sure he did not wander the streets aimlessly.

Eventually, my ex, another enabler, bought a condo in the area JUST TO HOUSE difficult child who did not appreciate the generous, amazing gesture. But he was no longer homeless and living in hotel rooms that ex paid for. He lived in a Super 8 hotel for a few months until the condo happened and certainly he had no money to pay for it. I felt horrible for having kicked him out too, although he had gotten very scary, and I'd bring him food and keep him company. Nothing was expected of him. We just wanted to keep him warm and safe.

Until CODA, years later, shame was my middle name. I have learned I'm not responsible for his spurning our values. He is, after all, a separate person and made his own choices and created his own values.

Barbara, you have tried so hard to help everyone here with your wonderful responses to us when we are in pain. I don't know if this helped, but I felt the need to reach out to you and, if you were here, I'd give you a big hug. I understand everything you said.

 

[scent of cedar]

I'll be ****ed if I know what it is that I am protecting/preventing/helping.

I don't know how we recover.

Being this way is scary, and being whatever it is that's "not this way" is scary too.

I think maybe those feelings are like the air raid sirens they used to warn the English populace to take cover, back in WWII. But no matter how loudly the sirens wailed, people were killed; life was changed. The city was devastated. Irreplaceable things were lost.

And though the English survived, their lives were never the same, again.

That's how it is for us too, I think.

Only there's a kind of desperate ~ I don't know. Is it haste? Is it being pro-active? Something like that. We are determined not to lose anything more. We are frantic; panicked, at the scent of loss that hangs over these times like the blackest thunderheads you ever saw.

And the sirens go off.

And I don't know, Witz. All we know when it's over is that we're still standing.

And I know one thing more. There are others who are still standing, too. In their eyes and their stories, we hear our own reflected. And somehow, because there are others still standing, too, we will make it through this.

Barbara

 

[scent of cedar]

I have learned I'm not responsible for his spurning our values.

Thank you, MWM. :O) We are all so amazing, so amazingly strong and responsible and committed to putting things right, somehow. I am so happy to hear that something I've shared has helped one of us. We are good people. We will make it through this.

Regarding the piece that I've quoted from your posting, MWM? You are so right. difficult child is spurning the values she was raised with. When difficult child son was addicted, he was doing that, too. I never thought of it that way, before. Oh, I could tell difficult child son that he had been raised to know better. But somehow, I never got that he was (or that difficult child daughter is, now) spurning the values we'd instilled.

There is just something so descriptive about that word, spurning. That is the truth of it; the true thing at the root of what has happened, to all of us.

Spurn: to reject with disdain; treat with contempt; scorn; despise.

Barbara