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<blockquote data-quote="Copabanana" data-source="post: 751632" data-attributes="member: 18958"><p>Hi Beta. Some of this is specific to Josh and his behaviors and some of it more generally applicable to almost everybody.</p><p></p><p>I think that all parents of children who become adults have to negotiate this change from inside to outside of the family. The process of becoming adults in our society involves setting up a different nuclear family, locus of control. Typically, adult children no longer live with their parents, in extended family groupings. In our society the idea of teenage rebellion seems to be have been accepted (but not welcomed) since the fifties. A function of this, has been to create the distance necessary to catapult the adult child out of the nest.</p><p></p><p>I am not normalizing Josh's behavior and I am NOT speaking about the necessary changes you are making to your relationship to him. But I think there is a way to hold Josh in your mind, even though he is acting towards you in a demeaning, violent, rejecting way, as still part of you. Not just historically but currently.</p><p></p><p>You HAVE DONE and ARE DOING every, single thing a loving mother and father could do for their troubled child. You are doing this with love and responsibility. I believe that you will continue to act from love, responsibility, as well as the necessary need to protect yourselves and Josh, from his illness and troubled behavior. This distancing is a necessary part of love, given these circumstances. All of us are negotiating relationships with children who no longer belong to us, with us, to the same extent as before. It may be less painful to think of Josh as having entered some category where he has gone away from you. I can see this. It makes what would have otherwise been intolerable, not so impossible.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Copabanana, post: 751632, member: 18958"] Hi Beta. Some of this is specific to Josh and his behaviors and some of it more generally applicable to almost everybody. I think that all parents of children who become adults have to negotiate this change from inside to outside of the family. The process of becoming adults in our society involves setting up a different nuclear family, locus of control. Typically, adult children no longer live with their parents, in extended family groupings. In our society the idea of teenage rebellion seems to be have been accepted (but not welcomed) since the fifties. A function of this, has been to create the distance necessary to catapult the adult child out of the nest. I am not normalizing Josh's behavior and I am NOT speaking about the necessary changes you are making to your relationship to him. But I think there is a way to hold Josh in your mind, even though he is acting towards you in a demeaning, violent, rejecting way, as still part of you. Not just historically but currently. You HAVE DONE and ARE DOING every, single thing a loving mother and father could do for their troubled child. You are doing this with love and responsibility. I believe that you will continue to act from love, responsibility, as well as the necessary need to protect yourselves and Josh, from his illness and troubled behavior. This distancing is a necessary part of love, given these circumstances. All of us are negotiating relationships with children who no longer belong to us, with us, to the same extent as before. It may be less painful to think of Josh as having entered some category where he has gone away from you. I can see this. It makes what would have otherwise been intolerable, not so impossible. [/QUOTE]
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