For years my response to my son was rage.
I had to work very hard to get to the rage part. You are new to us, so you will not have heard this story. When we understood that we needed outside help with our daughter (14 at the time), we took her to an Adolescent Crisis Center in the city where we lived. They kept her for a time. Then, directly into what passed for treatment in those days "or she will die" is what they told us. These things turned out to have been the worst things we could have done. Our authority as parents was assaulted. Our family identity was assaulted. Our child was labeled both victim and villain, depending on some professional's assessment of her performance, or of ours. We were told to discount her stories about drug use in that treatment center. Within the following years, her counselor was charged, and found guilty, of dealing cocaine. The Center eventually closed.
But it was too late, for us, and for our daughter and our son, who was put at risk through everything that was happening to his parents and to his life.
Poor kid.
In those days, so much was still the mother's fault. Autism was still believed, was just coming out of that belief system that taught autism was a problem with the way the mother bonded with her infant. Now, we understand that is not the case but then, that was not true. Our daughter was not autistic. I am using that as an example of the helping professional mindset. Perhaps that excuses what my mother said to me when, against my better judgment and at D H's insistence, I called to tell my parents what had happened, that our daughter was in such a troubled place and we had gone for outside help. Without batting an eye, as though she had planned it for years, my mother drawled: "Wellllll...looks like you weren't such a good mother after all, were you?"
Now, I can see the determination to hurt and to weaken me, in her words. Then? I believed it. I had not found the site, yet. If it even existed, back then.
When I began in therapy for myself, it was with the express intention of finding out whether I had done something horrible to my daughter and blocked it out. It was a vulnerable, shaming time.
That therapist?
Turned out not to be a very good therapist.
Again, it was a time when doctors and therapists were considered authorities, and were believed. I had gone there to be judged. I believed him.
He was wrong.
I still remember the session when he turned from therapist to attacker. I still remember it as though it were yesterday. Just that clearly.
He said: "You are a manipulator. I would never trust the compliments of someone like that."
Someone like that. Someone like...you. Someone...like me.
Boom. Cedar falls apart.
He also said he loved me. He wanted to know my feelings for him.
A therapist I saw much later told me about counter-transference.
It wasn't until I had been here on the site for some time that I finally told that story, and was helped to understand what was true about that and what was abuse about that time, and that therapist.
It was Recovering Enabler who helped me, then.
Years earlier, I had told the leader of my FOO Group about him, and about what happened there. That was after Group was over. I went back to see her, to tell her.
I just didn't know what to do with any of it.
Boom. Cedar falls apart.
But I couldn't just fall apart. So, I recreated myself, instead.
I am amazed at what I have survived, sometimes. It is good, to be amazed at ourselves and our strength.
Stations of the Cross.
Sometimes, it is good to tell the most shaming things. I am still putting that particular therapist's judgments away. Here is the thing: What he did to me had nothing to do with my child, or my children. How could he have done such a thing as to intentionally further weaken me? He knew things about my mother, about how I grew up, that I have not revealed even here.
Why doesn't matter.
What matters is that we see it, that we get on the outside of it.
We need to keep our wits about us, even and maybe, especially, when we see a therapist. I have seen many therapists, since that first therapist. I have never trusted one, again. The closest I came to trusting one was the woman therapist in FOO Group Therapy. I am fortunate I was able to trust her to the degree it was possible for me to trust, then.
Compassion has saved me, many a time. My own compassion, I mean. It enabled me to keep going, to forgive whatever happened there with that first therapist.
But I went through a dark time, through a struggle with vengeance, and with not being able to believe, to put things together in a way that made sense.
The only thing I know these days is that why does not matter the way I thought it did. Understanding and forgiving those who victimize is not helping them, and does not help us. So, what is there to do with them?
I don't know about that, either.
I know I am back, am coming fully and completely back.
Even with our kids, why doesn't matter. It is what it is, and if we intend to help them, we will find the best way to do that. Detachment parenting seems to be helping them both to stand up.
So I am right there.
But it cost me everything I taught myself about how to be a decent mother, to do that.
It's working.
So, out the window with being a decent mom by anyone else's standards, at all.
:O)
(Profanity. Pretend there is a profanity, that pretty much universal one beginning with F. We will make a phrase of it. The ever popular F followed by (if "it" is a preposition) by a preposition. Which Cedar does not actually employ at this point, because I don't know you well enough yet and would not like to offend.)
For years my response to my son was rage. I felt betrayed. I felt shame. I felt abandoned. I could not handle the injustice. That I had loved him so much, needed him so much. This story of redemption...could not end like this. My son was to replace the love I did not get. My son was to remedy my pain and fill my empty places.
I felt that way too, once I got to the rage part. But then, I really came to understand the concept of my children's lives being their own. I see now that, while it is my job to love them wholeheartedly (for their sakes
and for my own), their job is to live their lives according to their fates or maybe, according to nothing at all.
That part is not for me to know.
Once I got that, once I learned, through reading and reading here on the site, about addiction and betrayal and about how this is serious, deathly serious...I began seeing my children as heroic. They have battled and vanquished demons whose strength I cannot imagine.
Just imagine that.
Addiction; addicted.
And they beat it.
Time and again, they have beat and fallen and beat it, again.
So I am thinking about that, in this new way of seeing I am having, these days.
We needed heroes for children, Copa.
And we got them.
They are battling demons we know nothing about.
They are strong, just as we raised them to be.
Their job is not to love us. Their job
and our task was and continues to be, to make it possible for them to love themselves.
True.
And to do that, they must respect themselves.
And a first step in self respect, is respecting your mother and your father.
Unless your mother was a poop like mine.
That's me, hugging myself.
:O)
Until nothing was left except two infants. My high chair tyrant, and the infant I long ago was. If I could not make them love me, take care of me. If I could not as a tiny girl summon up their strengths...seduce them to give me a little bit of what I needed. I would die.
I love this. I will find a piece where we went through that same kind of thinking and came so beautifully out of it. I can't think what thread that was. It was one of mine.
I will find it for you.
The imagery in it was beautiful.
to have brought up your children to have a "poverty mindset"
Ha! :O) Thanks, Copa. My kids are too smart for me. This was one of their prime manipulatory tactics. I never wanted my kids to want for anything. Never, ever wanted them to feel poor, or to know what it was to be unwanted, or not cherished, ever.
The thing I finally figured out about the poverty mindset is this: Had our children wished to take advantage of all we had sacrificed and were prepared to deluge them with, poverty mindset would never have been an issue.
Their addictions demanded other things, demanded a limitless supply of money and approval. It was addiction that would destroy my children, and my life.
After all the fighting, all the concern and caring and determination to get this right, it would be addiction that destroyed us all.
Let us slip another profanity in right here.
Addiction is a terrible, destructive thing.
I hate it.
As an aside, we are learning now, about the genetic proclivity to addiction.
No mothering, however well or poorly done, is going to change a genetic fact. Some kids try it and let it go. Ours tried it and were hooked.
Hooked, like a fish on a line.
Profanity.
I remember the book "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" read long ago and now almost forgotten. I will read it. There is a vicious strength of this growth that will not stop the pain until we SEE.
I will find it, too. I have not read it.
Cedar
