Such great responses from COM and Recovering. To what they've posted, I will add that where you are now is in the middle part of a healing process. It happens every time we advance in our understanding of what is an appropriate response to our troubled kids. Someone else swoops in to save them.
Someone struggling with the same emotions and recriminations we have already come through explains their response to our child. We are left feeling less than in one sense, and numb in another.
At least that other mom still has hope.
She has not yet come to that place of understanding we have finally been pushed to.
It helped me to hope, right along with that other mom, that maybe she could perform that miracle I could not.
It takes more courage than I have sometimes, to choose, again and again, to cut myself free of hope, to stop helping/enabling.
But the other way didn't work.
So, for the sake of my children, I am detaching. I am learning that skill set. And it is way harder to hold back, to listen and remain present and not help, than it ever was to take some action, to take control of even the smallest things.
But I see my children changing, BG.
So, though it breaks my heart and changes my self concept to do it, it is my intention to continue practicing detachment.
But one of the very real costs of detachment that we seldom discuss here is the cost to us, as we morph into parents who turn away.
This is such a hard thing.
Like everything else surrounding the raising of a difficult child child, these kinds of choices will never have to be faced by those raising easy child kids -- who will become easy child adults, adults who will care for their own children. Those of us who have struggled through the raising of difficult child children?
Often find ourselves raising our own grandchildren.
You are doing so well with all of this, blackgnat.
I know this is hard, and is a crazy lonely place to be.
Recovering is right.
Be very good to yourself through this traumatic time.
Cedar
