T
toughlovin
Guest
In a couple of different threads a couple of you have said you are not good at detachment.....so I have been thinking about detachment and what it is.
It seems to me there are two parts to detachment. One is internal to us.... being able to go on and live a good life, have peace and serenity, enjoy life no matter how bad our kids are doing or what they are doing. I really don't know how to do this. And I think when we say we are not good at detachment this is what we are talking about. I know for me it is really hard for me to be happy when my son is doing horribly. I managed to get through the day when he was in jail but I still thought and worried about him all the time. With alanon I am getting a little better at this piece.... how to love them, care about them, but let them go enough so that I can enjoy life no matter what choices he is making.
The other piece though is from their point of view. I was dying inside at one point when he called me from where he was staying because the neighbor had beat him up. He was crying and a mess and I know he expected me to drop everything and come and get him. I didn't. It was an awful moment for me. The other time that was really hard was when he was in jail, thinking about what he would do when he got out and we told him he could not come home. I think that was pretty hard for him to hear....but we told him he could not come home until he got treatment. He said where will I go? I said I don't know, i will look at treatment places, but if you don't want to do that you will have to figure it out. It was very hard for me to be so tough but I knew that is what I had to do. It helped that part of me knew I had to do it for the sake of my daughter which is another story. So again it killed me inside to do that. BUT he did not know that. From his point of view I had detachment....I was no longer rescuing and saving him. I was setting limits and boundaries.
So those of you who don't think you are good at detachment (Nancy I am thinking of you), yet you are setting boundaries and limits because you know you have to do that for your child because bottom line is you love them too much not to. To me that is part of detachment!!
To me the first part of detachment is setting those boundaries and limits so that they learn they can not walk all over you, take advantage of you, that you will no longer enable them.
The other piece of learning to love life no matter what they are doing comes later I think..... I don't really know because I don't have that piece either.
This may not be what the literature says about detachment but it is the way I think about it.
It seems to me there are two parts to detachment. One is internal to us.... being able to go on and live a good life, have peace and serenity, enjoy life no matter how bad our kids are doing or what they are doing. I really don't know how to do this. And I think when we say we are not good at detachment this is what we are talking about. I know for me it is really hard for me to be happy when my son is doing horribly. I managed to get through the day when he was in jail but I still thought and worried about him all the time. With alanon I am getting a little better at this piece.... how to love them, care about them, but let them go enough so that I can enjoy life no matter what choices he is making.
The other piece though is from their point of view. I was dying inside at one point when he called me from where he was staying because the neighbor had beat him up. He was crying and a mess and I know he expected me to drop everything and come and get him. I didn't. It was an awful moment for me. The other time that was really hard was when he was in jail, thinking about what he would do when he got out and we told him he could not come home. I think that was pretty hard for him to hear....but we told him he could not come home until he got treatment. He said where will I go? I said I don't know, i will look at treatment places, but if you don't want to do that you will have to figure it out. It was very hard for me to be so tough but I knew that is what I had to do. It helped that part of me knew I had to do it for the sake of my daughter which is another story. So again it killed me inside to do that. BUT he did not know that. From his point of view I had detachment....I was no longer rescuing and saving him. I was setting limits and boundaries.
So those of you who don't think you are good at detachment (Nancy I am thinking of you), yet you are setting boundaries and limits because you know you have to do that for your child because bottom line is you love them too much not to. To me that is part of detachment!!
To me the first part of detachment is setting those boundaries and limits so that they learn they can not walk all over you, take advantage of you, that you will no longer enable them.
The other piece of learning to love life no matter what they are doing comes later I think..... I don't really know because I don't have that piece either.
This may not be what the literature says about detachment but it is the way I think about it.