Daughter out of control again ....

[Anonymous]

On 2006-01-02 05:46:00, Truth Searcher wrote:

"Anon~

I stated that I don't put much value on labels.  I never said that I didn't believe in treatment.  She is under the constant care of a very good psychologist (weekly) who specializes in BPD.  In addition she sees a psychiatrist to tweak meds about once a month.



With that said however, just as a diabetic has to learn to compensate for their illness, so does one who has a mental illness.  She can't hide behind it and use it to excuse her behavior.  It certainly might explain some of her skewed thinking processes, but lets face it, the real world isn't really going to care that she has a DX.  My ultimate goal is to prepare her to be able to survive outside in the real world on her own two feet.



BTW ... she opted to come home last night.  She said she feels "we can work things out".  I'm hoping that is a good sign.  Holding my breath that we can have some productive talks today.



"

You know, right now I'm working with a teen who is a cutter, the opposite of promiscuous, has been in hospital, and is having a number of problems that I don't want to go all the way into even if I don't name her, because of her privacy.

Some of the subjects she needs to complete the education of high school are things her parents either didn't take or don't remember, so I tutor her.  And I like her and am a friend.

I have a major mental illness, so does my young daughter.  This girl has a DX, and her doc says she can't go to school--because the stress would set off the cutting and stuff real badly.

People with mental illnesses get by by taking our meds, seeing our docs, and avoiding situations where we would be likely to do something bad when we're feeling unstable.

That avoidance is a huge part of compensating, and caregivers have to give the mentally ill person that option----of retreating from situations where they feel they're at risk of not being able to control their behavior.

Too often, caregivers want "compensating" for the illness to mean functioning just like someone who isn't mentally ill.  That's not realistic.  Those of us with mental illnesses have to do things like choosing careers and jobs where the things we can't do or our other quirks don't really hack off the boss or keep us from doing that job.  If, for example, someone has executive function problems and can't keep track of time, that person has to pick a career where they can find a job where punctuality just doesn't matter.

Caregivers, particularly loving family members who desperately want the ill person to get well or do as well as possible, usually err on the side of having standards that are too high.  They tend to mistake rational avoidance of situations that would put the ill person at risk of behaving badly in public as "using the disability as an excuse."

It isn't.

Watch the TV show "Monk"---it's very accurate about the kinds of adjustments and accommodations someone with OCD has to make to work and function in daily life.  When it shows his brother, Ambrose, it's very accurate about the kinds of adjustments a man with agoraphobia has to make to function.  Ambrose may not leave the house, which is sad, but he has a job, he pays his bills, he orders his groceries from someplace that delivers.  For the disability he's got, he's coping and living his life.

Unfortunately, the medicines for the other mental illness symptoms just don't affect hyper libido.  I understand that's one of your concerns and you're a very religious person, but I'd like to very respectfully suggest that *until* better medications can help your daughter more, you may want to emphasize that your daughter take precautions against STDs and seek longer-term partners to minimize the number of different partners (if possible).  Keep in mind that your daughter isn't in her right mind and if she really can't control herself, God knows.

It may not seem like an irresistable compulsion from the outside, to you.  You desperately want your beloved baby to be well and okay.  I know, because I'm a mom and my daughter is ill and it just breaks my heart.  She's ten and not sexual yet, but I understand the heartbreak of having your kid get sick with a mental illness---and the helplessness---and the desperate hope.

Try to get her to protect her health right now and let God worry about her soul.  Pray for her, and particularly pray that the medical profession comes up with better drugs to help those symptoms, soon.

Pray.  Pray a lot.  Encourage her to avoid situations where she could get hurt or in trouble with the law.  Encourage her to study anything at all she's willing to learn.  Encourage her, if she can't meet your religion's criteria for sexual morality, to at least take care of her health.

Pray for medicines that will help those symptoms.

The *good* news is that now that they've got drugs that are so effective with so many of the *other* symptoms, the research establishment is getting a good handle on which symptoms they haven't helped yet and is actively pursuing leads towards developing treatments for those symptoms.

I know how hard it is.  I know from my own illness, my daughter's illness, and from tutoring a teen facing some of these challenges.

Try to keep in mind that avoidance is frequently the only healthy compensation available if you have a mental illness.  It's not using the disability as an excuse.

Seeing your doc and your therapist (if you need one) and taking your meds is how you make it so you don't have to avoid so many hazardous situations.  And how you make it so you don't have so many outbursts that get you in trouble anyway.

Right now, though, there is *nothing* for excess libido and the compulsion to be hypersexual.  Be understanding, encourage her to control it as much as she can, and make the safest choices she can.

And keep praying.

Julie

[Anonymous]

That is an excellent post Julie.
I may share it with some friends who have mentally ill teens or young adults. You make some important points.

[Anonymous]

On 2006-01-01 04:38:00, Perrigaud wrote:

"Hmmm. Quitting school. Personally I think it's an irrational decision on her part. If it were my daughter and she was under 18 she'd be going to school. If it came down to her not wanting to go past the age of 18 I'd tell her she could do what she wanted. "

Parrigaud, I am tutoring a sixteen year old with a DX (I'm not going to go into the details)--I can see some similarities and differences with the daughter in this thread.

The kid I'm tutoring is also a cutter and her pdoc says she can't go to high school because she just cannot take the stress.

Her parents can't teach her some of the subjects, and she can't teach herself some of them, so I tutor her.  We go at her own pace.  It may not be perfect, but she is still getting an education.

She also has a truly impressive talent in one of the fine arts and will probably be able to support herself with it, within the limits of her issues.

Her mother is handling the situation super well by getting her medical care, minimizing the stress to minimize the cutting, understanding that not setting off the anxiety and proper mental health care are the priority with her daughter.

She and the stepdad and the daughter are making career plans for her together to maximize her talents and minimize the impact of her weaknesses.

They have buy-in from the daughter partly because they are applying so much compassion and understanding.

They and she understand that they *will* likely have her living at home into her twenties.

Their emphasis is on working *with* their daughter to help her pursue *her* strategies for how to reduce and ultimately stop her cutting, how to get more functional, and how to develop towards being as independent and self-supporting as possible someday.

I think their daughter's willingness to study her schoolwork, and plan the courses she needs to take, and work out the curriculum, and work with me when I tutor her----I think all that comes from  the parents making themselves her allies in growing into the kind of woman *she* wants to be.

Where her eccentricities aren't actually hurting anyone, they ignore them.  Gently.

Where her problems make more work for them because there's a whole lot she can't do (yet) without getting a panic attack, they cope with the problem and don't force her or yell at her.

Compassion is working.  This girl is slowly improving, and gradually becoming more positive and more functional as she builds trust that her parents are working *with* her.  She is positive about treatment and therapy and medication---because she trusts her parents to work with her as allies.

This means her parents can keep a close count of problems and symptoms, and express their concerns to the pdoc and therapist.  The pdoc and therapist  then have a better idea, after talking to the daughter, of what they all need to work on.  The pdoc and therapist *also* work as allies with the daughter.

My daughter, because of what she is, can be oppositional.  This is what I do---and her therapist says it's the textbook right way to handle it---is I make myself her ally in growing into who she wants to be.

My Katie doesn't have a big picture (at ten) of who she wants to be, but she has little pictures of what would be better than now.  When you get right down to it, past the bravado, those little pictures are almost always things parents and teachers and therapists and such can agree are at least small improvements in at least some area of functionality.

You start out making yourself an ally in the small things, and your kid starts opening like a flower---a flower with a lot of problems, still, but a flower---and trusting you to be an ally as she admits the bigger things that she sees as problems she needs to deal with to move in the direction she wants to go.

The self-destruction is usually bravado painted on top of despair.  Alliance and compassion is a slow way of making changes, but it's like water wearing river stones smooth.  It's slow, but it works.

The quick fix didn't work.  Try the slow fix, and adjust your expectations.  Really, watch Monk---it shows a high-function person with a mental illness who is coping using necessary accommodations.  From my experience of mental illness from the inside, the whole idea of how you compensate and how you cope is very accurate.

Right now, if I were you my short term goal as a parent would be to win back my daughter's trust enough to get her to trust me with *one* thing she'd like to learn to handle better, and make myself her ally in developing for herself a strategy for working on it, and see how you might be supportive as she works on it.  See how you might help her on that one thing in ways that *she* feels are help.  If the only help she says you can offer is to get out of her way and leave her alone, agree and do it.  You have to demonstrate to her that she can trust you to be an ally.

If you can do that, then you can slowly start helping her as much as she can be helped.

Julie

[Anonymous]

On 2006-01-03 17:35:00, Anonymous wrote:

Right now, though, there is *nothing* for excess libido and the compulsion to be hypersexual.  Be understanding, encourage her to control it as much as she can, and make the safest choices she can.

Part of presentations for teens on sexual safety and health now often include masturbation.  This IS the only safe sex and addresses needs of people who have already opened Pandora's box with sexual activity, finding themselves unable to abstain completely from sexual pleasure.

[Anonymous]

Anyway, point is you can't just tell a cutter what they're gonna do or get out.  Not if you love them.  You have to handle it better than that.

Cutters are at higher risk of suicide---they cut because at the moment they cut, it seems the only alternative to suicide.

If you love them and care if they die or not, then an oppositional do-it-or-get-out strategy is a real bad thing to pick.

Some kids are just obnoxious or criminal.  Sometimes we have family members that are mentally ill.

The law allows us, mostly, to just cut our mentally ill relatives loose to end up the homeless, stinky bag lady in the park.  Or end up the whore on 16th Street.  It's entirely legal to do that.

When a difficult relative is not just a criminal no-good jerk but is instead mentally ill, most of us decide to treat the situation differently.

Mom, I really sympathize.  All I can do is tell you how the people I think are doing well with their own or their kids' challenges are pulling it off.

Julie

[Anonymous]

The last about why ultimatums are a bad idea was for Perrigaud, not Mom.

Perri, I don't think you're a monster who would just throw a sick relative out on the street or something.  That's not what I meant.

Stopping recuing someone means issuing certain ultimatums.

I meant that while stopping rescuing them can help a criminal or delinquent teen, it doesn't work so well with a loved one of any age who is mentally ill.

Most mentally ill people desperately want to be healthy.  If not well, at least well enough to fit in and not immediately stand out as weird.

When a mentally ill kid gets in with the wrong crowd, it's because fitting in there is particularly easy----people abusing drugs act a lot like the mentally ill, it gives you the opportunity to self-medicate some of the bad feelings away, and people abusing drugs are real tolerant of a lot of interpersonal differences as long as you aren't the type to moralize at them or narc them out.

That desperate wish to not stand out as weird, to be able to fit in, to be able to make friends, to function----that matters a lot.

A mentally ill person wants to be well--or at least be able to convincingly fake it when they're around people.

So you handle a mentally ill relative not with ultimatums, but by finding out what situations they want to handle better and helping them learn how to do that.  They go from wanting very small functional improvements, or big ones in small steps, to making big functional improvements.

At some level, they plateau, when they're compensating as much as they can with their therapist's ongoing help and whatever medicines are currently available for their symptoms.

With her doctor's permission, you might want to start her taking some additional supplements, if she will.  Ginko Biloba, Grape Seed Extract--both have a general "neuroprotective" effect.  Also get her to take fish oil if you can.  It helps with a whole lot of mental illnesses because most people don't get enough Omega-3 oils in their diet, and that dietary lack has bad effects on the brain.

We used to think that nerves and the brain didn't heal much at all.  Now we know they do, they just heal very slowly.  Just like in the rest of your body, oxidation causes damage to cells.  In most of your body, you don't really notice much because the other parts of your body heal faster than your brain.  With the brain, it's easier for the damage to outpace the healing and, well, make you have mental health problems.

(Part of the reason lithium works for bipolars is because it has a neuroprotective effect.

Strong antioxidants protect the brain from further damage.  Not necessarily completely, but enough that some things start healing back and improving.  So while these supplements aren't a substitute for her meds, *with her doctor's knowledge and approval*, they *may* help your daughter.

My doctor knows and approves of my taking fish oil and ginko biloba.  He also warned me that they're blood thinners and to be careful with aspirin or ibuprofen.

Some supplements you can't take with some meds.  Some have things the doctor may want to caution you about.  If you aren't already adding the supplements, you may get some additional help from them.

The ginko and fish oil help my executive function problems--which are one of the things the regular meds won't touch much.  Maybe their across the board kind of help will help your daughter a bit with the symptoms her current meds aren't doing the job on.  It probably won't *fix* them, but it might improve them.

Julie

[Antigen]

On 2006-01-03 15:05:00, bandit1978 wrote:

I could have done all that with a GED, as well, but I'm glad I got a regular diploma.

What's the difference?

It only takes a little prescience to understand that we're all fair game for the deeds we condone.

--Antigen

[Antigen]

On 2006-01-03 17:35:00, Anonymous wrote:

 If, for example, someone has executive function problems and can't keep track of time, that person has to pick a career where they can find a job where punctuality just doesn't matter.

Boy, that explains a whole lot about recent political and corporate scandals, doesn't it?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
-- Bertrand Russell

[bandit1978]

Ginger,

Well, as I said, I do not believe it would have made a difference in my college career, but I could be wrong.  I was admitted as a transfer student to a university for which I did not have the required GPA, and I had a few very poor grades (as a result of signing up for classes, then just leaving during the semester, going traveling, but not withdrawing from class). But I give a good interview, had great references, and family alumni.  And when I started in the nursing program, I was a bit older (22?), and took things more seriously.  I had aquired lots of random credits during my time at community college, so most of my pre-requisites were done.  

I do feel there would be a difference is in my confidence level- I feel better about having a "real" diploma, rather than a GED. Also, it looks better on my job applications.  My job requires a college degree, so it looks better that I "graduated" from high school, rather than getting a GED.  

My point is that getting a GED doesn't have to mean the end of one's education.  Some people just need a break, or may not be ready for a serious college career (I certainly wasn't).  

But for a kid who only needs a few more high school credits to graduate...go for the home study.  It's not hard at all.  You can sleep late, not have to deal with all those "authority" figures who run the public school.  I think you'll feel better about it in the long run.

[Antigen]

K, thanks.

It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant examples

--Charles Dickens

[exsafecounselor]

:grin:

[Anonymous]

On 2006-01-06 12:04:00, exsafecounselor wrote:

" :grin:
"

What is it that you want?  You keep posting random smilies in random threads?  Got something to say or are you just that lonely and desperately in need of some attention?

[Anonymous]

Why do you even worry about some random smiley face. If anything you are the loner/loser.

[bandit1978]

G-  why so sensitive about GED?  Do you have one?

[Sylvia]

Hi, Truth Searcher:

Just wondered how you and your daughter were doing?