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