Another week, another therapy session

Today was another family session day. It was hard. It’s always hard. But you have to keep going and keep putting in the work.

We talked about the drama over Thanksgiving. Then we jumped back into the overarching theme of our therapy sessions. Our kid’s biggest hurdle is herself. She is so afraid of being too much and us rejecting her that she turns small things into big things and then blows up at us about things.

Take the example from Thanksgiving: She could have told us after that first text. She chose not to and kept it to herself. Apparently she told her therapist about it, but even managed not to tell her everything, like the asking for things and the increase in their demands. At any point, she could have told us about this.

Instead she was freaking out on the inside because she did not know what to do to make them stop messaging her. They kept messaging her and she felt like she needed to respond. So she did. Then they offered her things. Then the demands came and she offered to meet them at school to appease them. Now the school had to be alerted and a lot of people know about this moment of weakness on her part. All things that could have been mitigated if she had told us in the first place, but she thought if we did that we would reject her. Then when we found out anyway, she pushed back against her lying to us and said it was our fault that she had to hide it.

The therapist really tried to help her process it and again helped us affirm that we care about her. That we are only concerned about how these people from her past will hurt her and how much more damage they are going to do to her.

Ten years these people made her feel insignificant and lesser than. It has been eight years of multiple therapies and we are still working on this first step. Building the trust in us that we are going to be on her side and that we will fight for her at every step. She tried to say that we would block communication and in their case we did. They have been investigated and found to have done awful things to our children. None of us need to be in contact with them. We have not stopped her communication with her bio mom or bio sister even though they once again betrayed her and gave her phone number to people that she is afraid of. People that they themselves say are abusive and should have been jailed.

She accused us of saying things that we have never said. We have worked with her and other professionals to get her caught up in school. In fourth grade, she moved in with us and she tested at a kindergarten level. Now she is college level just in time to start college. We have put in the work. We have dealt with all the waves of pain and hurt being directed at us since she cannot direct them at the people that truly deserve it.

Everything about this situation is miserable. We get up each day and we try to prove that she can trust us. We are not leaving. We refuse to give up on her. We are just waiting for her to join us on the other side of her pain. I wish I could do all the work for her, but I cannot. That has been my struggle in family therapy. I want to do the work that she cannot do. That is not my place. My place is to be hear waiting and supporting until she is willing to see herself as the person I know she is.