Processing Feelings

Since my son has been home from the therapeutic group home, we have had some setbacks. Though my son cares about himself and wants what every teen want, accetence, a sense of belonging and to have fun. The unfortunate part is he still doesn't feel as if he belongs to any tradtioal group in school, he keeps telling he wants to be normal and fit in, and is tired of therapy.

So I asked him what he thought normal was? His response was to not have bipolar disorder and to not have to go to therapy and to not have major mood swings. So to help him understand I explained to him, being different is normal. There isn't a person in this world that doesn't doubt themselves or question if they are normal. Normal is a society word to place label on others to give classification, however it doesn't define who we are or if you fit into any of the categories. I told him, to choose to be himself and accept he has a mood disorder, but because of this challenge doesn't make him abnormal. He seem to accept my explanation, but he hasn't moved forward in accepting himself.

The past couple of weeks he has had set back emotionally, having been through this with his father and several classes latter, I have started to process his his feelings. I have learned that children who have had a traumatic childhood tend to have mute dissociation in which they are unable to process emotions in which make them hurt inside. My son having lost his father at such a young age is having a hard time understanding why is father made such a drastic choice of killing himself, and will not grieve as it is a painful memory. For most bipolar suffers it is known that when an traumatic event occurs, in ordor to talk about the expericance they relive the experience, and they don't want to relive that pain again.

So considering the month of April has always been a tough month for my son, I decided the only way he is going to get past his bottled issue is to process his anger and grievance on his terms with the help of myself taking his emotions with baby steps. The first step we have done is admit his sucided was painful, and that my son would rather not talk about it. The next step was to ask him that since talking is too painful, to write a poem of how he feel, and what pain he feels with this loss.

Step two came this week when I was waking him up trying to get him to go to school. When he awoke he was angry and said. I asked him if he know what triggered these feelings after he had a restful sleep and he replied I don't know, I new. So I asked him to sit down with me and have breakfast and talk about how he is going to have a good day at school, and that he take his day on class at a time. He wasn't going for it, he said that he felt all these emotions rushing in and that if confronted by another kid during passing period if they said anything mean to him he would explode. So this signaled to me he wasn't ready to take control of his emotions nor did he have the desire to. So I sat with him and explained, we all have choices to make, we can either talk about what bothers us and know that once we let go, we then will have control over ourselves or we can choose to succome to these emotions and let them run our lives and be unhappy. He said he wants control, but isn't ready to let go of his fathers death.

At least this was tiny breakthrough because in all there years he has been in therapy he has never talked about what was truly tormenting him on the inside. Thank God for the class. With the extra knowledge and having kept a journal of his shutting down periods I was able to pinpoint one of his major issues. So now with the help of his therapist and the acknowledgment we can now move forward and process the negative feelings and teach him how to let go of pain, but love the person for who they were and not what they did.

Next step is to work on his self image, my son has always felt down on himself no matter how many praise I or others give him. So I asked him what style do you like what is it that would be you feel good about your self when you look at your self in the mirror, what do you envision you to look like, so he told me a new hairstyle so I went to the hairsalon were he could be pampered and choose a style that he would be happy with. So far he is happy with this.

He also asked if he could have a pet so when he was feeling lonely or upset that he could talk to it and relax. So we now have a little canary ( he choose this little bird because it sings really pretty and sooths his nerves) So I am hoping this will help. The other thing is to get him a hobby he enjoys other than computer games as this alienates him from outside interaction. He chose martial arts. So I made a deal with him ( sometimes you have to make deals, so don't always listen to the so called parenting expercts they may have a PhD, but everychild is different and can't be group into this is the way to parent)

The deal is, if he can complete going to school for an entire week including his day treatment program, he can enroll in a martial art program. He seemed pretty excited, ( I called a lot of places to see which one was going to be the best program to help him with self esteme as well as understanding his disorders and the nice thing is this class has a diversed group of teens. whoo hoo) .

I am willing to do whatever it takes to help him gain control of his life and to know it is normal to process feelings and the only thing he needs to worry about is an education and having control over his life and making good choices, I told him I will be there to help him but he will have to work just as hard as me in this process as I can support emotionally, but I cant do all the work.

The ball is in his court, I am hoping he will choose the make that basket.

We still have a long way to go and another IEP to get in place and I am thinking of getting in home services to help me out, as I have realized as a single mom you have to know when you need help in getting your child the services they need and though I have taken classes and continuing education classes, there is still so much more to learn. So if I do get a CTA maybe I too will learn more and be an even better advocate for my son.

Hang in there our children depend on it.

Take Care
Stacey A