I think you’re contradicting yourself here.
Someone else quoted this but I wanted to as well. Well put.
Of course he is going to say whatever he figures will freak you out the least. You do realize that honest communitation is pretty much shot by now?
The vast majority of people who either drink or smoke week never run into problems. However, freaking out about it is one way to drive them into worse choices.
Well, then, I must have exceptional kids because ever since this has happened, they have both expressed a desire to get back to our relationship we had before all this. And they don’t care if it requires random tests, counseling or whatever. They are eager to rebuild the trust.
They would indeed be exceptional in my experience, if they buy that “random tests” will “rebuild trust”. :rolleyes:
I know I’ve over-reacted to things involving my kids. My opinion - which you are free to disagree with - is that you are over-reacting here. But keep doing what you think best. It is about all any parent can do.
They’re teens and they smoked some weed. Something most teens do. I don’t see how that warrants counseling.
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I think most families with teenagers would benefit from counselling. It’s not a punishment.
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Everyone, including the OP, acknowledges that Declanium overreacted in a way that really upset the family dynamics. Think of it as family counselling focused on her with her family present if it helps you. It seems to me that a parent modelling “this is more than I can handle on my own. Let me call in a health professional” is a really good step.
She’s going with them. Given her reaction, I think some family counseling will be good for everyone. I think it’s great that she’s getting counseling.
Family counseling is a good idea because it could get her side and her kids’ sides a fair hearing, so to speak. If she has a history of controlling and emotional blackmail, then a safe space for her sons to talk about the impact on them can only be a good thing.
What a wonderful post! I wish I was smart enough and eloquent enough to have written this.
I will just add one comment. I had a very long and painful relationship with my mother. Eventually, it completely broke down and I hated the woman. She didn’t much care for me either.
When I read the OP, my thinking is this is such a tiny problem and can be easily overcome. The really important aspect is whether you will listen to all the negative thoughts and your relationship with your sons will crash and die or whether you will have the patience to talk with them (both individually and together) and repair your relationship so that you can get back on track and have a rewarding life with them. Please take it from one who has suffered. It is a tragic waste of life to trash a family relationship between a mother and sons.
I wish you the very best of luck to repair your bond with your sons.
THAT’S the important part. You know your kids, and we don’t. You know your family relationships, and we don’t. I’m really glad to hear that you, your husband, and your kids all take the family relationships seriously and are taking steps to get on surer, more stable footing. I think you’ll probably learn a lot through counseling. I’m still sorry some of the responses were so judgmental, but I hope you got some benefit out of starting this thread.
Yes, you have exceptional kids. My mother reacted very badly when my older sister got caught with weed, and my sister didn’t respond well in turn. It ended up hurting their relationship pretty badly. I don’t know if it contributed to my sister’s later problems, but it ended up removing honest communication with her mom, which removed one person that she could talk honestly with about her problems, and my sister became much better at manipulation.
I learned one thing from the experience: Don’t get caught with weed. If you do, don’t call mom and dad. They’re reasonable about most things, but not that. So, not being stupid, I instead called my sister when I eventually got caught. She bailed me out with no hassle, and my parents didn’t know until she told them about it decades later in an attempt to manipulate them. Fortunately for me, the joke was on her, and they saw it for the manipulative attempt it was. We talked about it and laughed a bit when my mom brought it up to me.
By by then, my parents had some perspective on the situation. They didn’t know 1/10th of the actual stuff that I did that honestly scored well into the 90’s of likely to kill my loony self anywhere near the time I did it. They knew that I had rolled a pickup the night I did it (kinda hard to hide that when you do it on a main thoroughfare and it’s their truck). They understandably saw that as more dangerous than my sister’s getting caught with weed. They didn’t know about my career street racing for cash (lots of criminals there, first place I had a gun drawn on me - they had lost to a friend of mine and would rather not pay), my drinking and smoking weed, me and my friends shooting verboten BB guns and bows and arrows at each other, tons of verboten go-kart racing and dirt bikes, learning how to drive a manual a year before I could legally get a learner’s permit - and lots of other things I can’t remember right now that would probably have turned their hair white if they had learned them as current events instead of ancient history. I still remember the look on my dad’s face when I told him that 20 years ago I had slid his daily driver sideways on two wheels (I drove like a complete maniac then, I honestly am much more sane now), and recovered without leaving a scratch on it or loosing a hubcap. I’m pretty sure he would have (rightly!) destroyed my license and locked me in the attic if he’d known at the time. He ended up laughing about it, but admitting he would have reacted differently if he had known about it when I was 16. We had put 100K on the car after that and it was long gone.
Even though I rolled the truck, I was in some ways seen as the “good” kid of the two older, loud kids. Mostly because I was smart/lucky enough (yeah, probably the latter) to not get caught for most of it. Most of the people who knew my parents would probably get the stellar report about me you got from the folks you asked. I got pretty good grades, and generally stayed out of trouble in their eyes. I was a complete loon who was lucky to have retained all of my limbs after getting a bicycle, almost all of my truly dangerous adventures came under the influence of nothing stronger than hormones and Dr. Pepper, and my parents had no idea until years later. Remember, most people (and families) are like ducks: nice and smooth above water, working their ass off like nobody’s business below water.
So, obviously, I’m in the camp that thinks that their smoking weed probably doesn’t rate 50 on the scale of things likely to kill your kids. When they’ve rolled a truck, they’re much closer to 100 than weed ever would seem.
I do think it’s good you’re going to counseling with your kids, but you’ve got to understand that the people participating in counseling need to think they need it for it to do any good. I’ve never been to counseling, but that’s the one thing I’ve taken from other’s stories with it. That goes for you and your son. If you’re going to counseling, it’s because you both have a problem you can’t talk about yet, and need to figure it out. I would agree that you need to come to terms with the idea that this being a slap in your face is not a productive way of looking at their mistakes. They will be making their own choices completely independent of you in a very short time, and already are doing some of that. This will undoubtedly continue, because otherwise you wouldn’t have done your job well. Even the choices you disagree with won’t necessarily be mistakes. As a marijuana smoker who got started before I learned to drive a manual: I’d say that my advice would be that they wait until later than their teens to further experiment with that business. At their age, there’s enough lunacy going through their veins in the way of hormones, why throw weed into the mix? I also heartily advise against street racing, if they’re wondering about that. When I actually got to running on a drag strip, even with all the high HP hardware hanging around, the sexiest thing was and still is the ambulance sitting at the end of the timing lights on the return road. I’ve seen too many weird things in racing to think anything else.
If it’s not too personal, how did you find out they’d been smoking weed/vaping? I’m sorry if I missed it if you’ve explained it already, but it seems like the only likely way that you would find out a month or so after they last tried it would be if that they still had some on hand that was discovered or you were told about it, and they honestly admitted to you that they had been using it or it was theirs without any deflection or misdirection when confronted. If that’s the case, throw it in the trash, apologize for making it about you, and firmly request they at least keep this kind of experimentation for after they are dependent on yourself. I don’t have any kids, and smoke weed often. If I had a kid who honestly admitted to doing something I disapproved of when confronted with it. I’d probably take them out to dinner if they seemed to honesty agree to change their behavior while in my household. I know that I wasn’t anywhere near that responsible when I was their age.
Oh, and piss testing your kids is only going to lead to various potential emotional and logistical problems. I’ve got to firmly vote not to do it.
Scabpicker, one of my sons had left his phone downstairs on the table while my husband and I were watching tv. He received a text from my other son (who obviously did not know it was on the table in clear view of us.) The text read something about wanting to share a cyph and scoring more weed.
So yeah, then we went upstairs and asked what that was about. First, all denials and then my husband opened my son’s backpack. Found all the paraphernalia in there. It was a helluva way to end Christmas.
I don’t think I agree with this. I’ve been told different by experienced counselors.
For example, when my father was first in an alcohol/drug treatment program, the head counselor told us*“we don’t get anybody here voluntarily”*. Some are forced to be here by court order, the others are forced by pressure from family or friends. In our case, Mom had a lawyer fill out divorce papers and show them to dad (they were never actually filed). The counselor said that was a fairly common move to ‘force’ someone into counseling.
I understand that often one of the first tasks in counseling is to get people to understand that ‘they can get something useful from this counseling’ (that they ‘need’ it often more of an admission than they will make). Sometimes it’s only ‘completing this program will get my family off my back’. But that’s enough to get the counseling to start to work.
So go for counseling, even if you don’t think you need it. If your sons need it, maybe you going too is the only way to get them to go. So do it.
Ok, so just as complex as real life usually is. I’d say that their subsequent apparent acknowledgement of the gravity of the situation would still merit mercy and understanding, even if they had the normal human reaction of “how do I get out of this?” initially. Be as nice as you can and understand that their behavior is not a personal affront. Seriously, almost no one thinks about what mom and dad would think in the heat of the moment, the ones who do are better than most of us. If you feel their contrition was genuine, I would say that since no actual harm was done (nobody got hurt in a material way), I’d say to talk about it as much as seems necessary or useful, forgive and forget as much as you can. Even if your lives are normal lives, bigger decisions and/or problems continually await on the horizon. If you find that it becomes a recurring problem, then it would be the time to actually have discussions of a breaking point.
Hmm, ok, I’ll happily revise it to say “For counseling to work, you have to realize that you are contributing to the problem in some way at some point in the process. You’re either passively or actively contributing to it if you’re here.” Yeah, that’s incredibly lame and vague, but it’s what I’ve understood. No one gets out of it completely unchanged, even if unsuccessful.
scabpicker, one does not need to have “problems they are responsible for” to benefit from counseling.
Since you’ve never been in counseling, maybe you need to lay off the lame and vague slogans?
I’ve never been, but I know many people who have. If the OP’s attitude about the situation does not change at some point from “he needs counseling, so he’s going” to “we need counseling so we’re going”, I would predict poor outcomes.
Instead of basically telling me to shut up, why not correct my statement?
My therapist friend cut her teeth as a facilitator in court ordered domestic violence perpetrator’s groups and believe me, one does NOT need to believe they need adjusting to benefit from counseling. In that milieu, the more advanced clients were instrumental in bringing the n00bs to the understanding that they do, indeed, have a big problem and had better get their shit together. Other convicted abusers giving social correction and the big stick of “get this shit right or get your ass back to jail” hanging over their heads provided a lot of attitude change in those guys. Pretty much all of them came to appreciate and understand their error but the work started long before the attitude adjustment. Something as simple as the required use of non-gendered language (they had to refer to their victims as their “partner” rather than “wife” or “girlfriend” or “that harpy”) will begin to effect change even on an unwilling and resistant participant.
There are plenty of problems a person may need help addressing or coping with that they are not responsible for, that they do have not contribute to. If you can’t imagine a problem like this, you have no business telling someone what counseling may or may not do for them.
I didn’t tell you to shut up, by the way. I told you to stop trying to come up with lame and vague slogans about who benefits from counseling when you have no first-hand experience with it.
I’m a little horrified at how many people have come out on the side of “it’s just weed, it’s no big deal”.
While I don’t know where the OP lives, there’s a very good chance it’s illegal. That could get them in trouble with the law - though less so than 30 years ago, I gather.
Someone said “teenage boy behind the wheel” being a greater risk. So, OK, how about a teenage boy who’s been indulging, behind the wheel? If they’re using a few times a week, there’s a pretty good chance this combination has happened.
The dangers of much stronger pot, and the boys’ ages, are less certain but there are a number of studies showing quite a few long-term problems. I like that the family is making the kids talk to a doctor about this. The direct effects on IQ and overall performance (see this link) are pretty frightening to me - aside from the concerns over this being “self-medicating” behavior.
It’s not clear whether the kids are having some fun once a week, or doing it daily. While that link suggests that even occasional users show some decline, I’d definitely be worried more if they used it more frequently.
Anyway - those of you who say “no big deal” are understating the issues. From a social standpoint, I agree, but it’s still a Big Deal in general.
That said, yeah, the OP and the boys might benefit from some counselling to repair the relationship.
The line I’ve bolded is simply wrong. People who’ve been subjected to domestic abuse constantly hear that they’re contributing to the problem. The problem lies solely with the abuser. Counseling can help a victim see that.
And you’re completely ignoring people with PTSD. How does a veteran or rape victim contribute to the problem?