(Just finishing the thought.)
And, on preview, I can see that I owe AHunter an apology. It took a while to compose the post, and he and Norine had an exchange that clarified things.
Robin
Norinew, my sister also suffers from both Bipolar and BPD, with a whole lot of paranoia thrown in. She also exhibited many of the destructive behaviors already mentioned - since she was 12. For years I worried that she wouldn’t make it.
She turned 35 this year, and things are finally starting to get better for her. She’s no longer enjoying being ill; she’s taking an active role in her own healing. I’m telling you this because I think there’s hope for your daughter. I think that there comes a time in such a person’s life when they wake up and say “I refuse to be like this”. If (as I think you are doing) you keep reinforcing the message - of how to get better - she will have the tools she needs to do so once she makes up her mind.
I admire your courage. You are right about the effect on the family. Living with an unstable person can make the whole family unstable. Hang in there.
NinetyWt, thanks for your words of encouragement. It’s good to hear success stories, as it does give me some hope for the future. Right now, as I said, we need to focus on keeping her safe; if we don’t, she’ll never live long enough to reach the point that your sister has.
Robin, you’ve given me a lot to think about in regards to 12-step programs. I must confess that when she first started attending, hubby had reservations about it. I, however, did not. My opinion was colored by the great success my father had in AA (he died with 27 years sobriety, and a very strong program). I didn’t necessarily think she would actively work the steps (unless she found a sponsor who would kick her butt), but hoped that something would sink in. Of course you realize that if she does come home, and we forbid her to go to meetings, it will be met with a lot of criticism. Not that I’m afraid of criticism. I’ll do whatever I think is best for her. But also, what you say gives me even more reason to believe that she’s better off in a long-term facility. For kids like her, it seems that trouble is waiting around every corner.
I have no words of advice, just a story.
My cousin started doing drugs at the age of 10. She started smoking crack and snorting cocaine at 14. She’s been in and out of 30 different rehab programs, hospitals and prisons. She left one program to live with her counselor, who was selling drugs to the patients. Her parents didn’t want to commit her. Now they have two of her kids to take care of and she breezes in and out of their lives.
If you help her now, maybe she can help herself later.
My thoughts are with you.
This sounds amazingly like my older sister, Bi-Polar, Borderline Personality Disorder, Alcoholic, Drugs, suicide attempts, acting out all over the freaking place. She got it full on when she was in her twenties. Long-term mental hospital lockups, ward of the state, crack-induced attempted-murder victim, self-destructive behavior… I wrote her off as “never gonna see 30”.
I am very pleased to say I was wrong.
She turned 40 in February, is living on her own, working two light jobs, and pleasant to be around, when she is up for it. She “grew out of it”, as it were.
When I recommended self-help groups, I wasn’t really thinking specifically about 12-step programs. Those are highly effective and useful for some people while for others they just aren’t the thing. They tend to reflect at least some portion of the world-view and, well I’m not sure ideology is the word for it but the in-house reigning conventional wisdom at any rate, of the AA Big Book. I have Problem X and I’m powerless over it and my continuing recovery is dependent on me recognizing that, etc etc.
There are other models out there, some of them a bit more cultish and some of them a bit less so.
I’ve got no advice that hasn’t already been said, but I would urge you to call the Maryland chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), a nonprofit organization that can connect you to a support group for families of the mentally ill and can provide you with advice and literature that might be able to answer your questions and give you a shoulder to lean on.
Call 1-800-467-0075 for the MD state chapter, and they can help you find a support group in your area.
gobear, thanks for the number. I will definitely call tomorrow!
FilmGeek, the kind of things you talk about are the kinds of things we’re afraid of!
UncleBill, thanks for sharing the story. Hearing these things is really helpful.
AHunter3, I have some idea of the kinds of things you’re talking about; unfortunately, Cumberland is a very small city, and our options are quite limited by that.
Norinew, I just wanted to say that I think you are just amazing and I think you are doing the right thing, definitely. I’ve known lots of parents who weren’t willing to make the hard choices to do right by their kids, both those that were out of control and those who were being victimized by it. You show that you care about all your children by taking this step. You have a lot more courage than a lot of people, and I hope you know that. I don’t know how your other kids feel about it, but if I were in their place, I would feel closer to my parents if they took necessary steps to protect me.
Not to hijack this thread further, but my own experiences are largely with the 12-step model. I emphasize that because it seems to be the default model for most self-help groups. That’s all.
Robin
And, one more time, that was me.
My name is Robin, and I’m a ditz. I keep forgetting to sign in.
I’d heard about Dialectical Behavior Therapy too, but jellyblue beat me to the mention of it.
Back when I was depressed, I figured out that there has to be a “gottawanna” factor to recovery – you gotta wanna get better. When you really WANT to get better, you’ll do what you need to do – take meds, do talk therapy, smile more often, etc – whatever it takes to get better. (I KNOW there’s more to it than this, folks, but this – for me, at least – is where it had to start.)
Sounds like that’s where your daughter still is.
My thoughts and best wishes are with you. My cousin is dealing with something similar with one of her adopted sons. God bless you all.
I was hospitalized at the age of 14 and put into a drug rehabilitation program, including twelve-stepping, and I’d like to put in my own two cents.
First of all, if your daughter is asking for help, that is a very good sign. By all means, do what you can for her now. But shop around and find a good place. This means sufficient staff and a small patient list. The smaller the place you can find the better. Because all those F’d up kids she meets in there are going to be her friends when she gets out, and believe me, the fewer the better. I myself met at least three people from my school, who I never had met before, in rehab. They introduced me to several things I hadn’t done before even getting in there, like speed, cocaine, and oral sex.
I would also recommend avoiding the AA circuit as much as possible. When I was 14 to 15, here’s what I did at AA meetings: Fake praying, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, hit on the biker guys, have sex behind the building with the other juvinile delinquents, get fondled by older AA guys who pretended they were “tickling” me, and hitchhike to the record store, but I always made sure to be in the right place when mom or dad came to pick me up. It’s a BIG waste of time. Not necessarily AA, just the regular meetings themselves. Once a week plus counseling is FINE.
Hugs and good thoughts. This is not going to be easy for you.
One more thing…the smoking. I suggest you ease up about it. Cigarettes are legal at 18 and she is almost there. Its fine to lay down the law about smoking in the house or around the baby, but in my opinion you are setting yourself up for a whole lot of trouble over something that is in the grand scheme of things not such a big deal. Would it be too much for you to let that one go? My parents had a hard time with it too, but they did eventually just accept it and signed the waiver that allowed me to smoke in rehab. It made me 10 times more open and willing to talk to them, which opened up a lot of things in therapy. They did forbid me to smoke even on their property when I moved back home, but I would just take a walk. It was a mutual respect kind of thing. It could help.
BTW, I’m 30 now, graduated from UC Berkeley and have a good job and a good life. If she’s as bright as you say she is, she can make it too.
Good luck to all of you.
Do you really believe your daughter when she says she wants to be hospitalised? Does she really want it or is she simply wanting attention? You’ve already said that she’s an inveterate liar. Is hospitalisation actually going to help her? You’re doing the right thing by making enquiries, but you might consider - and I know that it’s nasty - throwing her out. At 17, at least here in the U.K., she’s an adult. So far she’s known that whatever she does, you’re there to pick her up. Let her experience - if only for a short time - what it’s like without you. So change all the locks, throw her out, and the rest of you go on holiday for a fortnight; but hire someone to keep a very discrete eye on her.
You will likely decide against this course of action, but I think you need to consider why.
But you are to be commended for your concern. You are doing your very best and I’m sure that we here all know that you will make the right decision.
Wow! on one note i have to say good job! and i do understand in some ways what your going through. Only its my dad that it all happened to. And i saw it from a childs point of view. And dont give up hope as they say “hope dies last”, for my father is now doing very well. He no longer drinks uses drugs nothing. And i just wanted to say. well we’re with ya every step of the way.
Well, we really can’t ease up about the cigarettes, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I watched both of my parents die of smoking related illnesses, so I have a personal bugaboo about it. But even more important is this: whatever we allow her to do, she demands to be allowed to go to the next level. For the first few months in AA and NA, we didn’t know she was smoking. At that time, even though she was smoking to deal with stress, she didn’t want us to make a big deal about her cutting on herself. It was her “only stress relief”. No doubt in my mind that if we allowed the cutting, she’d want to be allowed to smoke pot. IOW, she always has to be one up on us. Hubby and I were just talking about the smoking today, and both agreed that if we saw evidence that she was serious about getting help, etc., we could ease up on the smoking. But it’s not about smoking. It’s really about her being pissed off that we won’t let her do what she wants to do.
I don’t think she knows what she wants. What she believes she wants is to get the hell out of here. She has herself convinced that anything has to be better!
Here, she’s not considered an adult until she’s 18. If it was 17, believe me, we might be considering just what you suggest. Here, we do have a system where she could become an “emancipated minor”, but that would involve either her getting married (she doesn’t even have a boyfriend right now; and I don’t even want to think about her having kids at this point in time), or us abandoning her. The biggest problem with the abandonment issue is that it would call into question whether we were fit parents for our other kids. Our options, as far as we know right now, are: hospitalization; handing her over to the state, and she would get into the foster care system; some sort of private thing like boot camp. We can’t afford private institutions, unless we could find one her insurance would pay for. The foster care system does have families to place kids with, who specialize in dealing with troubled teens; but as you can imagine, there are not enough families to deal with all the kids. Hospitalization seems the most feasible at the moment.
norinew, I asked around and there’s a mental health consumers / self-advocacy group in Maryland, On Our Own of Maryland, headquartered in Baltimore but with a listed affiliate in Cumberland.
http://onourownmd.org/affiliates.htm
Maybe this will be useful to you or your daughter.
I don’t have any advice to add, but I just wanted to say, good luck, norinew.
AHunter3, thanks for the links! You can never have too much info, IMHO.
Thanks, Guin