Reply to Sharing self-injurious thoughts

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[quote=Anonymous]My DS had a long term relationship in HS with a girl who had self-injurious thoughts and was extremely anxious and controlling. From the outside, I could see that her sharing the thoughts about self-injury was a way of controlling him.  It was pretty clear that she was engaging in emotionally abusive behavior - control, isolating him from friends and family, criticism, buying him inappropriately expensive things (she came from a very wealthy family.) I am not saying abuse is your situation, but it is something to watch out for.

I didn't think that my telling him to break up or forbidding him to see her would be successful - he had to do it on his own.

I made sure he has his own therapist for his own issues, but, unsurprisingly, he spent much of therapy (I think) talking about her and how to deal with her anxiety and threats.

I had complicated issues to navigate about her safety and mental health and how to talk to her parents about it.

I spent a lot of time educating both my kids about mental health and various kinds of abuse in relationships. This was mostly through sharing stories of my own relationships growing up and talking about public figures, media representations, etc.

I also made sure we had a private college counselor so DC had someone independent supporting his decisions about college.

Really all you can do is keep listening to them and educating them about healthy relationships and how to draw boundaries, not necessarily with direct reference to their relationship at the moment. PP is right to keep repeating the "I'm not a professional, so I really don't know how to help you cope with this, you should talk to a therapist or doctor."

My DS also had to know explicitly that:  it is OK to break up with a mentally ill person, and you are not responsible for their choices in response. We are each responsible for developing ourselves to be ready for healthy relationships, and there are times in our lives when we should be working on ourselves and not a relationship.  You can love someone, and they may not be a forever person.  In fact, the latter is common in your teens and 20s.

I would definitely make sure, for safety reasons, you are monitoring cell phone and social media use and that location tracker is on cell.

It was a very scary time for me. I had to do a lot of thinking about my own emotional responses to the situation. [/quote]

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