Reply to My teen is obsessed with being diagnosed with ADD/ADHD/Austism and I am exhausted

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Reply to "My teen is obsessed with being diagnosed with ADD/ADHD/Austism and I am exhausted"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, I think people aren't really getting your rant. Once you have acknowledged whatever it is she is obsessing on sympathetically it is perfectly okay to change the subject. If she doesn't get the hint just leave the room. Or give her a chore to do so she has to leave the room. [/quote]

Well OP’s frustration is valid but I’ll tell you what, once your kid gets a diagnosis and you learn about the issue and finally understand what’s going on in their heads, it’s so, so much easier to deal with them. So I think it’s very likely that the best thing OP can do to get rid of her frustration is to get a neuropsych evaluation. [/quote]

I don't disagree with the advice about the neuropsych eval, but, DD will likely just keep obsessing about something after it. This is her personality (and maybe a symptom of a disorder). Doesn't mean OP has to listen/discuss it all the time. Do you have a kid like this? Sometimes they literally have to be told to shut up (in a nicer way of course). It is a teaching moment.[/quote]

Yes I have a kid like this. I'm saying we are getting the rant, but OP's exhaustion isn't an inevitability and it probably doesn't have to be dealt with by kindly telling the kid to shut up. I would say OP that besides really trying to learn about her child and understand where her child is coming from, OP would probably feel much better if she did some self-care so that her capacity for dealing with a challenging kid increases, instead of trying to constantly figure out in the moment how to support her kid when she has limited emotional resources. An ounce of prevention and all that.

Just as an aside, that I don't intend at all to be judgmental, I feel like parents don't stretch themselves as much as they could when it comes to supporting their kids emotionally. We are often capable of much more validation and empathic  listening than we realize, just like we capable of really stretching ourselves physically when the kids were little. Like, for me, I really can't even describe how difficult my child was, and I didn't think I had it in me to parent her the way her therapist told me I needed to. But I learned and I practiced and I'm doing it. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, though, so I don't actually judge parents who don't. [/quote]

NP.  I have a daughter with a lot of similarities to OP's daughter.  PP, can you talk more about how you emotionally stretch and the type of self-care that increases capacity for dealing with this?  Mentally, I l would love to do this.  But the reality is that my personality is such that I find my daughter's rant a huge emotional weight that I can't effectively deal with.[/quote]

I can try!

A lot of it is just those little things we all know we should do but often don't. Sufficient sleep, daily exercise, nourishing food, walks, doing fun things for ourselves that help us feel like whole people, taking mini-breaks throughout the day when we feel overly tired or overwhelmed, time with friends, etc. Before DC went to therapy, I wasn't doing these things really consistently because I didn't realize how much my moods were negatively impacting my child's mental health. When I discovered this, all these little things became a huge priority. Also Brene brown has a chapter about calm in one of her older books, gifts of imperfection, that I read several times over.

PP mentioned that a lot of our struggles with hearing others' emotions stem from our own childhoods where our emotions were invalidated. For me this was totally true and I have been working on it in therapy. I am doing dialectical behavioral therapy to learn self-validation in addition to emotional regulation and distress tolerance and it has been amazing. The results that have come from just learning to identify and then just be mindful about emotions, thoughts, and feelings are kind of magical.

I also learned something from a parenting book that seems obvious but for me was pretty revelatory: I don't have to adopt my kid's moods and feelings. Just because my child is freaking out about something doesn't mean I have to let that impact how I feel. "You don't have to go in there" is how the book phrased it. I listen, I try to understand, I sympathize, but I don't get anxious or irritable just because that's how my child is feeling.

It took at least a year to change and I am so not perfect about it. But I seriously had such an irritable and inpatient personality before and now my husband is constantly telling me he cannot believe how patient I am. He can't handle her emotional dumping. Which is actually okay because she has me (and her therapist).

We have had issues with her depending on me too heavily when she is in crisis mode. But the way her therapist is having us deal with it is not for her to just deal with things alone (though she is learning to identify trouble emotions and self-soothe before the situation gets unbearable). Instead, I approach her on an almost daily basis and ask her how she is doing (red, yellow, or green) so she has some support and guidance if she needs it. This way she doesn't need me *immediately*, which is good because no parent can do that all the time do that all the time (because maybe I am in the middle of getting myself some food so I can better emotionally regulate).

So it's a mixture of handling the issues so they are rarely *that* hard to deal with, and expanding my own emotional capacity for support.

This does seem like a lot to do for a kid, but honestly now I think of it as doing it for myself as much as for DC. Life is just easier for mewhen I live it in a way such that my kids' moods don't throw me for a loop.

[/quote]

I'm PP with the autistic daughter that sounds like a twin of OP, and that was really helpful to me.  Thank you!!![/quote]

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