Reply to What do you do when your adult child goes into therapy and lays blame at your feet.

Forum Index » Adult Children

Reply to "What do you do when your adult child goes into therapy and lays blame at your feet."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]He is in pain and he is expressing it and you want to make it go away with a quick "I'm sorry if I anything I did contributed to your unhappiness."

Obviously that is not going to be satisfying for your son! He doesn't want a throwaway non-apology, he wants you to listen and validate his feelings.  Why not actually talk it through with him, admit that you made mistakes (specific, not a general "sorry if I made some mistakes") and explain why you did the things you did? Not to make it go away, but so he can see you that you actually care.[/quote]

I don't think he has doubts that we care. I will admit somethings were mistakes, like homeschooling - it didn't work for him, he fought it. Other things like church were not a mistake even though he doesn't attend church now. The opportunity to go to college was not a mistake. He didn't like it and his grades weren’t good, but he had the chance to try it, but dropped out. Our marriage was challenging and I wish we hid it better from the kids. We did the best we knew at the time. If these are the worse things we did, we should be forgiven.[/quote]

Let me spell this out for you. Your son grew up in an unstable, high-conflict household. On top of this, the two people in the dysfunctional, high-conflict marriage he was born into were also intensely controlling and gave him no opportunity to be exposed to a normal, non-dysfunctional environment (homeschooling, forcing a specific church on him).

And this is just from what you’ve told us.

Strongly suspect that your son was homeschooled for religious reasons. This feels so familiar- saying you know you weren’t perfect (but it wasn’t that bad), trying to explain everything away as him having been a challenging kid (and universally responding to it with an authoritarian style of parenting)… feels very old school evangelical and I’m not surprised that 1) your kid finally broke, and 2) you still can’t handle hearing- actually hearing- what he is telling you.[/quote]

You’re a crazed loon. What are you smoking, and can I have some?

You make a huge leap from OP’s “Challenging marriage” to claiming she was in a “high conflict marriage.” These two are not the same. And your equation of church with abnormal disfunction says less about OP’s particular church and more about your rabid bigotry.

And where did you get the idea OP is “intensely controlling” and “universally authoritarian” and gave him “no opportunity to be exposed to normal, non-disfuncional environments”? Did you just go ahead and assume OP never let her kid choose his own clothing, musical instrument, hobbies, sports team, band, or play with the neighborhood kids?

You really need to get a therapist of your own and work out your mommy issues and your issues with trying to shoehorn others’ experiences into your own facts.

— pp who identified her two kids above 
[/quote]

the fact is - OP claiming that she is totally blameless, deserves to be forgiven, her son is “difficult” … then dropping parenting decisions that could have been dysfunctional (homeschool, rigid religous expectations, pressure to go to college) raises a TON of questions. Nobody knows what OP was like as a parent, but there is more than enough here to strongly believe in the possibility that OP is in denial about her parenting. [/quote]

OP never ever said she was totally blameless. She even said she made mistakes and listed a few, like the marriage issues. You use phrases like “could have been” and “raises question” and “believe” so it looks like you’re reluctantly admitting that WE JUST DON’T KNOW. Where you go off the rails is when you take your surmises and your beliefs and use that to justify your social media cruelty. [/quote]

yeah we just don’t know. which suggests that OP should meaningfully engage with her son and try to understand, instead of insisting she should be forgiven immediately. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics