Reply to Adult Failure to Launch DD Stealing from Me

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here. No, we NEVER gave her permission to use our credit card. We weren't even aware that she knew the CC number until now, but apparently she wrote down my CC number when she was back home from winter break last year without me noticing. See how much of a sneaky, entitled person she is?

Re: college. She was an English major at a SLAC known for entitled, whiny students (similar to Oberlin/Wesleyan). She started off as pre-med/Bio at an HYPS school, but she left the school after her freshman year due to "mental health issues" (which I now realize are just depression and loneliness due to how insufferable she is to be around). She took 1 year off of college back in 2021 and then transferred to this progressive SLAC (similar in rankings/political reputation to an Oberlin/Vassar type school) because she wanted to "pursue her creative ambitions."

She lives with a college friend in a different part of the country, and pays $600/month in rent. She Venmo'd the person $3k from MY bank account (the audacity!) because she wanted to "front-load" rent for January-May. Insane.

She wants to use the extra $1k for Delta plane tickets to visit her FRIEND's FAMILY (not us, but her roommate's parents!) over winter break because "she never wants to see us again." This is despite the fact that she's 23 and on our health insurance and phone plan. Insane. [/quote]

Thank you for answering, that helps paint a more detailed picture, and I think I remember another post from you about the challenges you’ve been having — and ultimately, that your DD is struggling with. Cumulatively, it sounds incredibly stressful, and I’m sure by now you’re at your wit’s end.

If you haven’t yet spoken with an individual therapist for yourself, it might be worth considering a few sessions, given your daughter’s current behavior. While it sounds like you have a plan for dealing with this latest issue, a therapist can be a strong resource and support for yourself, and potentially make some recommendations for communicating your limits (even more) clearly and firmly with DD.

Best to you.[/quote]

OP here. I've been in WAY too many therapy sessions (family therapy was required in the DBT program my daughter was in). It was actively harmful.

What I struggle with in terms of therapy (whether that’s DD’s individual therapist or a family therapist) is that there isn’t any focus on RESILIENCE. Like there’s no emphasis on the fact that living with family means that you need to tolerate some things about others that are unpleasant. It’s all just focusing on what we’re doing wrong as parents, and I don’t like that therapists don’t acknowledge that a parent-child relationship is a two-way street.

For example, we made college funding for DD contingent on going to a local church every Sunday. We told her that if she didn’t go to church (and we could check using Life360), we wouldn’t pay her tuition. The family therapist kept trying to get us to drop this requirement, but we told her that because DD is financially dependent on us, she needs to play by OUR rules. There’s just no acknowledgement of what WE want as parents.

When DD was in the intensive DBT program a couple of years ago, we were told to always “validate” whatever crazy BS she said. The problem is that anxiety and depression, by their nature, cause distortions of thinking. Therapy used to be about challenging these distortions and helping people see relationships, etc. clearly. Now, therapists sit in a bubble and hear only the patient’s assertions and expects the world to mold around those. It is fine to try to understand where someone is coming from, but making my daughter feel that only her perceptions and feelings are legitimate is a recipe for problems.

My daughter also has zero appreciation for my strengths as a parent (which are many!), and dwells upon minor indignations she feels she suffered as a child. I walk on eggshells, because when they are older you only see them at the kid’s discretion. We talk once a week on the phone. I wish I could call her more often (keep in mind she’s on OUR phone plan and we pay for everything including her phone), but she says she “doesn’t want to call us more because she hates hearing the sound of our voice.” I don’t even think she realized how painful that statement was to hear.

I think the therapy fed into her self-absorbent, and she began ranting to us about how we “weren’t meeting her emotional needs” because we did a few things in her childhood that made her angry, even though we were paying for her ENTIRE college tuition + room and board. Apparently the DBT therapist told DD that we have a “dysfunctional family.”

When I asked him why he thought this was the case (our family is loving and warm, as are most families where the parents are paying for the kid’s college), the DBT therapist told us that he can’t tell us that much due to HIPPA release, but that “EVERYONE has a role to play in the family dysfunction.” When I asked DD’s therapist to give us specific examples of ways that we’ve allegedly “fed into this family dysfunction”, her therapist simply responded that he can’t say anymore due to HIPPA violations.  :roll:  You can’t claim that we’re responsible for family dysfunction and then not tell us why… because the obvious answer is that DH and I were objectively amazing parents.

I have a DS (2 years older than DD), and he's the total opposite of DD. Grateful, appreciative, kind, and totally self-sufficient (he works in a tech job in SF). [/quote]

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