<p>Well said, Lukerdad.</p>
<p>Scared Dad—</p>
<p>My heart is with you. You are describing my 2nd daughter’s situation. </p>
<p>We used to be foster parents for the state; we adopted one of our foster children; it was clear from the day she was placed that she had been severely abused, and the state does nowhere near what they should for these kids in terms of their care. They are all PTSD patients as far as I am concerned. They have you drive them to counselors who do nothing and charge the state. Medicaid pays nowhere near what these kids’ care needs (medicaid is the health insurance of foster children).</p>
<p>The S hit the fan as soon as we adopted her (because “they know they are safe” as it was put to us). Loads of teenage acting out, manipulation, lies and so forth, and yes, drug use.</p>
<p>She left 2 weeks after she turned 18 and dropped out of her Jr year of h.s. I hate to say this, but it has been much easier on the rest of us since she did — we had been living with all the things you describe and more. </p>
<p>Contact has been sporadic in the years since then, and she has had her ups and downs (a brief marriage to a nice guy before she went down again) and most recently she has been living with an abusive creep, had a stint as guest of the state in which she now lives, etc. It is not looking good. </p>
<p>Is there a history of mental illness in your family, even possibly one the “old folks” did not know the right name for? Because it sure does sound like she has inherited some bad genes – another poster said, you can’t hold it against her anymore than you would if it was diabetes—but it is an illness and does have to be addressed. </p>
<p>You can’t have her come back and live with the rest of the kids while she is like this. The lying and the crazy behavior and the destructiveness—especially the manipulations which will ruin their younger childrens’ lives. You have the rest of the family to take care of too. </p>
<p>One of my cousins went to Vietnam and came back hooked on heroin. His parents took a while to realize what was going on, but when they did, they had to tell him he could not live with them. They had 7 other children still at home (he was the oldest) and one of them was autistic. The parents had enough on their plate without a heroin addict running the house, and that is what an addict will do, run your house. </p>
<p>He went to Calif after trying to load a lot of guilt on them for throwing him out – and after a lot of bad times eventually found a wonderful girl who was worth going straight for. He found good rehab (for vets) and has been clean for many years. </p>
<p>So it is not hopeless–but you have to have good care and you can’t let her live with you while she is “doing her thing.”</p>
<p>Gogd bless you and I hope you find good help! And yes, she has to do residential, for a good long while, and you should maybe look into something called Oxford Houses. Use Google.</p>
<p>OP:</p>
<p>Sorry but I couldn’t get through the entire thread. Based on what i did read your daughter is messed up on drugs and is lying and spending money like crazy and recently got date raped, maybe, depending on what you believe and you can’t control and/or help her much anymore and if she comes home you are afraid she’ll mess up the babies in the household. </p>
<p>So, you have turned to CC for advice, counsel and help. You have received some great advice so far. I’m not a trained professional in the fields of pyschotherapy or substance abuse but I’ll say this from one parent to another:</p>
<p>Low self-esteem.
Lack of goals. </p>
<p>It seems to me that those two problems are the root cause of lots of what we call bad bahavior. And, maybe, if you can address those problems you can solve the bad bahavior. I could be wrong but it is worth a shot. </p>
<p>When one has something to live for, whether it is church or sports or art or music or friends or charity work or whatever, it prevents one hanging out watching porn and doing drugs all day, for example. </p>
<p>Low self-esteem alone accounts for damn near most of the social problems I know of. I haven’t a clue how to fix it but I at least know what the problem is. I tend to agree with you on one of your posts when you said it comes down to DECISION MAKING and that pyschotherapy is pretty much BABBLE. You said it, brother.</p>
<p>ACCecil, I am happy for you that you’ve gotten this far in life without knowing someone with a major psychiatric disorder. If you had- you would realize that watching a Bi-Polar sibling struggle with demons you can’t fathom, or living with a parent in the grips of a major depressive incident, isn’t called making bad choices. It’s bad brain chemistry.</p>
<p>Like blaming the person with lymphoma. They should just make better choices and have better self esteem, right?</p>
<p>You are lucky but that doesn’t give you the right to be quite so smug about the hand life has dealt you.</p>
<p>OP- hugs to you. I have no answers except to tell you that if your D had Crohn’s disease and you weren’t happy with her treatment, you wouldn’t decide “oh well, tough it out”. You’d get a second opinion and seek out a doctor who had a better treatment protocol. The answer to your D’s dilemma for sure doesn’t involve deciding that psychiatry is a waste of time and money. There are millions of people who lead happy and productive lives due to the skill and caring of wonderful psychiatrists. Go find one of them.</p>
<p>Emeraldkitty, you do make a lot assumptions and I believe you are off base. My oldest and I have been inseparable forever, we have a ultra stable home life, we are fun, pretty young, great marriage, we always had the hard talks, we gave freedom, this has all happened very fast. To pull away after your daughter lies to your face multiple times, spends of $1000+ like it was candy, having a detective knock on your door and replying to his question with “No, my daughter is at college” only to find out that is clearly not the case, skipped the first days of school, missing class constantly, all for partying etc. Pulling away was the only thing I hadn’t tried yet and not once did I say it was easy because she is my big girl. While mad at her actions I love her to pieces. </p>
<p>Today was a good day (so far) the “babies” were happy to see her home. She didn’t wake up with them like she said she would…no biggie. They hugged her and kissed her none the less.</p>
<p>Her and I have hung out all day ate lunch, talked about rehab, I just listened really. She went through her goals and hopes in the coming months it has been a good day. I know I have to take all of this with a grain of salt because she has said similar things before in the past few months, but I am hopeful. She said they had 4 designated drinking days a week at school and none of the bars would card. 6$ all you can drink, ladies night at another, $5 all you can drink, and .25c beers at another. She said it was pretty intense and even though it’s only been 11 days since her last event she says “I can’t believe how much I justified it and hid it even from my friends” She would say “only let me have 4 drinks” and then sneak drinks and lie to her friends as to how many she had. Plus smoking bowls, acid, shrooms, etc.</p>
<p>I’ll know by the end of the day if she will be going to a inpatient rehab tom. we all (her too) hope she gets to go. It’s by the beach and after talking to the admin. director seems like a great fit meeting her rehab needs and PTSD regarding the rape. </p>
<p>Thanks again for the replies.</p>
<p>blossom,</p>
<p>I don’t want to hijack this thread and I am sure you don’t either. if someone has a medical condition they need help. No debate. But not all destructive behaviors are caused by medical conditions. Lying, for example. Being lazy, for example. Spending more money than you have, for example. </p>
<p>So put my comments about certain “fields” as being not much more than babble in context. We are talking about two different things. If the OP’s D has a medical problem then she does ned medical help. No duh. </p>
<p>Sitting on a couch having a conversation about butterflies at $100/per hour isn’t what I call help unless the problem is an over abundance of money that you just need removed from your wallet. And, FYI, I have evey right to my smugness as you do. :-).</p>
<p>I don’t believe in competely walking away from a child even if they are 18 and acting out. 18 is in my opinion not an adult. You don’t have to allow her to run your lives or to believe everything she tells you. Addicts and alcoholics lie as due 18 yr olds. I suggest you and your wife set boundaries that you can live with. Some in my mind are a no brainer. If you are drinking and using drugs we will not provide you with a car. That is for the safely of innocent people not to punish her.
Determine what sort of monetary support you are comfortable with. Maybe agree to some sort of support if she is doing the next right thing. Also don’t expect miracles after 30 days of treatment. It is only the start of a long unhill battle. Someone who has been through numerous rehabs described a 30 day treatment as the first week nothing gets done since you are adjusting to the place, week 2 and 3 are good and progress is being made, week 4 is family week and you are already in the mindset of I am getting out of here in a week and you don’t get much done. Also don’t be surprised if they recommend an aftercare program. If they do consider it. Consider making it a condition of your support.
If you don’t want her coming home to live after treatment consider making living in a sober living house for 6 months as a condition of financial support. Also you can give grocery gift cards versus cash.
Ultimately it will be your D’s choice to get help. Some people believe they have to reach bottom to want to get better.
I have one friend whose D is in crisis. They have told her she can not come home as long as she is using. The one thing they did tell her was that when she was ready to get help they would help her find people to help her.
Also try Al Anon if for nothing else but picking up some of the reading materials. They have newcomer packets with some great info including on detaching with love.</p>
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<p>I would not do this. Kids with street smarts can sell these for a little less than their face value. I would bet that many an addict would take a $50 grocery gift card and sell it for $30 in cash, or they could use it to by mixers for alcohol, cigarettes, or perhaps even bottles of liquor if they are sold in a grocery store in your state and they accept the store’s gift card. JMO.</p>
<p>Al Anon is a huge help in not only drug/alcohol but in the mental instability issues you are dealing with.</p>
<p>ScareDad, I’m so sorry that you are experiencing your present heartache. I do believe that you truly love your daughter and are very intuitive. I congratulate you for wanting to protect your younger children. You are so right. I have lived through a very similiar sad story.Unfortunately, my husband and I let it go on too long, not realizing how much it was hurting our younger 2 children. We bent over backwards and then did cartwheels. We spent over $40,000. The results…only more lies, stealing, betrayal. On top of that, the judgement from relatives and others…aren’t they lucky to be perfect parents and perfect people? We did go to al-anon, family therapy, individual therapy. The most valuable was our individual therapy…we learned not to blame ourselves and to put our energies into ourselves, each other and our children. Our other 2 children are successful, happy and loving. Sometimes you just cannot control what is happenning. Five years later, I am so relieved she is out of our life. She has continued her bad decisions and still blaming us. I’m sad for her that she does not realize the reward one gets from taking responsibility for one’s choices, and for being accountable. She is now getting to the point that she is losing ground being able to blame us for all of her misfortunes…it’s getting old, and people are getting tired of her playing the victim.Set limits, set boundries, protect yourself and the other members of your family. Google personality disorder. Your daughter sounds more personality disorded than mentally ill.Our 2 other children loved her, but once she was out of our house, they just blossomed. We were all walking on egg shells, and not realizing it. She had atleast 3 times the attention the other 2 did and so much love, but in retrospect was just an empty well. My prayers are with you. You sound like a wonderful father, your other children and your wife need you.</p>
<p>To Scared Dad, many people have said a lot of things. I just want to add one small thing, and that is, don’t expect things to ever return to how they “were.” It is not even a healthy expectation. Try to avoid, yourself, going back and forth from two extremes of closeness and alienation in regard to your daughter. As they get to be this age, (loving) detachment is more helpful, and I do detect in your posts a certain desire to return to an unrecoverable past.</p>
<p>We all deal with this as parents. Add to that the possibility of a new onset mental health issue, which can often emerge at this age, and the chance of truly recovering the kind of closeness you had with your daughter becomes even more remote. You need to let it go, and not feel angry at her for the loss.</p>
<p>Even in normal circumstances, we parents need to move on from that kind of nostalgia and deal with the new realities of their maturing.</p>
<p>I have been where you are, and we all managed to recover our balance, and things go well, or as well as they could. I don’t want to compromise my child’s privacy, so I am only saying that much so you know that I speak from experience.</p>
<p>Compmom I could not agree more that there is no returning to what was. I too miss the daughter I had and all the therapy in the world will never bring her back to us. It is a sad but honest acknowlegement of how depression/mental illness effects a family. Our daughter has hurt the family and the closeness that we all had. My husband and I have been put through the ringer by our daughter’s lies and manipulation.</p>
<p>OP many people can understand your anger and it seems like you have skipped over all the other stuff that most parents have gone through in similar situations. I thought that I could help and protect my daughter with my love but the reality was that our daughter just used that to further get what she wanted. </p>
<p>Our home will never be the place it was because the damage was too severe. Our daughter’s relationships with her brothers and us is very strained because we don’t trust anything that she says or does. The lies are ongoing and they have reached a point that I don’t even look or expect the truth anymore. She lives here but only in terms of a bed and food. There is nothing left that resembles a family. Don’t let this happen to you. Stay strong and stand firm and don’t buy into the crap. If I had to do over again I would have closed the door and changed the locks. I would have also called the police and had her arrested. Now the only step left is to have her committed and that is the hardest thing to reckon with.</p>
<p>Momma-three, I think you might misunderstand what I was saying. I was trying to articulate that change and loss are part of normal development, and that most of us parents, no matter how well or how badly our kids are doing, have to accept that some closeness with them is lost in the interest of autonomy and independence. This can make us sad, but also make us happy as we watch our kids become adults.</p>
<p>I think the father’s desire to go back to what “was” is misguided, and may be part of the problem. For the daughter to develop naturally, he needs to accept that the extreme “closeness” he had with her needs to change, and not be angry about it.</p>
<p>I have no idea what kind of pathology, if any, is going on with the daughter. With the onset of psychiatric problems at this age, parents suffer even more of a loss of “what was,” but that is an extreme version of what I think most parents experience at this stage of the game, and some of the same principles apply.</p>
<p>One more thing: I can’t believe, in the long run, that you won’t feel a lot better that you have given your daughter bed and food, and whatever love and support you could, no matter what happens. You have done the absolute best that you could, as a parent, in a very difficult situation, and that will stay with you forever.</p>
<p>Yes, I did misunderstand. I don’t want to hyjack the thread but I understand some of what ScaredDad is feeling. It is a tough balance to have a kid living in the home who has mental health problems. The posters daughter was just raped (although hard to really know when they lie and manipulate) and is exhibiting some of the signs that scream onset of mental illness. If his daughter is just an out of control teenager he needs to put the brakes on what he will tolerate in his home to protect the health and well being of the other children. I did not have little ones in the house and still my daughter managed to turn life upside down. I would never recommend that anyone with younger kids do what we did because it hurts everyone. Right now he needs to do what is best for his daughter during this crisis, but moving forward the best may not be having her live at home. The pain of mental illness or whatever these behaviors are can take over a healthy persons life and leave you limp and useless.</p>
<p>Compmom, yep I agree…100% I think there was already a natural changing of the relationship as she was growing up, experimenting, and finding her way. For me the kicker was the depth, length, and frequency of the lies I just don’t do well with that and don’t know how to respond when so much of what someone says is false. Thanks for the reply!</p>
<p>She is in a residential inpatient setting now that came highly recommended even her previous therapist recommended this facility as her first choice. The ride there was pretty quiet though she just wanted to listen to music which was fine with me being a music lover, but it was easy to tell alot was going on in her head. We stopped for lunch and we did talk a little.</p>
<p>She shared her plan and alot of what was said in the 7 day inpatient rehab. Her tentative thoughts are:</p>
<p>“”“” I don’t want to live at home. I want to move back to XXXXXXX where school is and hopefully attend in the spring hoping this is covered under medical leave etc etc. If I can’t go to school for whatever reason I still want to move up there because I like it and I’ll try to get a job and just work until I can get everything worked out with school “”“”</p>
<p>We’ll see of course that’s a scary thought…she has to beat this no one can do it for her. We can only love her and say we’re here.</p>
<p>My wife said she felt guilty and was crying because she loves her so much, doesn’t want to see her hurt, and wants so bad for this rehab to help her. At the same time she was crying because she was telling “white lies” the whole time she was with us and all that does is make us doubt the stories and the big picture all over again. It’s a vicious cycle of emotional ups and downs. The guilt part came in because it was like a weight was lifted when she left. We felt like we weren’t walking on eggshells anymore. Now all the kids are asking “Why is XXXXX smoking Dad?” “Are you letting her?” “I thought smoking was bad and caused you to die?” the irony is she did her Senior thesis on smoking 9 pages typed yet she is smoking now as if she’s a 10 year chain smoker…totally blows my mind. I even told her please don’t smoke in front of the kids it’s going to open up a bag of worms…“Oh I won’t dad!!” then she said she forgot.</p>
<p>Sadly no calls last night or tonight so either she’s adjusting really well or the opposite. We won’t know much until next weeks visitation and “classes for the loved ones to help with behaviors we might be displaying that would cause her to struggle” that should be a whoot, but at least we will see her. Hoping for the best maybe she will call???</p>
<p>Does the rehab program allow calls? Many don’t.</p>
<p>I just found this thread. I want to say something a little bit different here. I had a super talented HS daughter who was a great athlete and an amazing student and a really gorgeous kid. But she was always very fragile. She would get very stressed out about school. She was always super sensitive about things people would say. She developed an eating disorder after having been raped in HS…she had always had a tendency toward over concern about weight and counselors had told us that we needed to watch it. Well, her first semester in college she almost killed herself losing weight, drinking, drugs, etc. She spent a fortune, and her mind was chaos. We took her out of school and put her into therapy for her eating disorder. A couple of years down the road…with SOME improvement, but with her still not really on track, I asked her therapist whether they had tested her for ADHD. They told me that they had been trying to peal back all the layers of the onion…eating disorders/substances/rape, etc…to see what was really at the core of this. They, too, had decided that her mind was chaos due to ADHD and wanted to treat her. They started her on Vyvanse, and I am not kidding…she is a different kid. She has been through so much, so she is not the kid she WAS, but she was functioning again, and not self-medicating. (She hasn’t touched drugs since). Another year down the road, she now has a 4.0 in school with 30 credits. She is considering medicine or therapy. I think that what she has been through will make her a tremendous asset to either profession. In a strange way, I think God took her down this insane path for a reason. She looks amazing again. Her self-esteem is returning. She isn’t throwing money around anymore. Bottom line…your instincts are right. You can’t give up on a kid. And you have to get the help of professionals. It takes time. We’re on the other side now. I have a relationship with my daughter that is amazing. I don’t think either my husband or I though we would live through this nightmare, but we did. I will pray that you get through this as well.</p>
<p>My dad who has 30 + years as a therapist would ask you a question like "What do you do to continue these issues ? " or "How do you continue to enable your daughter?’ Nobody has problems like your D in a vacuum ,and this might help you to see your problems in a different light. I don’t have any ideas other than family counseling is very effective . Good luck !!</p>
<p>fauxmaven…Family counselors are great. You have to set boundaries and counselors help that process. But strong families that stay together through difficult times also are the best gift that a troubled kid can have.</p>
<p>Good luck, scaredDad. Let us know how the family sessions go.</p>