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Love and Other Stuff
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Category Archives: Parenting
The Condom Talk
I have to admit that teen girls scare me. My son is cute, personable, and seriously gullible. Girls have been trying to hold his hand, kiss him, and date him for years. I have always been grateful that he wasn’t really ready for any of it.
I saw a post yesterday on Facebook that he is in love. Oh my. I knew he started liking a girl at school and that they were planning a Starbucks date. Within two weeks, they are “in love.” Time for the condom talk.
Oh sure, I have had it before many times with him, but he wasn’t interested. This time the kid was bright red and nearly crawling under the chair. That told me volumes. Definitely time for the talk. When I told him I was going to show him how to put one on, he screamed No! and crossed his genitals with both hands. He’s a bit literal, and I am not. Causes some momentary cortisol spikes.
I’m telling you this because it is good to continually prepare our kids for what they may not really, actually understand despite all the talks and all the emphatic, “I know, Mom”.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Fear Is Not Required
One of my children was potty trained and talking at 1.5 yrs. The other was 4 yrs. before either of those things happened. I was frightened by both.
One of my children was astute and controlling everything and anything in her worldview. The other was forever a baby, needing help with simple tasks through the teen years. I was frightened by both.
One of my children was cunning and shrewd. The other was gullible and passively uncooperative. I was frightened by both.
One of my children used a 10″ butcher knife to threaten her adult step-brother and carve a line in the wall about waist high in every room in our house. The other foreshadowed this years earlier by meandering toward me with a similar blade, which seemed longer than the arm that was wielding it. I was frightened by both.
My fear made me distant. My children needed me closer.
Go closer.
Get some skin in the game.
Fear less. Engage more.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
The Quiet Talks
The quiet morning talks are always so enlightening around here. Today’s topic: Hatred.
“I do love you, but I also hate you.” Never has a truer sentence been spoken.
My son tells me that he, “Can’t put two and two together when it comes to any sort of consequence.” He says, “Consequences seem like they will last forever, even though I know nothing ever goes away for longer than a day or a day and a half.” In that moment, “I hate you.”
“The rest of the time there is this feeling inside me like defiance of rules…Whenever there is a rule, I feel hatred for it…Sometimes I just won’t ask you for something because I am afraid how I might react if you say no.”
How frightening it must be to react so emotionally violent to every day structure, rules, and expectations? That is a thwarted, everything-is-against-me worldview many of our traumatized children experience.
My compassion for the collective struggle our children experience continually increases over time, and my ability to hold my son with soft eyes and empathy grows exponentially alongside it. Better late than never, I tell myself, though my grief for how long it has taken me is right there, just under the surface.
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Big Bad Scary World View
Without a “felt sense” of safety, our children with complex developmental trauma (abandonment + abuse) default to a big, bad, scary world view. Translated, that means very high anxiety, through the roof cortisol spikes, and super huge walls of defensiveness. Frankly, they are often reactive, verbally and physically defensive, rejecting, fearful of change and new things, rigid, and controlling.
Fear is powerful poison in the well of a child’s psyche. It changes children from roly-poly bundles of silly delight and giggles into hypervigilant, self-focused and sometimes maniacal survivalists.
Therapeutic parenting is all about creating a patient, playful environment where chronic poor choices are seen as mistakes to learn from, rather than calculated misdeeds that need to be punished. “Felt safety” cannot grow in an angry, punishing family.
Therapeutic parenting tip number 1,000852: Start every day anew. And to quote Taylor Swift, “Shake it off. Shake it off.”
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Love Matters Scholarship Fund can use your contributions. Click here for more information.
The next Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.
Please share freely. Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.
Put on some music and dance around. Come on. Shake it off.
Be Gentle and Kind
When we teach scripts to parents for correcting and redirecting attachment challenged children, the first one is usually Be Gentle and Kind. At various places around the office that direction can be heard throughout the day, every day, every week, all year long, year after year. It takes thousands of repetitions to stick the landing of a new neuropathway.
It occurred to me this morning that my last three Daily YOU Time emails have really fallen under the heading of Re-parenting Parents With the Script Be Gentle and Kind.
I wish I had been re-parented early on to Be Gentle and Kindwith my children. I just did what was imprinted by my parents–Be Powerful and In Control. That was misguided and made a mess of things for quite a while.
So, forgive me for my repetitious re-parenting script to Be Gentle and Kind. I am simply trying to make it stick for YOU and your attachment challenged child(ren). It makes all the difference over time.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Love Matters Scholarship Fund can use your contributions. Click here for more information.
The next Trust-based Parent Training Course in Sacramento, CA is scheduled for January 24th and January 31st. Register here.
Please share freely. Your community of support can sign-up for their own Daily YOU Time email by clicking here.
Be Gentle and Kind All the Time. Why not?
I Wish I Had An Attitude Adjustment Earlier
I bought a panini maker. Mmmmm, nothing like a cheesy/carbo-load to get the kid out of bed. What I discovered is how sweet my son is when he knows I made it for him, whether he has time to eat it or not. When he was younger, I would have pitched a fit if he lollygagged and didn’t eat it. Then he would have pitched a fit back, maybe throwing the hot panini puck at my face. I would have insisted at higher and higher volumes that he NEEDED to eat breakfast, but why was I MAD when he didn’t. After awhile, I took everything personally. It felt like these shenanigans were by way of gutting me with a fishing knife. I started to hate my life and my kids, too. This is the ugly truth.
If you are waiting for your children to have love in their eyes before YOU have love in yours, YOU will be waiting a very long time. Oh, I know you used to have love in your eyes, but your child’s attachment challenged shenanigans drained you to flat, hopeless, and sometimes bitter despair. I’ve been there. I know. And, I don’t judge YOU. I get YOU. I am YOU. I am YOU years down the road.
When my kids were younger, I wish someone had bonked me on my head, like a V8 commercial, so I could have had an earlier attitude adjustment.
So, (if you need one) here is my attempt at a “bonk” on your pre-frontal cortex. If you are a parent who adopted a child, YOU are their best hope of finding the buried treasure of love in that damaged heart (a.k.a. pre-frontal cortex.) Have I mentioned that pre-frontal cortex is my favorite set of words? Of course I have.
Here is the key:
YOU must make a DECISION every day to BE a loving person. Period.
No one loves the shenanigans of traumatized children–the mean, hateful, scary, snide, cunning, unrelenting, mind-boggling, mind-numbing, heart-stopping, shitty crap (clinical term) they dish up. No one is made for that, better suited for that, temperamentally predisposed for that. So, YOU wishing you could give up, throw them back, leave them on a corner, put them back on a plane, or relinquish them is very human, understandable, and evidence of the magnitude of grief YOU feel to the bone. I wish I could hug YOU. I know you need it.
If you consider yourself capable of being a loving person, then be that in the face of adversity. Raising this kind of child is the definition of adversity. There is a payoff. It is down the road. Essentially, your love is “paying it forward.” It will come back to YOU. Gandhi said it best,Be the change you want to see in the world. Be the love you want to see in your child. It starts with YOU.
Shenanigans be damned, but not the heart-broken child or the heart-broken parent.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Love in the face of adversity is the definition of love.
My Hindsight Might Help YOU
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening RelationshipsLove Matters,Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Love Matters Scholarship Fund can use your contributions. Click here for more information.Underarmor helps.
Halloween Bah-Humbug
Halloween gets my Bah-Humbug going.
Where did my playful, sense of fun at any cost, dressed-up fairy-self go? Bah-Humbug. Dysregulation is a stir, so I’ve
strapped on my Nerves of Steel spanx (big NS on the chest) for the rest of the day, and will probably wear it under my clothes throughout the weekend.
From too many cupcakes at school, through too much candy door-to-door, to no candy because “Honey, you are allergic to Red dye #4, Yellow dye#2, Blue dye of any number, and sugar–sorry–here is an organic, gluten free, non GMO, cranberry edamame vegan bar. YOU loved these yesterday.”
Be patient. Have compassion. Expect too much sugar, too much fun, too much cortisol, and a blowout or three. It’s Halloween! (Yay. Bah-humbug.)
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Love Matters Scholarship Fund can use your contributions. Click here for more information.
This is controversial: I allowed my kids to eat their Halloween candy as soon as I inspected it (yep, I’m that paranoid) and throughout the next day. Whatever was left after 24 hours was dumped. Some years they were rolling around with tummy aches, but mostly they ate a little all day at intervals. When I dumped it, they had had their fill and didn’t really pitch much of a fit. To me that was better than trying to spread the sugar out in single pieces FOREVER!
Bed Head Day 5
I have had A DAY. It is 9:04pm and I am just now finding a minute to send YOU a daily missive. Where are my priorities?you might ask.
Uh, not sure. I do care very much about YOU. Still, I must admit to caring about my life a little bit more.
This is day five of my son’s bed head, and day three of school refusal.
A text I read from his confiscated phone by him to some odd anime-named girl in Michigan read, “I hate my “f-ing” mother, so I am making her suffer by not going to school.” Huh, who knew?
Apparently, that comment I made about him showing me apps on the new phone I told him not to download apps on, put him over the edge. He decided in his head that I was mad. He decided in his head that he was grounded. He decided in his head that he would make me suffer by not going to school and staying in bed for 5 days straight.
Truth be told, it was like a 5-day vacation for me. No inane conversations about Minecraft. No stalking for attention. No requests to drive him anywhere. No requests for dinner. No smelly body in the living room. No nothing. It was all kind of peaceful around here. I was basking in this suffering.
Still, he did need to go to school, plus he had an IEP he was supposed to attend this afternoon, so I just did the obvious:You can have your phone back if you get up and go to the IEP with me.
Boom. Five minutes later he was in the car (very stinky, not having showered in 5 days) and ready for me to drive him to the IEP.
We talked later about how he was the one suffering, not me. He was calm and accepted the reality of the situation. I could have offered the phone sooner, or tried to be more soothing sooner, or offered some other reward for getting it together sooner. That probably would have decreased the 5 day “sleep in” protest, but he is about to be 18 and I had a sense there was a better lesson to be taught by waiting it out.
Tonight we had the talk. He listened and shared and learned by the lack of emotional upheaval. That is all I can ask.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
The Attach Place
Center for Strengthening Relationships
Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT
Love Matters Scholarship Fun can use your contributions. Click here for more information.
Wisdom For Adoptive Parents 