Well-Intended Advice

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

“Why did you do that? You’ve taken the only thing he had to care about.”

A friend I haven’t seen in a while is trying to convince me that the hubby and I have made an awful mistake by not allowing our son to go off to college in another state this fall. She faces me as we stand at a reception amidst hundreds of people. I feel that feeling in the pit of my stomach – the one that comes when this wasn’t the response I was expecting.

I try to gather myself back together to explain the “why,” but I can’t seem to make any sense to her. I decide to give up trying to explain to my friend the intricacies of our situation.

“Maybe we did make a mistake. I hope not. We made the best decision we could.”

I disappear into the crowd when someone else appears to talk to my friend. I shuffle around, weaving through the others, searching for my hubby. I want to go home. I feel lost and misunderstood.

Making Tough Decisions

My youngest son, Blake, has been struggling with depression for at least two years now. He’s up all night. He sleeps all day. He has little he looks forward to. He also has OCD, which I thought had become a minor issue until we began therapy as a family recently. Blake was accepted this past school year to his first choice college – a small, extremely demanding school without dorms or a meal plan, where he will have to live in an apartment with at least three others and navigate his way to school and around the city.

Although we celebrated his acceptance to the school, the hubby and I were deeply concerned how Blake would go from struggling with his mood and needing constant support to finish high school to functioning in this challenging environment. We spoke with him repeatedly about how important it was to start new habits now, long before he went away, so that he would be ready to function far away from home. He said he wanted to work on it. As a family we implemented schedules, made sure he was reinforced for positive steps, engaged his school’s and his psychiatrist’s assistance, and utilized tools to help with the whole process.

It didn’t work. Things got worse. We asked Blake to get help from a therapist. He balked at this over and over.

“What good will that do? The only person who can help me is me. It’s a self-discipline problem,” Blake told us.

Finally, we had to tell him that we just couldn’t send him to school this fall. We asked him to take a deferment. It was one of the toughest choices we could have made. We wanted him to go. He claimed it was the only thing that he cared about in life. And, yet, his behavior said it was going to be a disaster. Our new family therapist, a veteran in working with extremely tough cases, wondered why we hadn’t made that decision sooner. Why? We didn’t want to break his heart. And, indeed, when we delivered the news, Blake cried for days.

Giving Advice

When my friend wandered up to me at the event and wanted to know how Blake was, I just figured she’d understand that we’d looked at every other option before deciding to ask him to wait a year. I figured she’d know the amount of soul searching the hubby and I had to do, and how much courage it took to make the decision and stand firm – and then to stand back and watch our son’s devastation as he refused comfort from us.

Instead, she admonished me for having made that decision.

“You took away the only thing that mattered to him. You should have let him go. He might have surprised you and risen to the occasion.”

Sure. He might have. Don’t you think that the wish that kept us from making the decision sooner was that he would show us he could do it?  He’s struggling with mental illness. He can’t force himself to function. If he’d been able to, he would’ve shown us that he could do what was needed when we told him that school next year was on the line. He has work to do first. He has to get healthy.

I know my friend’s advice was well-intended. I know she has my best interests at heart, and Blake’s, too. I also know she had to make a tough decision about sending her own young adult child back to school.

Hearing this unexpected response from my friend has toughened my skin a little bit. It’s made me realize that I have to be firm in the decisions our family makes and recognize that others won’t always understand the in’s and out’s of those decisions. It’s made me recognize how important it is not to judge the decisions others make for their families. And it reminds me the importance of not offering advice unless I’m asked. I love my friend, but her reaction still stings a bit – and it’ll just take time for that to fade. In the meantime, our job is to keep working in therapy and applying what we are learning every day.

Fingers crossed that Blake will be ready to head off to school in Fall of 2018!

“You’ve Hired a Dog Trainer!”

Blake is furious. Yet, he’s remarkably composed at the same time.

“You’ve hired a dog trainer! I won’t take this anymore! What’s the therapist’s phone number?”

I give him the number and Blake calls the new therapist that the hubby and I have been seeing to help us work on getting Blake moving toward functioning. Our boy has been spending all day in bed and all night up doing who knows what. I see him for dinner and before I go to bed. He has few activities. He’s miserable.

Blake gets the therapist’s voice mail system. He leaves a message saying he doesn’t agree with what the therapist has his father and I doing. Blake suggests we all need to meet to talk this over.

Why Hasn’t He Called?

Nearly a week has passed and Blake has grown impatient. The therapist has not responded to his voice message.

“Why hasn’t he called back?” he wonders.

I have my suspicions. Blake rejected therapy when we brought him in to see this therapist. Now the hubby and I are the patient – in a manner of speaking. I imagine the therapist wants to talk to us first. We’ve been slowly implementing increasing demands on Blake. Each comes with an unpleasant consequence that targets his OCD if he does not participate. He’s gotten furious with each new step, but he’s been complying.

When the day of our appointment arrives, Blake demands to come with us.

“You’re welcome to come,” I tell him. “I’m sure the doctor will want to talk with Dad and I first. You might be invited in. You might not.”

“I’m willing to take that risk,” he says.

The Appointment

We arrive at the appointment and the therapist, the hubby, and I talk this over.

“Let’s see what he has to say,” the therapist says. “If he is willing to work with us, then we will have him stay. If he just wants to try to keep things the same, then we know he’s not ready to participate.”

He invites Blake in. Blake begins in a composed way, but he’s angry and he loses his temper. The therapist observes that our family spends a great deal of time going over what the problems are, but getting nowhere. He asks us to agree not to talk about the problems just until our next appointment. The hubby and I agree. Blake is having none of it.

“We have to talk about it! I can’t go a week without finishing this! I can’t! I won’t agree!”

And he storms out.

The hubby and I agree once more with the therapist that he and I will not talk about the problems or about what happened in the session. Blake is outside the building. He refuses to speak at all. He and I take off for home while the hubby goes back to work. Blake is silent for half the 45 minute ride home. Then, he apologizes.

“I’m sorry I exploded in there, Mom.”

“You were upset.”

“I know, but I really didn’t have a good reason to react the way I did. I agree. I’ll wait until next week to talk about things.”

“You’re coming back?”

“Yes. I’ll be there.”

So now Blake is in therapy with us. It’s not something he really wanted, but he wants more control than he’s had since the hubby and I have been going alone. That seems like a good place to start.

The First Step

Recently, after more than three years of Blake refusing treatment for his OCD, and for the depression that ensued later, the hubby and I made the decision to return to treatment. We didn’t give Blake a choice; we just told him we had an appointment with a specialist who might help us all find a way to do things in a better way. He entered the room on his own, but left in a rage after the therapist called us in to plan together (actually, he left when the hubby and I agreed to a plan the therapist had suggested). When Blake refused to return, the hubby and I became the patients, with the therapist directing us on how to shape our son’s behavior.

The first step was for the hubby and I to make a list of what Blake was not doing – where he was falling down in functioning (like sleeping all day and being up all night). We were also to list the things he was doing (for example, serving as a moderator for a special interest website) and, interestingly, what OCD behaviors we saw that he still had. That last part was odd to us. We hadn’t come to therapy to address OCD. We were more concerned that Blake was depressed and was barely carrying out the basic tasks of living. The therapist wasn’t as sure as we were that OCD wasn’t important.

When we showed up with our lists, he took time to review them.

“Let’s start with something Blake can be very successful at, like getting to the dinner table on time,” he suggested. “Now to chose what happens if he doesn’t make it on time. Hmmm… How bothered is he by the dogs?”

“Just a little,” we noted. “He always washes after he touches them, but it’s not like he runs to do it.”

“Okay, how about this? If he is late to the dinner table, you are going to rub a tissue on the dogs. Then you will break it into several pieces and place them on his bedroom floor.”

“What? How is this related to not getting out of bed?” the hubby wanted to know. “Why are we focusing on the dinner table and his dog contamination stuff when we want him to get out of bed?  And how does rubbing a tissue on the dog even relate logically to getting to the table on time?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Then why are we doing it? Shouldn’t the consequence be logically tied to the behavior?”

“Natural and logical consequences haven’t worked with Blake,” he reminded us. “We can’t try the same old thing.”

The hubby wasn’t convinced, but he was willing to give it a try. I was intrigued and kind of confused, but I understood that Blake had been unmoved by the natural consequences that had been coming to him, or any consequences that the hubby and I had employed that were logically connected to his behavior. The therapist wrote the plan down. All that was left was to inform Blake of the plan.

Blake Explodes

Blake was infuriated by this new plan. He didn’t even make it to dinner that night. He went upstairs to his room. He slammed his door and his shutters, and he threw things everywhere. Then he came back downstairs like nothing had happened.

The hubby and I carried out the consequence as directed. We didn’t make a big deal out of it to Blake. We simply quietly wiped a tissue on both our dogs’ fur, then cut it apart into several pieces. Then I went upstairs and placed those pieces on his floor. Blake responded by pouring Nature’s Miracle all over his carpet.

The next night, he showed up to dinner on time. And the next. And the next. And our dinners were actually pleasant. The hubby was still confused about the plan and wrote to our therapist.

“Why again are we using Blake’s OCD as part of getting him to come to dinner? It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Remember, Blake hasn’t been functioning and he hasn’t responded to regular consequences. We are trying to prevent you from having a 35-year-old who hasn’t launched.”

The rest of the week continued without incident. We felt just the littlest bit hopeful. It was a baby step. It wasn’t the big goal we wanted. We could only hope Blake would respond well to what came next.