The Princess and I had family therapy yesterday
morning. It wasn’t fun. This is the second session in a row she has
refused to participate. She just sits
there, with her arms folded, and won’t say anything other than, “I don’t know,”
or “I don’t want to talk about it.”
There’s a lot going on, but for her, if she doesn’t think about it, then
it’s not really happening. For her, if
she doesn’t deal with it, she doesn’t have to feel it. For her, those big feelings are still there
whether she wants to feel them or not. So,
because she will not deal with “it,” she is easily triggered and then explodes,
(like she did at the zoo), or she’s constantly talking, bouncing off the walls,
and using her baby voice. You see, she
MUST be in control. If she lets go, if
her control
goes, then there’s no telling what feelings will come to the service! She’s crazy scared of what those things REALLY
feel like. The fear is HUGE!
There is nothing we can do to MAKE her participate in
therapy or in other community based services.
Nothing. We can be there. We can offer her support and help, but if she
doesn’t want to participate, we’re (therapist, social worker, SRS case manager,
parents) just spinning our wheels. She’s
just not ready for talk therapy right now.
She’s 13 and has the shape of a young woman, but she is still about as emotionally
capable as a preschooler. So, backwards
we go. In therapy, we’ll deal with the
preschooler.
After the $140 waste of time yesterday morning, the Princess’
therapist called to talk with me privately.
We had two choices: quit for now
(not an option to me) or revert back to play therapy with puppets, sand trays, play
dough, and other toys (like you’d use with a much younger child). I asked the therapist to try taking her backwards
and working with her as though she were in preschool. When she started therapy two years ago, these
are the kinds of tools we used in our attachment therapy. She responded well then. She revealed her thoughts and feelings
through play and responded well to receiving ideas for helping her to deal with
situations. So now, in going back there,
I am hoping she responds well again.
Things have been so hard with her the last several months. I cannot imagine her (nor I) not
having our therapist and HCBS (home & community-based services). I don’t want to imagine it. (I know
some of you, dear readers, do not have a mental health facility near you like
we do. Please forgive my whining. I know a lot of you do this on your own. I am a wuss, and God knew that when He
plunked us down here. Believe it or not,
I just “lucked into” finding our therapist.
I didn’t even know we had a MH facility in our community when we moved
here.)
When I picked The Princess up after school yesterday, I told
her the therapist called me, and that we talked about adding a community-based
service (someone who’d work with The Princess in the community and talk with
her about family and social skills). We
also talked about the need to cooperate and work in therapy. I
explained we’d be going back to doing play therapy more so than talk therapy,
but that she needed to do the work of dealing
with the big feelings that have been bubbling up inside of her. I did not tell her about the possibility of
being “fired” from therapy for not cooperating.
She would seize CONTROL of THAT like a drowning man grabbing a life
ring! I did tell her if she did not
cooperate, we would be facing a lot more years of therapy and interventions
than we could begin to imagine. (I did
not elaborate.)
The Princess is not afraid of me, nor of her therapist. That’s not where her need for control
rests. She trusts us. The person she doesn’t trust is herself. She doesn’t trust she’s strong enough to
handle those big feelings that are festering under the surface. She’s afraid of peeling off the emotional
scab and letting whatever poison out that is there, so the healing can
begin. Alas, we plod on. We try to help her feel safe enough to “go
there,” assuring her that developing coping tools now, while she’s young, will
help her out much more effectively than waiting till she’s older to deal with
things and does not have us “right there” to catch her, and help her back up.
That’s what therapeutic parenting is, you know. Plodding on.
Trauma sucks. Big
time.
