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Our 27 year old son finished college after 7+ years of quitting, faking and finally getting serious. He came home 4 months ago, took a temporary job before Christmas and is now asleep for the second day in a row. I suspect he may be bulimic as he goes through these vomiting/nausea spells. He refuses treatment, he lies to us on occasion, and seems completely unmotivated.
My husband and I have been enablers of the highest order. I fit all of Allison’s categories but I am finished. AlAnon has given me courage over the years and I do wish there were a SANITY group in NYC where we live.
I want to deliver an ultimatum: get treatment or move out although I am conflicted about that. I really don’t think that we can afford more treatment for him (residential for 17 months while in high school). He is a brilliant handsome charming guy with some major psychological issues. Other guys his age have jobs, girl friends, and their own apts. What’s wrong with our picture? We are, obviously, I am praying for guidance, I am turning this over to God, and I am trying very hard to take good care of myself (although my sleep has been bad lately).
Well, I have said it. Wish me good luck, courage and the ability to change this enabling behavior/thinking!
Oh Ann, I feel for you, and I know only too well what you are feeling! When your son came home four months ago was there a WRITTEN ACTION PLAN in place that he had to agree to follow? He’s 27 years old, not a child, and your “job” isn’t to supervise him or wake him up or make sure he does “such-and-such.” If he is sick (physically or mentally) and is refusing help, you can refuse to allow him to remain in your home. Is that a hard line to tow? YES! But, who is in charge? Whose home is this? Who is paying the bills? Who is the rational adult in the scenario?
Alas, we are not always rational when it come to our kids. We are responding emotionally and that will not help.
Please forgive me for the hard line I am taking. Of course there are individual situations and I am not a therapist and I’m not giving you professional advice. But I am a mother who has walked this journey. Please read my response to Melinda.
Delivering an “ultimatum” is critical. However, make sure you think it out, WRITE it out, pray about it and when you deliver it, be prepared to accept the consequences and to follow through with what you and your husband have outlined. Learning how to love our adult children with open arms is very hard, especially when they exhibit a clear distaste or motivation for being responsible for their own lives.
On that note, if you feel your son in mentally or psychologically incapable of caring for himself there are steps you can take to become his legal guardian and thus force him into some type of acceptable treatment program or hospitalization….only you know if that is the case. However, in most instances that isn’t the case. In most instances these adult children are comfortable in their safety net existences….and only when it becomes uncomfortable is there a glimmer of hope that things will change.
How “uncomfortable” are we willing to make it? How uncomfortable do we think God wants to make it for them AND FOR US to teach us the life lessons He wants us to learn?
Pray for God to give you clear discernment for the path He wants you to take and for the doors to open to help you and your husband make choices that will be pleasing to God and will help your son. Sometimes, (often) “helping” looks far different than we ever imagined.
I’ll be praying for you, and if anyone is reading this who can share some insight please post your comment.
God be with you and your husband and your son.
I just finished SB with your Adult Children late last night. I think I read this book in record time. We are a new blended family with SEVEN adult children. The youngest is a Senior in High School (mine from a previous marriage) and is the only one still at home. He is back and forth between his father and I. The other six, who no longer live at home, but have no real direction in life are going nowhere and live in “crisis mode”. We are raising our only grandchild who is three, after being taken by CPS, my daughter is five months pregnant, and another son and his girlfriend are expecting as well.
Before I’d even heard of your book, we had a crisis come up with my husband’s two adult daughters. We decided we’d had enough of their verbal abuse and disrespect. We tried to talk to them and explain their actions and comments were no longer going to be tolerated. Things had escalated in short order to the point the we asked the girls not to call us anymore or come over. That’s when I went “shopping” online for some much needed help! I decided to give your book a try. Allison, I attacked your book with a pen and highlighter as though I’d was taking a final exam at the end! Your words seemed to jump off the page at me. You put into words what I had been thinking about our situation(s). But…most of all I felt like I FINALLY had some direction about how to proceed into the future. I can’t thank you enough for giving us some wisdom about how to handle the situation with our daughters. In addition, there seems to be four more scenarios to be addressed and handled. Each one unique to that child. This is going to be quite an undertaking for us to do not just once, but SEVERAL more times! With your specific guidance and instructions, I think it’s a task that we can actually now manage.
Thank you SO MUCH! I’m sure you’ll be hearing from me again. 🙂
Tracy,
I was just wondering how things are going?
We have 2 adult children (son and daughter) living at home and one daughter, our oldest, who owns her own home. Our son moved back home and works for us. He has since high school. The plan is for him to take over the business some day. He’s a hard worker and has complete respect for us. He lives in our garage, which is finished off. Our youngest daughter and her 3 year old son live with us. She split up with her husband. Her ex is Japanese and moved back to Japan. He was a horrible husband and father (seriously not making excuses here). They lived with us for about a year. Our daughter worked nights and he would be here with the baby (he didn’t work). He would put our grandson in his room with the gate closed and go in his room on the computer (making music, he’s a musician) with his headset on and leave the baby there all night. He wouldn’t change his diaper, poor kid would be soaked. Many occasions I would say to him, his diaper is full (waiting for a response but simply getting a dear in the headlight look) and I would ask “do you want me to change him? (hoping for an answer of “thank you for telling me I’ll do it” but he would say yes. I never mind changing his diaper just felt his father should do it.
He left them and went back to Japan and missed his son’s first birthday. His excuse was he didn’t speak good enough English so he couldn’t get a job
My daughter left a couple months later with the baby to go there. He still didn’t work. They weren’t there too long about 2 or 3 months and they moved back (all 3 of them).
After a while they moved out. Rented our condo and paid rent every month. . I was hopeful. But my daughter was still working nights and he still wasn’t. We gave him a job at our company. All the while all they did was fight. His fathering skills didn’t get better, they got worse completely ignoring him with no one there to watch out for the baby. He was mentally abusive to our daughter, which started when she was pregnant and he would constantly tell her how fat and ugly she was. Later he told her if she didn’t lose weight he wouldn’t sleep with her he would find it from someone else. This went on for another year. Then, about a week after our grandson’s birthday he went back to Japan and has been there ever since.
Which brings me to my daughter, she moved back home after that for support. It was going good. She had a good job, a family that supports her and found a really nice guy who is also a single dad. Things were going great. She was so incredibly happy, probably for the first time in her life. I can honestly say I have never seen her that happy before. Her life was on track. Her son was happy. He started calling her boyfriend daddy. It’s a natural thing to happen. He was 2 and heard the little girl calling him daddy so he followed suit. I really thought this was the one. A little over a year later she went off the deep end. Split it off with him (says he was being horrible to her). We’ve never witnessed that. There was an incident in which they got in a bad fight and her story has changed. The key here is she has a bad habit of lying, a LOT. They broke up, but still hung out. She told us she wanted to eventually be with him but needed him to change and realize what he did. We believed her but honestly she was just stringing him along. She now has to be in control of everything and everyone and will manipulate us all. When she doesn’t get her way she threatens to send our grandchild to live with his father. We feel like we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. We don’t want to continue to enable her but we are afraid that she will send our grandson to live with his dad in Japan. And once she does that, good luck getting him back. I am at my wit’s end. Right after he was born I was diagnosed with cancer. I went through treatment and have been cancer free for 3 years. My daughter has surgery next Friday (She told me she had a tumor) and planned it so I could take her and be home with her. Yesterday she told me she didn’t want me taking her, her friend was going to because it was none of my business what was wrong with her. We weren’t fighting or anything. We were at work and just out of the blue she said that. I was shocked. It’s another form of her manipulation. She has to be in control. It’s just crazy. You would think we were estranged the way she acts but weren’t not. She’ll be upset about something and cry and I’ll hug her. I’m just so stressed out and I know it isn’t good for my health and
My heart is aching for you, and for your relationship with your daughter and grandchild. It isn’t easy to know what to say or even how to say it when things have gone so wrong. That’s why the “Y” in SANITY is so critical. Especially now. Yielding our adult children to God is the only thing we can do when they are old enough to be making their own choices…even if the choices they make are detrimental to their health. You’ve written a great deal about your daughter and what she is and isn’t doing, and I can’t help but wonder what your choices have been every step of the way. Forgive me if that sounds harsh, I don’t mean it to sound that way, please remember that I have walked in your shoes and I know how caught up we can get in the drama, chaos and crisis of our kids lives. But we cant change them or the choices they are making…we can only change how we respond to them.
When it comes to our grandchildren we are so torn in knowing what to do, and it’s important to put a child’s safety above all else. If you fear your grandchild is in danger, you must take the legal steps to protect her, and I would advise you to pray hard about this and contact social services to inquire about your rights in your state.
I wish there was a succinct answer to this dilemma, but alas there is not. What we must do is pray for wisdom and discernment to make healthy God-honoring choices. We will soon be launching an online SANITY support forum where you can talk with other parents. In the mean time, I encourage you to keep reading Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children and applying the 6-Steps to SANITY to your life.
I’m praying for you.
Allison