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Please help me... I feel like I lost my child
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urban gypsy




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 8:06 am
I badly want to participate in this conversation but I'm very confused because I feel like Zehava and Mommyg8 are both correct on this What
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Zehava




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 8:07 am
amother wrote:
These challenges are better off being discussed in support groups.

People who have children who are on the straight path have no idea what it is like to deal with rebellious/otd children.

I’ve gotten comments on threads I’ve written saying if their child had a girl/boy friend they would embrace it and feel no pain or shame.
I’m glad there are people out there who are this naive.

Big difference between personality disorder and otd. Big big difference.
And I’m glad you think that anyone that can accept their children’s right to a self-determined life is naive.
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Zehava




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 8:08 am
If I could
I'd protect you from the sadness in your eyes
Give you courage in a world of compromise
Yes, I would
If I could
I would teach you all the things I've never learned
And I'd help you cross the bridges that I've burned
Yes, I would
If I could
I would try to shield your innocence from time
But the part of life I gave you isn't mine
I've watched you grow, so I could let you go
If I could
I would help you make it through the hungry years
But I know that I could never cry your tears
But I would
If I could
Yes, if I live
In a time and place where you don't want to be
You don't have to walk along this road with me
My yesterday won't have to be your way
If I knew
I would try to change the world I brought you to
And there isn't very much that I could do
But I would
If I could
Oh baby
I just want to protect you
And help my baby through the hungry years
'Cause you're part of me
And if you ever ever ever need
I said a shoulder to cry on
Or just someone to talk to
I'll be there, I'll be there
I didn't change your world
But I would
If I could

~ Celine dion
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Zehava




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 8:10 am
On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
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amother
Ivory


 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 8:17 am
gold21 wrote:
I'm guessing that back in the day p*rn was nudity and nowadays it's explicit s*xual acts? This is my random guess.


Back in the day there were explicit s*xual acts! Just usually they were accompanied by awful stories and soundtracks. Nowadays they generally try less hard to invent stories. 🤣
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urban gypsy




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 8:32 am
Zehava wrote:
Big difference between personality disorder and otd. Big big difference.
And I’m glad you think that anyone that can accept their children’s right to a self-determined life is naive.


I agree with you on this. I see a big mess here conflating OTD, personality disorders, and [filth], which are three distinctly different things. It drives me nuts when people automatically believe that if a child is "OTD" (whatever that may mean in a given family) the only explanation can be that the child is "broken" in some way.

Regarding p*rn, I want people to stop conflating that with age-appropriate s*xual curiosity, a lifestyle choice, or irreligiousity. Today's p*rn is a hardcore assault on normal neural development and s-xual behaviour. It's the equivalent of pouring battery acid directly on your brain. I try to teach my children that their are some standards of behaviour that are universally common to all moral and thinking people. P*rn is not good for anyone, it has nothing to do with religion or "lifestyle choices."

Thanks for the Kahlil Gibran poem, what a lovely concept. I'm looking forward to seeing myself as a stable bow Heart
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amother
Cobalt


 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 8:41 am
urban gypsy wrote:
I badly want to participate in this conversation but I'm very confused because I feel like Zehava and Mommyg8 are both correct on this What



In theory I would have agreed with Zehava but being that all the mothers going through the situation themselves don't seem to agree with Zehava and don't even find her to be helpful, I'm concluding that she is wrong when it comes to the real world.
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Zehava




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 9:05 am
amother wrote:
In theory I would have agreed with Zehava but being that all the mothers going through the situation themselves don't seem to agree with Zehava and don't even find her to be helpful, I'm concluding that she is wrong when it comes to the real world.

Wow I find this statement so sad
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yksraya




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 9:11 am
amother wrote:
In theory I would have agreed with Zehava but being that all the mothers going through the situation themselves don't seem to agree with Zehava and don't even find her to be helpful, I'm concluding that she is wrong when it comes to the real world.

When it comes to the real world, how many parents are in denial? How many parents blame the child instead of searching for the reason, or admitting that they did something wrong?

Yes, some children simply go OTD without their being a real reasons. But that is a small percentage. The majority of children, especially that young go OTD because they went through challenging times.
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urban gypsy




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 9:12 am
amother wrote:
In theory I would have agreed with Zehava but being that the mothers going through the situation don't seem to agree with Zehava or finds her to be helpful I'm concluding that she is incorrect in the real world.


You would be surprised how deeply and intensely people are resistant to truth.

I think people are confused about what unconditional acceptance means. I am just learning about this myself and am trying to unlearn years of conditioning on this.

Perhaps the mothers who disagree with Zehava have never been unconditionally accepted themselves and are having trouble understanding what it entails and how to do it.

Unconditional acceptance involves being grounded in reality, which lives only in the present moment and nowhere else. That means releasing your attachment to things that happened in the past, and not being ruled by your fears for the future. It means seeing your child, actually seeing who they are inside, and accepting reality, not fighting it. Fighting will get you nowhere. Acceptance in the first crack in the facade of projection, delusion, and denial. The crack where the light gets in.

Unconditional acceptance of others goes hand-in-hand with establishing boundaries for yourself. You can't have one without the other, they are two sides of the same coin. You also have to unconditionally accept yourself before you can accept others. You can go on and on about how much you "love" your OTD child but acceptance is the scaffolding that will make the love stick. Otherwise it won't "work" the way you hope it would. Getting your love to "work" is not the point of love.

I grew up with an incredibly loving, supportive, and attentive mother who overcame great difficulties to give my brother and I a stable and happy childhood. My brother grew up to become a self-destructive OTD drug addict and criminal, and by all accounts I grew up to be a frum, happy and productive mother of three. Now I'm divorced from an abusive husband and in therapy trying to put the pieces of my self back together. At the age of 33 I am just now learning about what unconditional acceptance is. My mother gave me many many gifts but that was not one of them.

So, the mothers who are going through the situation who don't find Zehava helpful likely haven't tried what she is suggesting and probably don't understand what she means or how to start. I sense that she is speaking fundamental truths borne from great pain and wisdom and you all would do well to listen to her.
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amother
Cobalt


 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 9:46 am
urban gypsy wrote:
You would be surprised how deeply and intensely people are resistant to truth.

snip

So, the mothers who are going through the situation who don't find Zehava helpful likely haven't tried what she is suggesting and probably don't understand what she means or how to start. I sense that she is speaking fundamental truths borne from great pain and wisdom and you all would do well to listen to her.



It seems to me like Zehava is the one who is being deeply and intensely resistant to truth.

If after all Zehava's posts the mothers who are going through the situation still can't understand what she means or how to start then she may as well stop posting. No one is understanding her anyway.

The great pain of all the mothers in the situation provides a lot more wisdom than someone who isn't. If they are all rejecting a piece of advice as unhelpful it is very unlikely that they all wrong and just trying to convince themselves not to take beneficial advice for some alleged motive.
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urban gypsy




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 9:53 am
amother wrote:
It seems to me like Zehava is the one who is being deeply and intensely resistant to truth.

If after all Zehava's post the mothers who are going through the situation still can't understand what she means or how to start then she may as well stop posting. No one is understanding her anyway.

The great pain of all the mothers in the situation provides a lot more wisdom than someone who isn't. If they are all rejecting a piece of advice as unhelpful it is very unlikely that they all wrong and just trying to convince themselves not to take advice that would help them.


LOL Zehava isn't the originator of this concept, nor is she obligated as the only person on earth qualified to educate people about it! Sounds like you a bit of a lemming lacking in critical thinking skills! Come to think of it, we should all really stop posting because I doubt anyone has ever been convinced of anything from an anonymous forum posting...
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amother
Cobalt


 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 10:01 am
urban gypsy wrote:
LOL Zehava isn't the originator of this concept, nor is she obligated as the only person on earth qualified to educate people about it! Sounds like you a bit of a lemming lacking in critical thinking skills! Come to think of it, we should all really stop posting because I doubt anyone has ever been convinced of anything from an anonymous forum posting...



Saying that I am a lemming lacking in critical thinking skills is not going to convince me of anything.

Another side question I had reading this thread was why do the people preaching unconditional acceptance, seem so much quicker to insult and attack those who don't agree with them?

How do they suddenly drop that tendency when they have a defiant teenager spitting in their faces?
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urban gypsy




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 10:11 am
amother wrote:
Saying that I am a lemming lacking in critical thinking skills is not going to convince me of anything.

Another side question I had reading this thread was why do the people preaching unconditional acceptance seem much quicker to insult and attack those who don't agree with them?

How do they suddenly drop that tendency when they have a defiant teenager spitting in their faces?


I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I called you a lemming because you are basing your beliefs on tallying up a number of likely uninformed postings from an anonymous forum, instead of researching for yourself a well-known and established tenet of psychotherapy.

I don't think the mothers rejecting the concept of unconditional acceptance as unhelpful are doing it for an ulterior motive. I think that they, and you, don't understand what it is, and are unwilling to learn about it due to their upbringing, social conditioning, ignorance and/or mental blocks.

I'm just sharing information. Feel free to believe what you like. Let's agree to disagree. You continue with your parenting approach, and I'll stick to mine.
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amother
Copper


 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 10:30 am
This discussion reminds me of the old parable of the three blind men describing a elephant.

We are not all talking about the same thing here, and worse, there is no agreed upon definition of the terms being used.

Firstly, everyone has a very different picture in their head about the type of child being discussed here.

1. Some are discussing kids who are fully functional and reasonable, yet don't want to be frum in the same way as their parents. They go to school, have stable friendships, are basically capable of heeding the parent/child relationship despite their struggles with rejecting the lifestyle. Maybe they'll stay that way and be non- religious adults, and maybe they'll sit around one day and abashedly joke with their friends about what awful teens they once were. When posters here speak in their smug, confident terms about how they would lay down the law, and refuse to tolerate misbehavior, they are basically saying "This is the only type of kid I can imagine, because I have never encountered a truly struggling child".

2. Others are discussing kids who are struggling and behaviorally challenging, in ways that have nothing to do with Judaism (ie, drug use, promiscuity) and not being frum is just one additional behavior. Why? depression, anxiety disorders, adhd, ptsd, and a million other possibilities. Parents who have children going through this chuckle bitterly to themselves when parents of "regular" kids say things like "oh, I'd never tolerate that" or "my kid knows she couldn't get away with that". Because these kids will climb out windows if you lock the doors, the concept of curfew is a joke because they just might decide not to come home at all for 2 or 3 days. I am speaking from experience, and no. This is NOT by any means always the result of s-xual abuse or a dysfunctional home.

3. There are kids who have mental illnesses or personality disorders that go way beyond the issues of the kids in #2. This is a different thing altogether.

No way to have a discussion about the merits of different interventions and management styles without a very clear picture of the type of child being discussed.
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Zehava




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 12:21 pm
amother wrote:
This discussion reminds me of the old parable of the three blind men describing a elephant.

We are not all talking about the same thing here, and worse, there is no agreed upon definition of the terms being used.

Firstly, everyone has a very different picture in their head about the type of child being discussed here.

1. Some are discussing kids who are fully functional and reasonable, yet don't want to be frum in the same way as their parents. They go to school, have stable friendships, are basically capable of heeding the parent/child relationship despite their struggles with rejecting the lifestyle. Maybe they'll stay that way and be non- religious adults, and maybe they'll sit around one day and abashedly joke with their friends about what awful teens they once were. When posters here speak in their smug, confident terms about how they would lay down the law, and refuse to tolerate misbehavior, they are basically saying "This is the only type of kid I can imagine, because I have never encountered a truly struggling child".

2. Others are discussing kids who are struggling and behaviorally challenging, in ways that have nothing to do with Judaism (ie, drug use, promiscuity) and not being frum is just one additional behavior. Why? depression, anxiety disorders, adhd, ptsd, and a million other possibilities. Parents who have children going through this chuckle bitterly to themselves when parents of "regular" kids say things like "oh, I'd never tolerate that" or "my kid knows she couldn't get away with that". Because these kids will climb out windows if you lock the doors, the concept of curfew is a joke because they just might decide not to come home at all for 2 or 3 days. I am speaking from experience, and no. This is NOT by any means always the result of s-xual abuse or a dysfunctional home.

3. There are kids who have mental illnesses or personality disorders that go way beyond the issues of the kids in #2. This is a different thing altogether.

No way to have a discussion about the merits of different interventions and management styles without a very clear picture of the type of child being discussed.

If only it would be this clear cut. It can be. If we learn to accept our children the way that they are.
But since we don’t, an innocent 1 child will so many time slide into 2. Because the more they try to individuate, the more the parents lay down the law and it turns into a power struggle. The parent as the adult should know when to stop and take a good hard look at their child, and decide if they are willing to destroy the relationship and their child in the process all in the name of laying down the law.
Once there is a rupture in the relationship, once that trust is broken, once you let your child know that he is bad and wrong and defective, he will have nothing to lose. He will climb out windows. He will want to drug himself to numb the pain. He will want to escape and disappear. And this is why we see so little of number one. Because parents can’t let go.
Once upon a time when I was engaged I called the Yitty Leibel helpline to ask for advice. There was a rabbi on the line, I think he was also a therapist, I don’t know his name, he told me this.
“I always tell people, god gives us children and we destroy them.”
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urban gypsy




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 12:25 pm
I think there is a difference between "laying down the law" and setting rules and boundaries. It can be done in a healthy and non shaming manner.

I also think that some children are born more like group 1 and some more like group 2 regardless of their parents.... Nature versus nurture etc etc
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Zehava




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 12:30 pm
urban gypsy wrote:
I think there is a difference between "laying down the law" and setting rules and boundaries. It can be done in a healthy and non shaming manner.

I also think that some children are born more like group 1 and some more like group 2 regardless of their parents.... Nature versus nurture etc etc

Absolutely. Boundaries are good, when they come from a place of love and acceptance of who the child IS. God it’s impossible for some people to separate the child from the behavior.
And yes there are definitely some group 2 with behavioral difficulties. But we’re seeing so little from group 1 because most parents mess up and before they know it they pushed the kid into group 2. Even the avi fishoff parents only go to home when the behavior gets extreme and uncontrollable. That’s when they decide to let go and surrender as a last ditch effort to save their kid.
But so much can be prevented if they never messed things up to begin with.
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amother
Copper


 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 12:35 pm
I wanted to add one more thing, regarding defining our terms.

Everybody is using the term "unconditional acceptance" not only without describing the type of kid we are applying it to, but also with completely different definitions of the term itself.

This term is incredibly vague, and needs to be defined in order to have any sort of intelligent discussion.

1. What exactly is being accepted? A different hashkafa? A completely secular lifestyle? A heroin addiction?

2. What does acceptance entail? Being involved, loving, and emotionally generous with your child despite these differences? Experiencing your pain quietly, so as not to alienate your child in order to preserve the relationship? Actually not caring anymore that your child has chosen a different way of life? Allowing this different lifestyle to be expressed openly in your home or in front of younger siblings?

The practical application of "accepting" lies along a vast spectrum.

As the mom of a teen who fell into group 2 of my description above, I can be specific within my own experiences and reality.

We all assume that our child will basically follow our rules. Unfortunately, this is not the case with the type 2 child I described above. But we start off like other parents, laying down the law with various methods: communication and compromise, no-nonsense strictness, consequences and punishments, etc. Yeah, trust me, we thought of it too. Then come the therapists and doctors, all the types of outside interventions one might imagine.

But ultimately, some parents are faced with teens who are thoroughly defiant and uncompliant. Grounding means nothing, because as our psychiatrist explained to us, that sort of thing is completely dependant upon the existence of the typical child's innate need and desire to maintain the parent/child bond and hierarchy. If that is not there, because of the child's issues, whatever they may be, short of house arrest under literal lock and key (yes, we tried that initially out of pure fear for our child's life, and no, it's not sustainable for any length of time), you have NO power whatsoever.

So in this type of case, when we use the term unconditional acceptance, it is basically going into disaster mode because you have NO choice. All you have left is the commitment to maintaining a solid and close and trusting and loving relationship with this struggling teen. It goes against everything that comes naturally to a parent. It robs you of your faith, and your soul, and changes the way the world and everybody in it appears to you.

But you have 2 choices:
1. Hold on to that child by accepting anything humanly acceptable (their clothing, their friends, their lack of frumkeit), thereby preserving a relationship so that you can still influence them and keep them as safe as possible, OR
2. Double down on attempted punishments and recriminations, maintaining a relationship of anger and negativity.

Neither will stop the behavior. But the first will offer the child an outlet and a haven and a promise of future influence and trust. It will allow you to pull a very occasional trump card, to get them to go to therapy, or to request that they keep you informed of where they are at 2 am, or to stipulate that while they are free to be mechallel shabbos privately in their rooms or out of the house (they will anyway!), you ask that they do not do so in any way in front of their siblings. (And no, I'm not in denial, the siblings will still eventually know that they are not shomer shabbos).

What parents of more "typically" misbehaving children don't understand, is that if you "lay down the law" or "institute consequences" and it WORKS, then we are not talking about the same type of child at all.
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amother
Copper


 

Post Wed, Mar 27 2019, 12:38 pm
Zehava wrote:
If only it would be this clear cut. It can be. If we learn to accept our children the way that they are.
But since we don’t, an innocent 1 child will so many time slide into 2. Because the more they try to individuate, the more the parents lay down the law and it turns into a power struggle. The parent as the adult should know when to stop and take a good hard look at their child, and decide if they are willing to destroy the relationship and their child in the process all in the name of laying down the law.
Once there is a rupture in the relationship, once that trust is broken, once you let your child know that he is bad and wrong and defective, he will have nothing to lose. He will climb out windows. He will want to drug himself to numb the pain. He will want to escape and disappear. And this is why we see so little of number one. Because parents can’t let go.
Once upon a time when I was engaged I called the Yitty Leibel helpline to ask for advice. There was a rabbi on the line, I think he was also a therapist, I don’t know his name, he told me this.
“I always tell people, god gives us children and we destroy them.”


I do agree with you.
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