Some certain family counseling techniques are driving me nuts. Specifically family counseling that advocates negotiation and explanation to find a middle ground.
Sounds good. Sounds reasonable.
BUT it's not appropriate for families with acting out kids. Many parents with acting out kids have been over-generous. Often with the idea that if their child just had THIS or THAT, they would be happy. Or pressure from sibs or the outside community that they must have a cellphone, car, music player, expensive shoes, lotsa money, etc etc.
But these families are experiencing substance abuse, domestic violence, civil and criminal charges, school failure, violence, intimidation, etc etc. Our group helps these families to set reasonable boundaries to regain control of their home and their own lives. This translates into stability for the acting out family member.
Plus (you would think that I wouldn't even have to say this but...)you can't work rationally with a drug user.
Parents also learn that talk doesn't matter, actions do. The family member may promise all kinds of things. Over and over. Sign behavior contracts, too. All to no avail. Just don't even bother with this.
Negotiation is almost synonymous with 'tit for tat'. You do this thing (go to school, whatever) and I will do this thing that you want. Or teen wants this and you say 'you can do that if you do this". This approach almost universally fails with acting out kids and usually just escalates into argument or worse. Better to set your own boundary that you can live with and the teen can make their own decisions.
So enter a family counselor who immediately recognize that the family member (usually a teen), has issues about entitlements. The parent has finally learned not to cave into emotional blackmail, threats and intimidation. They've realized that their generous behavior has enabled the very things they wanted to avoid.
This counselor now elicits the demands of the teen and tries to get the parent to give in if the teen will promise to do this or that. All the way, blaming the parent for being too rigid and unreasonable. "Couldn't you give back that Itouch if Janey does her homework for the whole week?
Never mind that the event that set up this counseling was the police coming to the hospital for a possible involuntary admit in the middle of the night after the teen has locked the parents out of their house, trashed the den, broke the lock on the file cabinet when her stolen keys didn't work, stolen their passports and financial records and refuses to give them back, set CPS on them the previous week terrifying them, has pot in her purse. The parents took away the Itouch (that they know now that they never should have purchased) because the local gang members have taken it to download pornography and set up drug deals. etc etc
And the counselor who is seeing this family for the first time at 2am and wants the parent to be more sensitive and listen to the child's concerns. Couldn't they give in? What would the child have to do to regain their privileges? Be reasonable here.
The parent hates to look bad here but they CANNOT believe what they are hearing.
This has happened to at least two Parent Group families in the past week.
?????????
Image used without permission from Fresh Attitude a substance abuse center in Toledo OH.
Another note...gotta blame myself on this one. Just this morning I said to Dennis, this little .mp3 player I have works great to listen to library books. I'm really happy with it. You guessed it, the .mp3 player immediately stopped working and the replacement that Dennis bought me today from Fry's does NOT work with the DRM interface with the library :(
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