Posted by fallsfall on January 4, 2005, at 7:21:32
This is very long...
I am having a problem with my 16 year old daughter (still). 6 more tardies before late January and she will lose credit for the US History course (a semester course) she has been taking. She is VERY able to be late 6 times in the next couple of weeks. We have tried everything. I have screamed, I have not screamed. I have woken her up earlier, I have sent her to bed earlier. I have taken her car away. Two different therapists have been helping with this one (mine, and one she and I saw together).
Friday my therapist said "What you are doing isn't working. So you need to try something else". I had driven her to school (and got her there on time) for the previous 9 school days. She was tardy to History (1st period) 6 of those days. I had to agree. He suggested (in an uncharacteristicly directive way) that I had done what I could and that this was her problem now. He wanted me to be "flexible" and change course (this is very hard for me...). So I told her she was in danger of losing credit for History, but that I had done what I could (and what was my responsibility) and the rest was up to her. She said "Do you think I *want* to be late for class??" I said "Yes, I do".
Well, that set me off. It reminded me too much of when my therapist said "You *want* to stay depressed." I told him that I didn't, but I didn't know how to "fix" it. All he would say was that I must want to stay depressed, or I would stop being so depressed. I deal really poorly with not understanding something (anything). I want *so* badly to do the "right" thing, but if I don't know what the "right" thing is, how can I do it? The ultimate terror for me is to know that I'm failing at something, ask for help (which is incredibly hard for me), and then be refused the help.
What if I'm doing that to my daughter? So I wrote her a long email trying to explain what unconscious motivation is. So that if she was feeling the frustration and abandonment that I've felt that she would know she could come to me and I would help her. My friends suggested that maybe I shouldn't send it to her - that it was too much like a Psychology lecture.
So I talked about this in therapy yesterday, along with a dream I had about "bad things happening to a friend on my watch". I wasn't talking about my daughter or my friend. I was talking about me - how alone and unsupported I feel in my current struggle (which is unrelated to my daughter). How abandoned I felt when he said "You must *want* to be depressed".
Fortunately, talking about my daughter was a way to talk about *my* issues, but be a little removed from them. He said that my assessment that she was either consciously being late ("I'll show Mom that she can't control me - she can get me to school on time, but I can *still* be late for class!"), or that there was some unconscious motivation (rebellion against my parents' mandate for good school performance) was too "black and white". I was able to convince him that I really didn't understand the grey, and he tried to explain it to me with this metaphor: She is driving on a three lane highway - conscious motivations are on one side, unconscious on the other, but there is grey area (where the motivations are nearly or just barely conscious) in the middle. She is swerving between the three lanes.
I know that I am trying to understand this grey area for myself by understanding my daughter. It is too painful to actually work on trying to understand myself.
I just barely understand the unconscious part. Can anyone help explain this grey area to me?
poster:fallsfall
thread:437567
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20041228/msgs/437567.html