Need insight into minor child behaviors and solutions

My daughter is 16 years old and has been diagnosed with many things; some diagnoses she embraces and some she rejects. She is not a diagnosis, but a cluster of symptoms, many of which resemble traits of Borderline Personality Disorder.

She has severe social anxiety and had been diagnosed with ADHD. These are labels she embraces. Everything else she does not.

Living with her is like hell on earth for me. She has many triggers that seem hairline. She is reactive and extremely punitive. She says she has PTSD because I abused her and am toxic. I have dug deep into my heart, I have dug deep in therapy. I begged for an answer for what is wrong with me, so I can fix it. But professionals and friends have said to me in essence that I should not allow someone to project their issues onto me and that I am not the provocateur. She needs to adjust her perspective or we won't be able to have a health productive relationship that is solution oriented. It's about narratives. I believe this, but what other thing could it also be.

My daughter has cut herself. She breaks things. She has no boundaries. If you try to set boundaries, she gets very reactive. She often threatens me with Hobbsiean choices. She threatens to kill herself or me. She's assaulted me in the past with injuries severe enough that I needed a CAT scan. She was hospitalized once, but they didn't keep her long enough to treat her properly. The entire affair and the aftermath was mismanaged by the mental health system so she refuses to get help, won't do therapy and I can't make her attend. She won't do it. What that means for me is that the only thing I can do is change myself. Everything I have done to that end, hasn't helped. She is unwilling to give an inch.

At the moment, she has run away from home. I know she is safely with a friend but I don't know where exactly. I have told her that I am legally obliged to call the cops on her. I feel relief that she isn't at home and I'm not under constant siege for her unpredictable behavior.

She wants me to admit to abusing her and all kinds of things that an average person would not consider abusive. Her latest is being asked to be accountable to using other people's possessions without their consent. Her justification: Well I needed it. My justification: It's not yours, it's mine and I needed it when you had it without my permission.

I haven't been a perfect parent but no one is. There were times when I didn't have the emotional bandwidth to meet her needs. That's abuse from her perspective. She felt unseen, unheard and neglected. And perhaps she needed more than the average child. Either way, I did my best with the tools I had at the time. Her demands as a baby seemed to be pervasive and never ending. She was never satisfied and always needed more. Not only did I have very little help but obviously not well suited for helicopter parenting.

But I was always there, every school play, every doctor's appointment, every weekend taking her somewhere fun for her, every parent conference. i did the best I could. What I wasn't? I wasn't a parent who said yes to a lot of spending, because I didn't have it. That was abusive to her because she was deprived of having things she thought she deserved. The reality is, she had more than many kids had.

She tells me it doesn't matter what perspective I have on any time or event. All it matters is how she perceives it and that I should care about that. I do care about it even if I don't understand how one would interpret things the way she has. But, there is no wiggle room here. It's black and white. Any grey, any ambiguity or any task that is not executed perfectly, in her eyes is a big fail and proof that I don't love her and that I am toxic. And of course, success criteria is something fuzzy that she can't even define herself, but she wants me to understand it, and show it to her. So I am tasked at doing things, apologizing for, for things she can't even articulate herself.

So my dilemma:
The mental health system failed her. She didn't get the care she needed and now she won't go to therapy.
Hospitalization did nothing but drop her back in my lap and worsen her behavior. She's very good at convincing people that she isn't dangerous to herself or others because she knows what to say to get out of being held in an institution.
She lives with me and threatens to hurt me or herself almost every day. She has done it in front of me and to me. Some of the things she has done to me can be sadistic. Example: Not letting me use the only bathroom we had in the house forcing me to go to the bathroom in the kitchen. Locking me in that same bathroom when it was above 90 degrees for three hours and not letting me out just because she doesn't like me. Hitting me with heavy bottom drinking glass in my face, stamping on my foot and breaking it, telling me every day that I am worthless and abusive and that no one will ever love me because I am an awful person.

This is what I am living with. I'm responsible for her till she's 21. I love her and I try to do so unconditionally. Nothing I do has an impact on her softening toward me. It's really hard to show her the love she needs when she treats me this way and she can tell when I am "sucking it up." which may be a form of self=abuse on my part, but it is also a sign that I am doing my best not to judge her for her frankly, outrageous behavior. And honestly, I'm at the point that I would be OK if she left and never came back. (As long as she wasn't dead or in severe trouble.) If she would be more happy without me, I'm willing to let our relationship go. But, I don't think she will be happy, I'm just her excuse for avoiding dealing with her issues. Kicking her out, even if I legally could, would prove her narratives that she isn't loved. Letting her remain means I subject myself to contant physical and emotional abuse while she does whatever she wants.

I really don't know what to do at this point. I don't know how to help her. I am miserable living with her. She's miserable with me. She doesn't have anywhere else she can go. (She can't go to her father or grandparents. We have no other family.) I honestly believe she won't start doing the work until reality kicks her in the behind and she is forced to be reflective and introspective.

Can any one offer any insights?

This is not a tenable situation.

Maybe you can't legally kick her out- but I would sure as heck start calling the Law out on her for physical assaults and theft of property if she takes something and takes off with it. I would secretly record audio
and video of her actions. ​I would not put up with that, nor would I expect it to get better. There's no reason for it to- she's old enough to know better but there is no penalty for behaving the way she is and she may not change even with penalty. This is an abusive relationship.

I don't know about "solutions" about that particular problem of runaway children, nor how to raise them.

I did notice a few things though.

You have some sort of perfect narrative where you are perfect, even when saying that you are not. So there is this image you project, which is quite one-sided, so it is hard to tell what you did wrong. All one could say is to validate you in saying she is terrible, and maybe she is, but it's impossible to tell with only one side. But I looked a bit at some of your past posts, and you do seem to create a kind of very narrow "path" of thinking, where it ends in a cul-de-sac. So what it seems just like that, is that you rationalize too much, and moralize way too much. I suppose on another person's perspective, it might feel like very constraining, but also it lacks genuine grittiness. There is no vulnerable part, no blood on the snow, everything is just too perfect. It might be good for rationalization, but for emotional connection and conflict resolution, perhaps not that great, because it is not realistic. It could be due to the forum medium, but it looks like a condemnation more than a try at fixing things. If you act like that in real life, it would be certainly a cause for dispute and even violence, because there is no other way.

The other thing is that you suggest you are trying unconditional love and "not judging", but here you are showing the exact opposite. So you have an image of who you are that is not in sync with reality. That's something you could look at. But for what it's worth, I think those ideas are usually quite toxic, because they are irrealistic and never genuine. It forces you to pretend to be someone you are not, which may explain the rationalizations. In order to have good boundaries, especially with someone that does not respect them, you have to be able to have very conditional love, and to judge if need be, otherwise, how can you even put a boundary in the first place?

So I am just thinking here, but hypothetically, when you are projecting that image of sainthood, you are setting yourself up to be a martyr basically. It might sound good just like that, in theory, but in reality, people will just walk over you, and not respect you. So then you have two choices. Either you betray that image to set things straight, or you basically "suck it up" as you said, but if it is not genuine, then someone will see it, and will deduce your an hypocrite. Sainthood is not for everybody though, and is not "sane" in any way, but if you wanted that, you would not be here, so that is not the right option. It leaves you the last option, to accept you are not any of those things. Maybe it could help a bit by not sending contradictory messages. It certainly should help you being more honest with yourself.

Maybe I am going too far, but it is what I am seeing. "Insight".

I haven't posted here in many years and have done a lot of work in many areas. I am not the person I was. In fact, the relationship that I discussed in my past is also in a hugely different place as well. I've spent a lot of time being introspective and reflective. I have learned a bit about attachment theory and my wounds. I have learned about narratives. I spent a lot of time asking questions like: Is this true? What other possibility could be true.

I am not a saint and never tried to present myself as a saint. I am an ordinary person who is imperfect. I used the best tools I had at the time that I used that. My mistake with my daughter was that I was not emotionally attuned to be a reflective listener and mirror better. I'm still learning that as it was not something I grew up in within my own household. I wasn't as there as she needed me to be even though I was home at least six nights a week if not seven when she was little. BUT, I am not a saint and couldn't be with her every waking moment. She does have official diagnoses from psychiatric trained personnel. And whatever my faults are: no one should have to put up with constant threats of violence in their own home. There is never a valid reason to hit, kick or punch someone just because you don't agree with their boundaries. She goes to a special school for kids who have inappropriate behavioral issues. She was on probation for her behavior after she was arrested by the NYPD. Objective people made those determinations. I am constantly a work in progress and I am always working to be better. But what I interpret you are saying here, and perhaps I am misinterpreting it, is that something I have done, and have not said here, justifies her hurting me physically. Is that what you meant to imply?

Regarding boundaries: My boundaries get better every day, but she doesn't respect them. She's been diagnosed with Anxiety, ADHD, ODD, Bipolar and Borderline Personality Order by mental health professionals. The last two are in dispute because her father is diagnosed as bipolar, but her behaviors seem more like BDP.

miss_empathy wrote:And whatever my faults are: no one should have to put up with constant threats of violence in their own home. There is never a valid reason to hit, kick or punch someone just because you don't agree with their boundaries.

I completely agree with you here. And I admire the work you've done to understand your shortcomings when your daughter was little. As parents we can provide what we recognize was missing from our own childhoods, but we can't provide what isn't even on our radar as something a parent is supposed to do. And a very high-need child can be beyond the capabilities of a particular parent--that isn't necessarily anyone's fault, but it's a tragic situation.

In the county where I live (in California), a parent has the option of opening up a voluntary Child Protective Services case, and that enables a higher level of mental health services available, including in-home services, and parental support, as well as enabling possible placements, such as foster care or residential placement. I don't know if that's available in your county or city, but it's worth looking into.

You can tell them that you can't keep her safe--she's running away, which puts her at risk. That should be enough for CPS to at least start investigating the situation. And then you can ask about voluntarily opening a case.

TheGangsAllHere wrote:You can tell them that you can't keep her safe--she's running away, which puts her at risk. That should be enough for CPS to at least start investigating the situation. And then you can ask about voluntarily opening a case.

I would. No way are you not only going to not obey me as a parent as long as my requests are reasonable, you're for darn sure not going to abuse my love for you, or my physical self. I am not perfect I don't expect perfection. But I don't care what issues you have, I am not having that under my roof, full stop- I'm not going to live in fear or tiptoe around my progeny. One of us is the parent, one of us is the child- I'm not the child. I'm not your battered spouse.

One time as a late teen- probably 18 or 19- I was arguing with my mother and dared to start to push her out of my way to go out the door- that's the last time I did that because she made it abundantly clear without laying a hand on me that that was a place I did not want to go.