Trying to Find Reason

Lately life has been pretty hellish.  One of the reasons we started the blog was to share our experience as a way to find meaning in some of the most recent events.  Life in our family is a constant struggle, a constant battle of wills, it's simply exhausting.  There are, however, moments and spans of time that are uniquely worse then the normal trudge.  We're in one of those moments now.
 

This fall my child was hospitalized for the 4th time for mental health issues.  As a parent you try to find meaning.  Did this time period coincide with a historical traumatic event in my child's past?  When she was taken from her birth family?  Moved to a different foster family?  Had a violent moment with some caregiver?  Hospitalized before? 

You spend the time wracking your brain for a reason.  Modern psychotherapy is built on reason and logic.  If we can logic out an individual's response and emotion we can unravel it and treat the cause.  This strategy may be entirely effective with many people (though in my experience, it seems unlikely).
 

There's a two prong problem that we've encountered when trying to reason out the whys:

1)  My child has undergone so much early life trauma that it's nearly impossible to untangle one or even a couple historical events that produce the behavior you see today.  Approaching her with cause and effect psychotherapy is a practice in futility.

2)  Half the time the responses you're getting are based on a manipulative version of the truth.  Are we sitting at the hospital today because my child is truly suicidal?  Or is it because her sister got ice cream when she lost dessert privileges?  As a parent, I can't think about this too closely.  A child threatening suicide is something you take very seriously.  There is a foot size hole in the wall because my youngest child who mastered the art of braiding hair didn't want to braid my oldest's hair that morning.  There is no hair braiding childhood trauma incident.  There is no ice cream trauma.  This is the deep seated need to control everyone in her sphere, and she's smart and doesn't play by the rules.
 

So something I want to include in this blog is not just a laundry list of struggles, but the solutions and coping mechanisms we've found as parents that help us get up in the morning.  Sometimes it's hard to see, when you're in it, how to survive - much less how to thrive.  So look for these at the end of each post.

How do I get through this?
 

Not sure I've figured out how to thrive in these moments, but surviving is definitely possible.  Something that helps me the most is remembering that this is a moment.  It may be a week, a month, six months, but it will pass.  My kid can hit the self-destruct button on her life (jump up and down on it for weeks, even) but this doesn't mean that I have to hit it on my life.  She will grow up, she will exhaust herself from all the jumping on her button, we will all survive.  Cultivate patience and an appreciation of time.