I missed posting a blog last weekend. Usually it is my “sort my feelings, clear my head” time and I look forward to those writing sessions as my own little oasis of peace, free from the distractions of life and work. Last weekend though, I chose to give up the writing time to clean up and clear out the downstairs room where my youngest son had his computer set up. I used the organizing and boxing of his computer as my “therapy time”…and perhaps I also needed some time to process what we had done before writing about it.
My youngest son is bright, engaging, athletic and creative. A few years ago he was well known in his charter school for making comedic videos and was equally gifted on the Improv comedy team at his school. He homeschooled in early years, scored well enough on standardized tests to be put into a gifted program in late elementary school and one would think that he would sail effortlessly through middle school and high school with good grades.
Somewhere in middle school, around the time that we took our daughter out of our home and into a residential treatment center, his mood started to change. The sunny boy that would sing around the house with made up tunes and lyrics of whatever he was thinking of at the time gradually turned into a young man with a dark mood that seemed to follow him like a black cloud hanging over his head. I chalked it up at first to hormones and figured he would work his way out of it.
Over the last few years, his grades declined to barely passing. Soccer, which he had played since age four was discarded about a year and a half ago. The wonderfully funny comedic YouTube videos stopped. He changed schools and refused to try out for the Improv comedy team and also refused to engage in any other school club, sport or activity. All of this happened gradually as he became more and more consumed by an online video game.
I had been talking to him, worrying that he was depressed and wanting desperately to “fix” whatever was wrong, much like I tried to do unsuccessfully with my daughter. My husband would have used a direct forceful approach long ago but I wanted to give my son the opportunity to figure out how to balance his life on his own. Needless to say, that approach failed miserably.
Two weeks ago, the situation came to a crisis point. Though a high school senior with just 3 quarters left to graduation, he was failing some of his classes and wanted to get his GED; he had missed a number of days of school and then refused to go to school at all. Something clicked within me one of those mornings when I tried about 5 times to get him up for school (not something I normally do). I suddenly realized I was “done” trying. We were unable to tell whether he was so severely depressed that he was immobile or whether he was being defiant. We decided that we would rather he be furious at us than take a chance that he might in a depressed state, try to harm himself. Last Friday a week ago, we had him transported to a therapeutic wilderness program.
I talked with the therapist a few days ago about him. He arrived at the program both furious and withdrawn. Within a short time there, he snapped out of the isolated withdrawn state and became outgoing, funny and engaging again. He was away from the stress of failing school, away from playing video games throughout the night, he got his body back onto a healthy biorhythm of sleeping at night and awake during a physically active day and turned back into his real self. I told the therapist that was the “real” him that we had lost.
In retrospect, I think my son suffered a ripple effect from family dysfunction going back to his middle school years. He was in 6th grade when we put our older daughter into treatment. Our family had been seriously focused on a battle to help her for 2 ½ years prior to that time however. Just prior to my son’s 8th grade year, we brought my daughter back into the home where she gradually slipped back into stealing and pathological lying until we kicked her out of the house after her high school graduation. That means there was some form of tension, stress or drama from my son’s 4th grade year on.
Just like in the picture above, one tends to focus on the very center where the main disturbance is. Look closely at the picture though…there is a ripple effect that travels far away from the impact point which can cause issues. Did years of stress in our family over my daughter’s actions influence my son to escape into video games? Since I was unable to stop my daughter’s behavior, did I subconsciously “give up” putting enough boundaries around my younger kids, both of whom have a high need for making independent decisions? Giving them the freedom to have quite a lot of control over their free time seemed to work well for my daughter but rather failed with my son. Given how stubbornly independent my son is however, I’m quite sure that a “hard line” approach would have also failed. In theory, guiding him through a strong relationship might have worked better though that was difficult as he kept us at an emotional distance.
The therapists at the wilderness program do not feel that my son is depressed, just that he got himself into a stressful situation with too much game playing and not enough studying. He will turn 18 in a couple of months so we will leave him there in the program to do some introspective evaluation of how he got himself into the pit he did. I feel like he will be fine but he needs to either balance better or stay away from playing video games.
For any families out there with multiple children, my heart goes out to you. It is a huge challenge as a parent to “be there” for the healthy siblings while dealing also with the mental/behavioral issues of the dysfunctional child. Just do your best and forgive yourself for the times that you are not “perfect”.
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