The Fine Art of Avoidance

There are a lot of good quotes out there about avoidance. Here are a few:

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” – Virginia Woolf

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” — Abraham Lincoln

“The best way out is always through.” — Robert Frost

The funnel of a tornado is reaching down to the ground from a dark cloud in a stormy sky. A tree is in the foreground to the left of the funnel. The landscape appears to be a field.

Public Domain Pictures “Tornado” by Jean Beaufort is licensed under CCO Public Domain

If avoidance can be viewed as an art form, I have spent years perfecting it. As I mentioned in my previous blog, I am now (finally) organizing papers related to my oldest daughter’s behaviors. Think of a Category 5 tornado that tears through lives, leaving massive destruction in its wake. That’s of course a devastating experience and the rebuilding is painful. What if rebuilding occurs and then another tornado comes through, hitting the same neighborhood…the same house? That’s what the life of a family feels like when dealing with a child/teen/adult that continues to defy societal standards.

The “before treatment” years combined with the “treatment” years encompass such painful memories that I have left the documents relating to that time period untouched for 16 years. Adding additional emotional pain are the documents relating to the years after she came home from treatment (the last two years of high school then after HS graduation). Those years have been equally tough, if not worse. Combined together, it is no wonder that my psyche has wanted to stuff all of the emotions around the last 20 years into a dark corner of my mind and think of something else…anything else.

Black text and arrows showing the link between Depression, pain, fear of pain, avoidance of activity then depression again. The alternative shows depression then pain, facing the fear, confrontation which leads to recovery.

Wikimedia Commons “Fear-avoidance” by LittleT889 is licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

It is a flimsy excuse to say I was busy working for most of those years. I can pretend that I didn’t have time to deal with those papers, however the truth is that I could have found the time. It doesn’t take a PhD to know that I was so afraid of revisiting emotional pain that I just left those papers tucked away in a closet. The problem was that avoidance didn’t work in the long term. I couldn’t bring myself to throw the papers away until I had emotionally dealt with them, but continuing to avoid going through them also kept me from fully healing.

I am now taking Robert Frost’s advice that “the best way out is always through”. I have spent many hours now chronologically cataloging these papers. I have a wide assortment of items from 6-year-old hand drawn cards to 7th grade counseling journals (written after thefts) to psychological evaluations in 9th grade to letters from her at Teen Challenge and later at her RTC (residential treatment center). In the years after she became a young adult, I added info on court cases and letters to her/from her while incarcerated.  

To my surprise, I feel better, not worse as I read through the items. I see patterns in hindsight that I couldn’t see when I was “in the weeds” of day-to-day life. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but it has already been enormously cathartic. I suppose this is therapy for me.

Whose Failure?

All of this organizing is helping me to come to terms with the fact that the end result was failure; after all, she is in prison now. Or is it failure? I can see from the items that I saved that I was there for her when she was small and I was there for her when she started to pathologically lie in third grade. I see where I was committed to helping her in 6th grade when she increased her rate of stealing. I was there for her in Teen Challenge at 14, RTC at 15/16, and afterward when she came home for the last two years of high school. I was still there for her in the years that followed when she abandoned her first baby, then another baby; now there are five girls she is not raising. I have high boundaries now with her, but those boundaries are not arbitrary or intended to be unkind. I have learned the hard way that I must have them in order to protect myself from her.

The Plan

When I finish organizing the documents, I am going to write about what I saw and what I learned and who I am now based on my struggles across those years. My goal at the end of all that is to be able to put all of my emotions about her actions to rest. Once I feel that I can let go, I will destroy all the papers; the painful ones anyway. I will keep some of the cute hand-drawn pictures that represent the little girl she used to be; when she had the whole world ahead of her, bright and limitless.