Friday, August 03, 2007

Just breathe

Ok - deep breath. Hold it. Now let go.

That is the key. Let it go.

We had our call with the therapist 'B' and Katie last night. At first I didn't think I would be on it because I had something going on at work, but then it took Diane over half an hour to actually get through - she kept getting a busy signal, so by the time she did get through I was home and Ben was able to conference me on.

Katie is back in Orange.

She got fired from being Momma, for both not working at the job, and for an inappropriate conversation (it was about shaving - started about girls who shave their heads and headed south. She says she stopped talking at that point, but also didn't do anything to stop the conversation - which was in the tape room as well.)

Otherwise it was a working call, if not a good one. She does seem to realize some of the things that came up, and wants to work on it, so this may not be such a bad thing overall. It is also good for her to experience some bumps in the road - as that is what life is all about (at times it seems that life [b]IS[/b] the bumps.

So not the real key is to see where she is and what she is doing in two weeks. Is she back to her old behavior, or is she actually learning something. A lot of it comes down to here feelings - she said that she felt like a failure about this, and the key is to realize that this was a mistake. To not tie her self-worth to external events. Which I guess is something that has been coming up for the entire group a lot lately.

So time to take my own advice - and just breath.

2 comments:

Marissa said...

Thank you for this blog, I can't believe how long I've been sitting here reading through your experiences at this point trying not to tear up. You are talking about remembering just to breathe, but from my point of view you must have nerves of steel, to have already made the steps you've taken. We have been looking into several schools or programs that help troubled teens for some time, but there is always something in the back of my mind that says oh she'll grow out of it, or all teens are difficult like this at one point or another. I'll keep reading your blog to help strengthen my own nerves.

Mike Carter said...

Thanks. I'm glad this is helping. Interesting site - however it is far from complete. I would highly recommend the WWASP schools (such as we have Katie in) - mainly because of the parent/family seminars that have proven so helpful to us. If you are interested - email me. Also, please take a look at Our Referral Site. If you go through there and decide to enroll your daughter, it does give us a referral credit. But even if you don't, I'm glad that this is helping.