conuly

I don't know if I can help at all, but I went through some similar problems when I was close to her age (a little older). Often doing stuff like pulling out hair or behaving wildly like kicking down doors (I did both) is just acting out from a buildup of confusing emotions. She may say it "isn't her" or that "she doesn't do those things". I denied it too. I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing and I was afraid of confronting it. The best thing that happened for me, was being expected to be responsible for my actions combined with my parents displaying a certain amount of trust that I would do the right thing. I think your daughter's problems are probably more serious than mine were, but holding her accountable and talking about the things she's doing is better than blaming them on "Mr. Nobody". If she's anything like me, she's having trouble making sense of the world around her and anything you can do to create a sense of cause and effect (that makes sense) is going to help. The more she can know what to expect and feel free to express her confusion and expect understanding and explanation, the better. She may not be talking to anyone because she may not see the point in it. At least, that's how I felt. I hope this makes sense and can help you and your daughter. I remember that time very vividly and it was awful. I hope things get better for you both soon.

From: (Anonymous)

Hi. Thank you for replying. The Mr. Nobody thing was a little joke. I forget that sarcasm doesn't travel well over the internet. *blush*

I'll keep what you said in mind. It is nice to know she isn't the only person that acts this way, but I'm so sorry you had to go through it. It is terrible.

Yes, taking responsibility for her actions is something we have been working on. We use the "Love and Logic" approach to parenting. In most things, it works, but for this? She has to see her problems as her own before she can take the responsibility. This is the main subject of the sessions with her doctors.

She is a very immature little girl in a world of more mature 8th graders. It is confusing for her.

It is something we'll have to work on day by day. There is no easy answer. She's healthy and smart. She has people who love her. I just worry about her so.

Thank you so much for sharing. It is surprising, now that I've told someone, other than my family and the doctors, I feel much better. I may just have to check into this lj thing. It might be a help to us all. She loves to write, but we will have to wait until she is ungrounded. I think it may just be a fun project for us to work on. Much better than creating petpages.

From:

I'm glad you found this outlet! It's a great forum to get emotions out in the open and to get support from some truly kind people. Your daughter will probably enjoy it just as much. :)

From:

conuly

If you get a journal, post here, tell me your username(s) so I can hook you up with some appropriate communities. If you want, that is.

From: (Anonymous)

Hi. I just found out what has been happening to my daughter. We got the results of some tests back. She has not been taking ANY medication since right after school started. The time when the really bad stuff started. Now we know why. She has been palming her pills or spitting them out. No wonder she has been so unsettled and out of control. The doctor has talked to her, and we have a family meeting set up for tonight. All the grandparents and her father...everyone but her little brother. We have a close family, so it is best if everyone is involved so she understands we all care about what happens to her. Not that she shouldn't know already, but I want it to be a united front. She simply must take her meds. Look what happens when she doesn't. it's not healthy for her and it is not helping her relationships with anyone. Her friends and teachers have asked me about her behavior, too.
The child is a straight A student, Gifted and Talented, First Chair saxophone, talented little actress...you name it, she's got it. Her grades have slipped some, but frankly, they were less of a concern than her behavior.
She doesn't feel she should take medication. That's why she stopped. 8th graders are uncool if they take meds. Bless her heart. We're taking away the lunchtime pills, so she doesn't have to take them at school. I have to check her mouth every time she takes meds in the morning. I watch her take it everyday, I fix the pills. She has just been putting them under her tongue or something to fool me and doing the same to the nurse at school.
She cracked when the results came back and confessed to not taking her pills. She wants to be just like her friends who don't take meds and she has to accept the fact she isn't. She has to take meds. That is all there is to it. We tried for years to find some combination of things that worked and last year we did. She was feeling so right, she decided that she didn't need the meds anymore. Now we know the problem, we can try and fix it.
The Trichotillomania is another story. We've dealt with it before and it does stop when she is aware of doing it. It's just something she has to be aware of.
The doctor says the eating should get back under control with the meds. If not, we'll deal with it then.
Oh, I am so relieved. She is a wonderful girl and I love her so. I hated to see her hurting and I just wanted to reach her. Now, I'm off to the band hall to pick her up, fix supper, and then on to the meeting. :)

From:

feathered.livejournal.com

Thanks for posting this -- I may not have seen her thread if you hadn't. I wrote up a long (largely useless) reply and PMed it to her because, after some deliberation, I decided it was uncomfortable to post such an outpouring of information about my past on your journal or the forums.

From:

A friend directed me to this post. I'm a 4th year psych student, and I just finished a bit of research of self-harm. It was actually a rather difficult thing to work on, as I was a self-injurer, and still am to some degree. My parents split up when I was 11, and within two years, I had a bald spot and was scratching at my face. It's a very hard habit to break.

To some extent, it's better that she's expressing the anger rather than turning it inwards on herself entirely. Turning it inwards can do more long-term destruction at times, mostly because it can stay hidden longer than outward aggression. And I agree with what one other poster said; she's struggling to deal with a lot of heavy-duty emotions. That's not your fault. It simply is. But she definitely needs help. There's been some research done in the last few years that shows that high-dose SSRIs help to minimize self-harm; if she's edging towards an eating disorder and has expressed suidical ideation, talk to her doctor about SSRIs. They might help to alleviate her unhappiness enough to get the work underway. I know changing the prescription is easy to say and difficult, even painful, to watch someone adjust to, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

It's important that you understand the nature of the ways she's chosen to express her confusion and pain: behind trich and ED, there usually lies a need for perfection and order, a sense of a loss of control, and there's also an element of self-punishment, especially with the restriction/binge eating. She may take pride in her self-control when she doesn't eat, and feel awful when she "snaps" and eats, especially since she probably isn't eating healthy foods when she binges. Those behaviours are her way of trying to regain some sense of control over her life. She needs to find a healthy, constructive way to feel in control: a hobby that she's really good at, an extra-curricular activity. Design together a healthy meal-plan of things she'll actually eat. Ask her what she wants, not just to eat, but with her life in general, and really listen to the answer. She needs to be heard, I'd wager, and she needs to know--as cliched as this will sound--that the breakup had nothing to do with her, nothing at all. Tell her that until the words lose meaning and then tell her some more. The division of a family is hard when you haven't learned much about relationships; it forces you to grow up very quickly, and the violence is her struggle against that--she wants to be a kid still, but her world is changing. Her image of what is "happiness", of what is "normal" and what a love-relationship looks like has been shattered. Two years may seem like a long time for her to still be working through it, but to be honest, she'll probably still be sorting it for a few more years. It took me well into my twenties to sort out the notion that I could see where both of my parents screwed up, and it didn't have to make them bad people, or mean that I loved either of them any less. She needs to be reassured that although things are changing, there are some constants: she is loved, wanted, and special, and she matters. Though she can't get her way in all things, compromises can be made, right?

If her emotional issues can be gotten in check, then the ADHD should be a much simpler issue to deal with. I know looking at a list of acronyms like that can be intimidating, and might make you feel a little hopeless, but one step at a time is the best way to do it. Don't lose hope, and good luck to you and your daughter.

From:

Almost forgot to add, on a more anecdotal note, one of my profs had a "Mr.Nobody" type schema for kids with anger problems. He described a therapy in which he'd start out by labelling the behaviour as Mr.Nobody's fault, and then, over time, get the child to admit that s/he was Mr.Nobody (although he didn't call it Mr.Nobody, because that would require the child calling him/herself nobody, and that's definitely not a positive outcome!) and had done the acts in question. It looked easy on the Powerpoint slides, but I imagine in practice it'd be rather arduous.

From:

Well, I will advise, but I have to say that I'm not expecting it's going to do any good, because it's going to drastically conflict with all the "expert advice" she's already getting. Still, one must try, so here goes:

Having been "hospitalized" at age 14 myself, the first thing I have to say is that the word "hospital" is a misnomer. Such places would be better called "concentration camps", and the levels of abuse in them are often worse than in prison - the expensive private hospitals often worse than the State institutions, because they are far less regulated. Should this woman send her daughter to one, the first thing she will be told is that any accounts of abuse she hears are lies and manipulation, not to be believed. Here are some references that tell the truth about what goes on:

Ill Treated (http://reason.com/0205/cr.bd.ill.shtml)

Outposts In Our Heads (http://amanda.autistics.org/intangible.html)

Now, as for the drugs, this poor child has apparently been pumped full of them for the past five years and she "appears to be getting worse all the time" - hasn't it occurred to her mother or anyone else that maybe the drugs are what's making her worse?!?!

Psychiatric drug facts (http://www.breggin.com)

My advice is that she find a doctor who can and will help her daughter get off the drugs. It won't be any fast or easy process; the withdrawal symptoms are liable to be severe.

Now, for the rest? There's no information given about what the child says is the problem. Is she being bullied at school? Was she ever molested? (That may not be known - I was molested right before I was hospitalized, which was what caused me to attempt suicide, but I never told anyone for over 30 years. And yes, I was molested again while I was in the hospital, by a member of the staff.) What is her relationship with her father like, and what does he say about her difficulties? How are her grades, and what is her relationship like with her friends?

It takes longer than two years for a child to 'get over' her parents' divorce, even if she has a good relationship with both of them and sees them both on a regular basis. 13-year-old girls are volatile creatures under the best of circumstances, with poor impulse control and a tendency toward Drama And Angst. And Middle School is very frequently an intensely hostile, competitive, high-pressure environment.

My advice about the hair-pulling is to leave her alone about it. It is a very minor matter compared to everything else - if she pulls out every last one of her eyebrows and eyelashes, what real harm is that? - and continuing to make it an issue is only likely to make the problem worse. Decrease the amount of stress in her life, and her 'stress symptoms' will also decrease.

Too long; continued next post

From:

As for the stealing food - if she is too thin, shouldn't she be allowed to eat when she's hungry? 98 lbs. is not terribly thin for a 13-year-old, unless she's very tall, but she could probably stand to gain some weight.

My advice is to stop buying junk food of any sort. Instead, keep lots of good healthy food in the house at all times, especially things she can just pick up and eat, and let her choose what and when she eats. If it's all good for her, her choices can't help being good. Ask her what she'd like to have.

Ice cream is the ultimate get-kids-to-eat food; it's got protein, carbohydrate, and a good amount of calcium, which growing kids need. Buy a carton or two of Breyer's Vanilla every time you shop, and don't put any restriction on when or how much she can eat. Bananas and cheese are two other foods to keep around all the time - if they're there, she'll eat them.

While she's in the process of getting off the drugs, she's going to need extra nutritional support, i.e. vitamins, herbal supplements, etcetera. Find a naturopath or other practicioner of holistic medicine to advise you about this; most MDs know very little about nutrition.

Let her wear what she wants - don't buy clothes you don't want her to wear, of course, but don't interfere in her choices. Show her how to do her own laundry if she doesn't already know, then leave it up to her to deal with it - if she runs out of clean and has to wear dirty, bite your tongue, no matter how long it takes before she washes them. Let her keep her room how she wants, and don't hassle her about it - yes, it'll be a pigsty; they're all unbelievable slobs at that age, but they do grow out of it.

If she hates her school or is falling too far behind, pull her out. This seems like a radical step, but it's a lot less radical than sending her away to an institution, and it may be what she needs while she's recovering. There are many good homeschool programs, but she may not be up to coping with any school at all for a while, so if you do pull her out, let her have a couple of months off - till after the holidays, say - then ask her what she'd like to do about her education.

If she likes counseling and thinks it's helping, keep going, but if she doesn't, don't make her go. Stay off the computer when she's home and awake. If TV is an "issue", get rid of it - Life Without Television is possible, and it's hard to re-forge a relationship with someone when one or both of you is staring at an electronic screen. Go for walks, go do fun activities together - don't nag her, don't criticize her, don't give her advice unless she asks - if she wants to talk, listen; if she doesn't, let that be okay too.

Too long; continued next post

From:

The point of all this is to reduce her stress-load to an absolute minimum in all possible ways. That's supposedly what the point of hospitalization would be... isn't it?... but that's not what hospitalization would do; instead it would subject her to more stress and more drugs. So I say, set it up so that if she needs to totally collapse, she can do it at home, in safety, with her mother's love to help her through.

No, this is no easy thing, I realize. My daughter is 15 now; her Dad and I split up when she was 8; I know what kind of a heroic effort I'm advocating here. But I also know what's going to happen to her if she's "sent away", and what that's going to do to her relationship with her mother - not temporarily, but permanently.

Bottom line: the shrinks have had their chance, and all their drugs and diagnoses haven't helped. If something different isn't done for this poor kid pretty soon, it sounds like she's destined for the ranks of the psychiatric survivors (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22psychiatric+survivors%22&btnG=Google+Search) - assuming she survives, of course; not everybody does - and we'll be reading her post-trauma horror stories on the Net a few years from now.

Sorry if that's harsh, but I think of what was done to me, what was done to countless others, and then I think of my own daughter. There is nothing - literally, nothing - I wouldn't do to keep such a thing from happening to her. My parents had ignorance for an excuse, which is the only reason I've been able to more-or-less forgive them, but... what if they'd known?

What if they'd known?

From: (Anonymous)

Hi. I've never posted on a live journal, I hope I'm doing this right.

Thank you to Uly for being such a great person. ((HUGS))

I'll post what I post on NC. I'm copy/pasting...

"She has started pulling out her eyelashes and eyebrows, she has started stealing food in the middle of the night, she kicked a hole in my closet door, pulled my bedroom door off the hinges, etc... She weighs 98 pounds at 13, but thinks she's fat.

I'm ready to hospitalize her, it is getting progressively worse by the day. Her doctors and counselors agree, but want to wait and see if these new meds work better. She's ADHD/Bipolar...diagnosed Bipolar in 3rd grade, ADHD at 3 years old. She started talking about killing herself at 8. We've tried all types of meds since then. ALL types of meds. We counsel, both family and individual. I'm at a loss. I can't seem to talk to her at all, she just screams at me to leave her alone. I do, for the most part, but it is so hard.

I know this is not normal. I know we're doing all we can. She has kept most of this behavior at home, but it is starting to seep into her school life. She won't listen to her doctors, her family, her friends. It's killing us and it must be Hell for her, too.

I'd blame the divorce, but that was over 2 years ago. This past year has been an emotional rollercoaster. The problems are eating up all of our lives. My only relief is the computer and an online game.

Can any of you young people give me any advice as to how to get through to her? Or things your parents do that you hate? Maybe if I have some idea how a young person thinks nowadays, I won't mess up so badly.

Thank you very much for any help."

Her doctor has called the hair pulling Trichotillomania. I've read up on it and we had it stopped for about 6 months. It has come back.

The eating? She diets (doesn't need to) and then steals food at night. She swears she doesn't, but I have found food under her pillow and under the bed.

The main problem we have is getting her to see her own problems. She swears she doesn't pull her hair, doesn't steal food, doesn't get out of control with her anger. She can't explain these things, but it isn't her. It's always someone else's fault. I tell her it must be Mr. Nobody. He gave my brother and I some trouble when we were kids.

She'll be fine for days, anger-wise, and then BOOM! Out of Control. It's cycling, but her hormones must be doing a job on her because it has never been this scary before. I'm afraid instead of talking about it, she might just hurt herself for real. I can replace doors, but not my daughter.

I just want to help her and she won't hear me or anyone else. Now, don't get me wrong. Some days she is an angel and we talk, laugh, and just love each other, but when it comes to her problems, she just won't talk to anyone. I love paying for doctors and counselors when she just sits there. *sigh*

From:

I don't know if I can help at all, but I went through some similar problems when I was close to her age (a little older). Often doing stuff like pulling out hair or behaving wildly like kicking down doors (I did both) is just acting out from a buildup of confusing emotions. She may say it "isn't her" or that "she doesn't do those things". I denied it too. I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing and I was afraid of confronting it. The best thing that happened for me, was being expected to be responsible for my actions combined with my parents displaying a certain amount of trust that I would do the right thing. I think your daughter's problems are probably more serious than mine were, but holding her accountable and talking about the things she's doing is better than blaming them on "Mr. Nobody". If she's anything like me, she's having trouble making sense of the world around her and anything you can do to create a sense of cause and effect (that makes sense) is going to help. The more she can know what to expect and feel free to express her confusion and expect understanding and explanation, the better. She may not be talking to anyone because she may not see the point in it. At least, that's how I felt. I hope this makes sense and can help you and your daughter. I remember that time very vividly and it was awful. I hope things get better for you both soon.

From: (Anonymous)

Hi. Thank you for replying. The Mr. Nobody thing was a little joke. I forget that sarcasm doesn't travel well over the internet. *blush*

I'll keep what you said in mind. It is nice to know she isn't the only person that acts this way, but I'm so sorry you had to go through it. It is terrible.

Yes, taking responsibility for her actions is something we have been working on. We use the "Love and Logic" approach to parenting. In most things, it works, but for this? She has to see her problems as her own before she can take the responsibility. This is the main subject of the sessions with her doctors.

She is a very immature little girl in a world of more mature 8th graders. It is confusing for her.

It is something we'll have to work on day by day. There is no easy answer. She's healthy and smart. She has people who love her. I just worry about her so.

Thank you so much for sharing. It is surprising, now that I've told someone, other than my family and the doctors, I feel much better. I may just have to check into this lj thing. It might be a help to us all. She loves to write, but we will have to wait until she is ungrounded. I think it may just be a fun project for us to work on. Much better than creating petpages.

From:

I'm glad you found this outlet! It's a great forum to get emotions out in the open and to get support from some truly kind people. Your daughter will probably enjoy it just as much. :)

From:

conuly

If you get a journal, post here, tell me your username(s) so I can hook you up with some appropriate communities. If you want, that is.

From: (Anonymous)

Hi. I just found out what has been happening to my daughter. We got the results of some tests back. She has not been taking ANY medication since right after school started. The time when the really bad stuff started. Now we know why. She has been palming her pills or spitting them out. No wonder she has been so unsettled and out of control. The doctor has talked to her, and we have a family meeting set up for tonight. All the grandparents and her father...everyone but her little brother. We have a close family, so it is best if everyone is involved so she understands we all care about what happens to her. Not that she shouldn't know already, but I want it to be a united front. She simply must take her meds. Look what happens when she doesn't. it's not healthy for her and it is not helping her relationships with anyone. Her friends and teachers have asked me about her behavior, too.
The child is a straight A student, Gifted and Talented, First Chair saxophone, talented little actress...you name it, she's got it. Her grades have slipped some, but frankly, they were less of a concern than her behavior.
She doesn't feel she should take medication. That's why she stopped. 8th graders are uncool if they take meds. Bless her heart. We're taking away the lunchtime pills, so she doesn't have to take them at school. I have to check her mouth every time she takes meds in the morning. I watch her take it everyday, I fix the pills. She has just been putting them under her tongue or something to fool me and doing the same to the nurse at school.
She cracked when the results came back and confessed to not taking her pills. She wants to be just like her friends who don't take meds and she has to accept the fact she isn't. She has to take meds. That is all there is to it. We tried for years to find some combination of things that worked and last year we did. She was feeling so right, she decided that she didn't need the meds anymore. Now we know the problem, we can try and fix it.
The Trichotillomania is another story. We've dealt with it before and it does stop when she is aware of doing it. It's just something she has to be aware of.
The doctor says the eating should get back under control with the meds. If not, we'll deal with it then.
Oh, I am so relieved. She is a wonderful girl and I love her so. I hated to see her hurting and I just wanted to reach her. Now, I'm off to the band hall to pick her up, fix supper, and then on to the meeting. :)

From:

feathered.livejournal.com

Thanks for posting this -- I may not have seen her thread if you hadn't. I wrote up a long (largely useless) reply and PMed it to her because, after some deliberation, I decided it was uncomfortable to post such an outpouring of information about my past on your journal or the forums.

From:

A friend directed me to this post. I'm a 4th year psych student, and I just finished a bit of research of self-harm. It was actually a rather difficult thing to work on, as I was a self-injurer, and still am to some degree. My parents split up when I was 11, and within two years, I had a bald spot and was scratching at my face. It's a very hard habit to break.

To some extent, it's better that she's expressing the anger rather than turning it inwards on herself entirely. Turning it inwards can do more long-term destruction at times, mostly because it can stay hidden longer than outward aggression. And I agree with what one other poster said; she's struggling to deal with a lot of heavy-duty emotions. That's not your fault. It simply is. But she definitely needs help. There's been some research done in the last few years that shows that high-dose SSRIs help to minimize self-harm; if she's edging towards an eating disorder and has expressed suidical ideation, talk to her doctor about SSRIs. They might help to alleviate her unhappiness enough to get the work underway. I know changing the prescription is easy to say and difficult, even painful, to watch someone adjust to, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

It's important that you understand the nature of the ways she's chosen to express her confusion and pain: behind trich and ED, there usually lies a need for perfection and order, a sense of a loss of control, and there's also an element of self-punishment, especially with the restriction/binge eating. She may take pride in her self-control when she doesn't eat, and feel awful when she "snaps" and eats, especially since she probably isn't eating healthy foods when she binges. Those behaviours are her way of trying to regain some sense of control over her life. She needs to find a healthy, constructive way to feel in control: a hobby that she's really good at, an extra-curricular activity. Design together a healthy meal-plan of things she'll actually eat. Ask her what she wants, not just to eat, but with her life in general, and really listen to the answer. She needs to be heard, I'd wager, and she needs to know--as cliched as this will sound--that the breakup had nothing to do with her, nothing at all. Tell her that until the words lose meaning and then tell her some more. The division of a family is hard when you haven't learned much about relationships; it forces you to grow up very quickly, and the violence is her struggle against that--she wants to be a kid still, but her world is changing. Her image of what is "happiness", of what is "normal" and what a love-relationship looks like has been shattered. Two years may seem like a long time for her to still be working through it, but to be honest, she'll probably still be sorting it for a few more years. It took me well into my twenties to sort out the notion that I could see where both of my parents screwed up, and it didn't have to make them bad people, or mean that I loved either of them any less. She needs to be reassured that although things are changing, there are some constants: she is loved, wanted, and special, and she matters. Though she can't get her way in all things, compromises can be made, right?

If her emotional issues can be gotten in check, then the ADHD should be a much simpler issue to deal with. I know looking at a list of acronyms like that can be intimidating, and might make you feel a little hopeless, but one step at a time is the best way to do it. Don't lose hope, and good luck to you and your daughter.

From:

Almost forgot to add, on a more anecdotal note, one of my profs had a "Mr.Nobody" type schema for kids with anger problems. He described a therapy in which he'd start out by labelling the behaviour as Mr.Nobody's fault, and then, over time, get the child to admit that s/he was Mr.Nobody (although he didn't call it Mr.Nobody, because that would require the child calling him/herself nobody, and that's definitely not a positive outcome!) and had done the acts in question. It looked easy on the Powerpoint slides, but I imagine in practice it'd be rather arduous.

From:

Well, I will advise, but I have to say that I'm not expecting it's going to do any good, because it's going to drastically conflict with all the "expert advice" she's already getting. Still, one must try, so here goes:

Having been "hospitalized" at age 14 myself, the first thing I have to say is that the word "hospital" is a misnomer. Such places would be better called "concentration camps", and the levels of abuse in them are often worse than in prison - the expensive private hospitals often worse than the State institutions, because they are far less regulated. Should this woman send her daughter to one, the first thing she will be told is that any accounts of abuse she hears are lies and manipulation, not to be believed. Here are some references that tell the truth about what goes on:

Ill Treated (http://reason.com/0205/cr.bd.ill.shtml)

Outposts In Our Heads (http://amanda.autistics.org/intangible.html)

Now, as for the drugs, this poor child has apparently been pumped full of them for the past five years and she "appears to be getting worse all the time" - hasn't it occurred to her mother or anyone else that maybe the drugs are what's making her worse?!?!

Psychiatric drug facts (http://www.breggin.com)

My advice is that she find a doctor who can and will help her daughter get off the drugs. It won't be any fast or easy process; the withdrawal symptoms are liable to be severe.

Now, for the rest? There's no information given about what the child says is the problem. Is she being bullied at school? Was she ever molested? (That may not be known - I was molested right before I was hospitalized, which was what caused me to attempt suicide, but I never told anyone for over 30 years. And yes, I was molested again while I was in the hospital, by a member of the staff.) What is her relationship with her father like, and what does he say about her difficulties? How are her grades, and what is her relationship like with her friends?

It takes longer than two years for a child to 'get over' her parents' divorce, even if she has a good relationship with both of them and sees them both on a regular basis. 13-year-old girls are volatile creatures under the best of circumstances, with poor impulse control and a tendency toward Drama And Angst. And Middle School is very frequently an intensely hostile, competitive, high-pressure environment.

My advice about the hair-pulling is to leave her alone about it. It is a very minor matter compared to everything else - if she pulls out every last one of her eyebrows and eyelashes, what real harm is that? - and continuing to make it an issue is only likely to make the problem worse. Decrease the amount of stress in her life, and her 'stress symptoms' will also decrease.

Too long; continued next post

From:

As for the stealing food - if she is too thin, shouldn't she be allowed to eat when she's hungry? 98 lbs. is not terribly thin for a 13-year-old, unless she's very tall, but she could probably stand to gain some weight.

My advice is to stop buying junk food of any sort. Instead, keep lots of good healthy food in the house at all times, especially things she can just pick up and eat, and let her choose what and when she eats. If it's all good for her, her choices can't help being good. Ask her what she'd like to have.

Ice cream is the ultimate get-kids-to-eat food; it's got protein, carbohydrate, and a good amount of calcium, which growing kids need. Buy a carton or two of Breyer's Vanilla every time you shop, and don't put any restriction on when or how much she can eat. Bananas and cheese are two other foods to keep around all the time - if they're there, she'll eat them.

While she's in the process of getting off the drugs, she's going to need extra nutritional support, i.e. vitamins, herbal supplements, etcetera. Find a naturopath or other practicioner of holistic medicine to advise you about this; most MDs know very little about nutrition.

Let her wear what she wants - don't buy clothes you don't want her to wear, of course, but don't interfere in her choices. Show her how to do her own laundry if she doesn't already know, then leave it up to her to deal with it - if she runs out of clean and has to wear dirty, bite your tongue, no matter how long it takes before she washes them. Let her keep her room how she wants, and don't hassle her about it - yes, it'll be a pigsty; they're all unbelievable slobs at that age, but they do grow out of it.

If she hates her school or is falling too far behind, pull her out. This seems like a radical step, but it's a lot less radical than sending her away to an institution, and it may be what she needs while she's recovering. There are many good homeschool programs, but she may not be up to coping with any school at all for a while, so if you do pull her out, let her have a couple of months off - till after the holidays, say - then ask her what she'd like to do about her education.

If she likes counseling and thinks it's helping, keep going, but if she doesn't, don't make her go. Stay off the computer when she's home and awake. If TV is an "issue", get rid of it - Life Without Television is possible, and it's hard to re-forge a relationship with someone when one or both of you is staring at an electronic screen. Go for walks, go do fun activities together - don't nag her, don't criticize her, don't give her advice unless she asks - if she wants to talk, listen; if she doesn't, let that be okay too.

Too long; continued next post

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