Denial and Parenting

Growing up my father parenting us when he felt like he wanted us involved in his world. When he did parent us he was always high as he was a pothead and I guess in his mind he could be a good parent while under the influence of drugs. His denial surrounding around the fact that weed did not effect his parenting and he beilieved that parentig us under the influence was not harmful to us I guess. The denial is a belief that is irrational and its effects on me have been angering enough that it hasmade me not want to talk with him or associate myself with him as I have become an adult.

Critizing me as a child and teenager, my mother lives in denial regarding the effects I have from her "abuse". Nevermind the physically abuse she perpetrated on me when I was a teenager. I am speciafically more effected by her denial of emotional, mental, and psychological abuse. Her name calling, critisizing, controlling behavior, putdowns, and outwardness regarding my looks were very harmful to me. The more I think about this abuse the more I am bothered because I was not who she wanted me to be, I did not dress the way she wanted me she critisized me and abused me. She allowed others including my siblings to make comments regarding the way I dressed also. She also joined in when others were putting me down. This really hurts. It hurts me even more than it did back then because of her denial regarding the effect this abusiveness had upon me. It was never right for her to abuse me nor allow anyone else including my siblings to do so either.

As I had my own children and family I tried my hardest to make them feel loved psychologically, mentally, and emotionally but lived under a sheet of denial to a degree and i still somewhat live under that sheet of denial regarding my childrens emotional, mental, and psychological difficulties being because of my neglect of them. I believed that my constantly telling them I loved them, they were pretty and handsome, that they were speical made up for the neglect they were experiencing in my home by winessing domestic violence which included emoitonal, mental, and psychological abuse by both my husband and I towards eachother. I denied that our abuse of eachother caused any of the childrens issues. For my children to hear and see the manipulation, control, and verbal abuse they saw and me to believe that my childrens issues were not because of what they were experiencing in my home was absured and a big form of my denial and taking responsibilty for my childrens psychological abuse they endured. I sometimes still minimize there experience to a degree but also know the truth of the matter was I neglected my children and caused them psychological difficulties they battle and may always have to battle because of the effects of theior experiences in my home and my DENIAL.

Children are greatly impacted by parents denial. Denial hurts children and causes them more harm than it does the adults or so called parents. In a way to be in denial is neglectful to the children we are parenting and causes tehm harm.

To even be in denial regarding our own mental health issues or a childs mental health issues is neglectful and very harmful to a child. For so long I lived a denial to a degree regarding my psychological difficulties effecting my childrens psych but I now realize that my denial of my own mental health issues and the extent that my actions effected my childrens mental health was neglectful towards my children and hurt tehm greatly. When I was psychologically unstable I was not a good parent and anyone who believes their psychologicla difficulties do not impact a childs life is in DENIAL.

Being a parent in denial can greatly impact children for the rest of their lives and I am sorry i caused my children possibly to have life long difficulties because of my need to avoid the TRUTH.

I thought I loved my children but did not know how to love them. I thought I showed them what I believed love was but me being neglectful and and in denial was not loving them the way they deserved!

Letter I just sent to my therapist (was not the intention of me writing to her)

Things have changed and the agency has and still continues to go through many ups and downs. I understand to a degree that this is just a career to you. But why did you choose this career. People do not choose careers in this type of field for nothing. People do not decide they want a job full of stress and that desensitizes them emotionally to peoples pain for no reason. There are underlying reasons people choose a career in the mental health system that is not very rewarding on a personal level. Most people in your position choose the career they are in because of personal life experiences. So why then does it feel to me that your choice to be in your position is not a choice to you anymore. You do it just to do. It seems to me that there are expectations placed upon you that is interfering in your ability to meet the needs of the clients you have on your case load. Yes you work for a community mental health center and with that brings overcrowding and the need for more than the very few counselors that are employed by the agency but why is it that I feel that the counseling is no longer a priority. Why is it that clients continue to need services but yet the needed services do not get provided but yet other agencies provide more services than the agency which is the main agency of service to the client. Mental Health Supports should not be the ones providing my counseling as they are not the one being paid for that service, they are not the ones trained to the degree that you and community services are trained to provide. Do not get me wrong they are helpful and they also aid in my treatment but I feel my treatment through community services and specifically my therapy treatment is no longer important now that you are forced into doing more than your share of the services their at Courtland.

Have you lost sight of the reasons you chose a career in counseling? Is that no longer important? Do the clients not really matter as we are just a means to bring in more income and funding to the agency no matter how much less productive and how much less services truly are being provided.018153 is all I am to you and everyone else in that agency it seems to me. It feels as if there is no point to coming there anymore for treatment as I do not feel treatment is being provided on a needs basis but rather on a basis of case managing. There feels as if there is no therapy being provided and my life is no more important to that agency as it was to my abusers growing up. I feel I am just a statistic to that agency as of lately and that me as a human being is not really what is looked at. My needs do not get addressed. The agency needs gets more addressing than the clients’ needs. The clients need more services than the agency provides. The agency needs to stop cutting services out and stop limiting the needs of clients to the limited services they are willing to provide. Stop cutting services and instead build more services to help the clients like productive lives and lives that should be worth living. What progress has the agency made with DBT? Non that I have seen. Dbt instead in my opinion has gotten less productive and less structured than it was back when I first began DBT in 2006 at Community services. Instead of building up programs the agency wants to continue trying to cut out services and do less of mastering the services they claim to provide. They continue to sacrifice Mental Health treatment, groups, and services and fight to provide and maintain addiction treatment and services that are instead of improving just being used to claim as a service provided but is it really being provided and maintained to a level that it should be maintained and provided. TREM was started and is a much need group in the area as there is no other trauma related groups in this area but it was cut out and never maintained as it should have been. The funding was not placed on maintaining that group in the agency. DBT now is just a fly by no effort to place on group within the agency. The recovery enhancement group is no longer done and that was a group that help some and could be beneficial to many if marketed properly and maintained to a degree it should be maintained. IOP is a forever unproductive group that seems to need more structure and commitment placed on it from the agency. DBT core group was stopped and never again even given a second though to it. How you ever realized you have a voice and could really help people if you advocated to a degree of advocating as you are able to. Yes I understand you advocate but do you truly really advocate for services that are in place to be revamped and actually given the attention that is need for them to truly succeed in helping people succeed in their lives. And maybe you have and maybe you do I just have not seen it and do not see progress within the services provided through the agency. I have seen so many changes effect the agency as a whole and us clients but do not see them as helpful in maintaining stability.

There have been many services cut out of the agency and non that have replaced those services. The very same services that I was involved with that had been helpful to some degree in the past are the very services that have been cut out and given no attention to them to maintain or to reorganize them to a point where they can be used to provide much needed services in the greater Lynchburg and surrounding area. How is it that services can be shutoff and unmaintained as the services within the agency has. Do you even realize, recognize, or understand all that I see that has happened within the agency over the past years and if so how is it that you act unaffected and as if all this is not important and do not matter to you and you continue to come to work and not stand up for the needs of your clients or the community when you took the counseling oath you took. There are many reasons like these that make people in your position decide to get out and make them change career paths or get away from agency such as the one that is employing you but yet for whatever reason you continue to stay in an agency that does not appear to be concerned with services to clients or the community but just in maintaining staying open. The services has greatly depreciated and no longer even seems to feel as a service but it feels as just an in between place where you can go to get information regarding the services in the area and be pawned off to some other services but yet keep us as the main service providers on paper so we can keep getting funding for the lack of services we provide but refer you to any and every other agency around. Do you see the effects of the way the agency is run on clients? Does anyone see how these things have effected clients? Does it matter to anyone in the agency how I as a client and not just case 018153 is and has been effected by what has occurred within the confinements of the agency that you work for and they run.

I understand you are just one person, one employee there. I also understand that you are one voice that I believe could make a difference if that voice truly care about us clients as people and lives really worth that voices efforts. Yes maybe I am not the client that is worth your voice but realize and understand your voice is the voice that could be used to advocate for more than just someone like myself. The way the agency is being run it may be you or a co-worker who needs the services at some point. Then would your voice be worth using. Is it just that we, including myself are not worth your advocating for the needed services, maintaining of the services that are provided, and the improvement of those services. Could it be that a family member of yours or yourself or a coworker needed the services could that be a motivating factor in people in that agency maintaining, improving, or providing services. Does no one there see that we are not just people we are members of families, some of us are employees, some of us could be very productive services if people really put the time, effort, and confidence in us as they do their own families, and selves.

I guess I am going to stop this ranting and tangent and hopefully have made some important points and given you some things to truly think about as my motivation for writing to you tonight was to get some frustration out regarding my need for treatment, stability, care, support, hope, and help. I also intended on expressing to you my thoughts recently and how my actions have contributed to my underlying depression, but instead I have used this as a message to vent regarding stuff that is not going to matter to you or anyone else there and instead I have wasted my time, effort, thoughts, and energy on things that are important to me and hopefully others like me and never got into what I originally sat here to write to you about. I may choose to do that in a bit but need to take this time in this moment to reflect on all I have just contemplated and relayed to you in this message. I only hope that I have not made you feel unimportant, alienated, angry, frustrated, or targeted by my anger towards what is happening in your job and its effects it has on me. I do realize that you are doing your best at the moment but I hope I also have helped you to see that you can try to do more than you do instead of just sitting there taking orders from the people above I hope I have inspired you to use your voice as an advocate for people like me who do not or cannot always use their voices.