I hope you’ll keep the door open to writing more. No need for it to be long and tortuous. As a parent equally trapped, it’s helpful to hear how others are making their way through it, what insights they develop. Whichever direction you go in, though, I think the important thing is to keep the conversation going. I hope that someday the friends I’ve lost — am losing — will see how wrong they are, but there’s no chance of that if we’re silent.
If this writing is helping you I think you should keep writing. I find it very moving about the broader picture although I am not involved personally. I did however have a very young daughter with anorexia. I finally had to stop visiting her in hospital because I could no longer watch her commit suicide bite by bite. So I can relate to your anguish. It was not until I took that step, saying goodbye, that I slowly recovered and slowly slowly so did she. I'm not advising you, just telling you how the corner was turned.
Thanks for continuing your incredibly bold and necessary exposition of the horrors you continue to experience, and the exposure of the horrors of that which has become normalised and frequently unchallengeable.
I know how wrenching all this is. My husband's cross-dressing life descended on my family way back in 1992, when our sons were 1 and 4. I was the single mom, eating peanut butter on toast for dinner, socking away as much as possible, as my (now COO of a tech company) ex used fraud (made up low salaries) to get out of paying child support. I developed many anxiety symptoms. Now, my sons have been brainwashed (also working in tech) and won't talk to me because I refuse to change my past and use female language regarding the father of my children, who says he's also their mother. Except he doesn't mention me. I recently published a memoir, In the Curated Woods by Ute Heggen, available all over the world as an eBook. The writing process was wrenching, but all the stories stopped churning around the turntable in my brain. Amazon kindle first chapter free! I do a lot of gardening and half of the book is my healing through nature. 50 photos of the flowers and butterflies. I've lost old friends recently too. I don't believe in the diagnosis at all. It is body dissociation and complex PTSD. There are too many de-transitioners for the "born in wrong body" condition to be real and permanent. You might check in at my blog: uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com I say don't stop writing. Work to make it more concise, be poetic as you can. Be satisfied with a well-crafted paragraph. It's the psychologists and the doctors who swallowed queer theory and conflate homosexuality with this identity crisis and invent more and more identities to have power over the discourse. Take care of yourself. There will be good new friends who think like you. I've found some. Ute
Thanks Ute I'll check that out. I don't have any truck with the broad umbrella term "Gender Dysphoria". The reasons and motivations behind so many young peoples transitioning are exactly as you say - wide-ranging and complex. The term itself I believe relies on a lazy willingness to accept this broad definition because giving "it" a label somehow makes it more controllable/known/understood. I think in time the phrase will be understood to encompass a range of traumas, anxieties, disociations. delusions and disorders that ONE diagnosis was never ever going to come close to covering. Thanks for your support, I'm finding new friends all the time :-) x
Thanks, Denton. My last post on uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com is about finding emotional balance through movement, gardening and photography. You are in a tough, tough process of healing from estrangement of a child. You are an artist, you interpret the world, you contribute--don't forget that. It means a great deal to me that you replied. ooxoo, Ute
Thank you for all of what you have shared, Denton! I hope that you can find some peace. You have probably already tried therapy, and I imagine that your practice of art is therapeutic, but I hope you can find something like that that can provide some solace. I don't know whether you have listened to the Gender--A Wider Lens episode with Lisa Duval, but I have a feeling that that episode would be helpful to you because it seems to me like your daughter resembles mine and shares borderline personality disorder features. Please keep sharing your ideas in whatever way you can that provides healing and helps you find some semblance of peace!
Thanks Rebecca, really appreciate your thoughts. I've had my concerns for a long time about the similarities between our daughters behaviour and undiagnosed BPD. rather than research academic tomes and papers, I collected multiple accounts of the behaviours and symptoms experienced by people who had BPD already, and were understanding the nature of their condition, alongside anecdotal and recorded observations by clinicians. Without the chance to be in her life - for however long that may be - there's nothing I can do. She's been failed and abused by all the people around her in this affirming bubble. I have great difficulty finding any kind of peace with that at all, but I will and do keep trying. And part of that is being able to write about it. Thanks for dropping by
I get it, Denton--finding peace in the middle of this situation is hard-won, often fleeting, and always tenuous. It's so hard. It's painful--I do research and speaking on BPD and other personality disorders in young people, so it is especially hard for me to see my own kid with these patterns. If you ever want to talk about the BPD stuff, I am happy to talk. I'll even be in the UK this fall (for some reason, I think that is where you are based).
I hope you’ll keep the door open to writing more. No need for it to be long and tortuous. As a parent equally trapped, it’s helpful to hear how others are making their way through it, what insights they develop. Whichever direction you go in, though, I think the important thing is to keep the conversation going. I hope that someday the friends I’ve lost — am losing — will see how wrong they are, but there’s no chance of that if we’re silent.
Thanks Linoak, I won't stop writing, I'll just change the balance between words and images for a while :-)
If this writing is helping you I think you should keep writing. I find it very moving about the broader picture although I am not involved personally. I did however have a very young daughter with anorexia. I finally had to stop visiting her in hospital because I could no longer watch her commit suicide bite by bite. So I can relate to your anguish. It was not until I took that step, saying goodbye, that I slowly recovered and slowly slowly so did she. I'm not advising you, just telling you how the corner was turned.
I hope you can let go.
I've let go as far as it's possible to let go. I can never let go completely because that would mean the end of hope. And hope is what keeps us alive
Thanks for continuing your incredibly bold and necessary exposition of the horrors you continue to experience, and the exposure of the horrors of that which has become normalised and frequently unchallengeable.
Thanks David xx
Interesting, thanks for sharing your thoughts
I know how wrenching all this is. My husband's cross-dressing life descended on my family way back in 1992, when our sons were 1 and 4. I was the single mom, eating peanut butter on toast for dinner, socking away as much as possible, as my (now COO of a tech company) ex used fraud (made up low salaries) to get out of paying child support. I developed many anxiety symptoms. Now, my sons have been brainwashed (also working in tech) and won't talk to me because I refuse to change my past and use female language regarding the father of my children, who says he's also their mother. Except he doesn't mention me. I recently published a memoir, In the Curated Woods by Ute Heggen, available all over the world as an eBook. The writing process was wrenching, but all the stories stopped churning around the turntable in my brain. Amazon kindle first chapter free! I do a lot of gardening and half of the book is my healing through nature. 50 photos of the flowers and butterflies. I've lost old friends recently too. I don't believe in the diagnosis at all. It is body dissociation and complex PTSD. There are too many de-transitioners for the "born in wrong body" condition to be real and permanent. You might check in at my blog: uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com I say don't stop writing. Work to make it more concise, be poetic as you can. Be satisfied with a well-crafted paragraph. It's the psychologists and the doctors who swallowed queer theory and conflate homosexuality with this identity crisis and invent more and more identities to have power over the discourse. Take care of yourself. There will be good new friends who think like you. I've found some. Ute
Thanks Ute I'll check that out. I don't have any truck with the broad umbrella term "Gender Dysphoria". The reasons and motivations behind so many young peoples transitioning are exactly as you say - wide-ranging and complex. The term itself I believe relies on a lazy willingness to accept this broad definition because giving "it" a label somehow makes it more controllable/known/understood. I think in time the phrase will be understood to encompass a range of traumas, anxieties, disociations. delusions and disorders that ONE diagnosis was never ever going to come close to covering. Thanks for your support, I'm finding new friends all the time :-) x
Thanks, Denton. My last post on uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com is about finding emotional balance through movement, gardening and photography. You are in a tough, tough process of healing from estrangement of a child. You are an artist, you interpret the world, you contribute--don't forget that. It means a great deal to me that you replied. ooxoo, Ute
Thank you for all of what you have shared, Denton! I hope that you can find some peace. You have probably already tried therapy, and I imagine that your practice of art is therapeutic, but I hope you can find something like that that can provide some solace. I don't know whether you have listened to the Gender--A Wider Lens episode with Lisa Duval, but I have a feeling that that episode would be helpful to you because it seems to me like your daughter resembles mine and shares borderline personality disorder features. Please keep sharing your ideas in whatever way you can that provides healing and helps you find some semblance of peace!
Thanks Rebecca, really appreciate your thoughts. I've had my concerns for a long time about the similarities between our daughters behaviour and undiagnosed BPD. rather than research academic tomes and papers, I collected multiple accounts of the behaviours and symptoms experienced by people who had BPD already, and were understanding the nature of their condition, alongside anecdotal and recorded observations by clinicians. Without the chance to be in her life - for however long that may be - there's nothing I can do. She's been failed and abused by all the people around her in this affirming bubble. I have great difficulty finding any kind of peace with that at all, but I will and do keep trying. And part of that is being able to write about it. Thanks for dropping by
I get it, Denton--finding peace in the middle of this situation is hard-won, often fleeting, and always tenuous. It's so hard. It's painful--I do research and speaking on BPD and other personality disorders in young people, so it is especially hard for me to see my own kid with these patterns. If you ever want to talk about the BPD stuff, I am happy to talk. I'll even be in the UK this fall (for some reason, I think that is where you are based).