Apologies in advance for what’s likely to be a long post. I’m at my wits end and wondering what to do for the best.
our daughter has been seeing a registered therapist since February to help her address low mood, primarily, and anxiety to a lesser extent. She had some EFT therapy in the past after experiencing bullying and exclusion a couple of years ago when she was rejected by her friendship group after telling one of the girls in that she had a crush on her. The girl did not reciprocate and the whole group turned nasty. At this point our daughter overnight decided she was non-binary in an attempt to fix things with this group, which didn’t work. She remained non binary for around 18 months, during which time she stopped all extra curricular activities other than one dance class a week. She stopped being non again in December 2023, and has been with a stable friendship group for maybe two years now (though arguments and falling out are happening more often at the moment). We never affirmed nb identification as it seemed to be a reaction to trauma rather than anything else.
she started therapy in February this year due to having very low moods periodically. Her moods have got worse, not better, since then. The only time she seems to experience being happy is with friends (therapist’s approach when she first said this was basically “we need to enable you to spend as much time as possible with friends” which isn’t exactly practical, rather than trying to help her to find peace and wellbeing and enjoying other activities). At home she sits in her room all day doing nothing but be on her phone (screen time limited to 3.5 hours a day after regularly spending 8 hours on it) or Spotify, only emerging for meals or and snacks and making zero effort to engage with us or her younger brother.
She does not seem to be engaging in behavioural activation techniques suggested by the therapist, who only introduced them a couple of weeks ago after we said we were surprised to see no improvement in mood since starting therapy. When I questioned whether cognitive behavioural therapy might also help, especially as our daughter is an overthinker and likes writing, the therapist said teenagers have to engage in behavioural therapy first. I’ve never heard this before. I have no idea if she is encouraging our daughter to engage in the behavioural stuff, but we are not seeing any of it.
The therapist said yesterday in front of our daughter that she thinks we should do family therapy. I am surprised this was mentioned in front of our daughter as I think she will take away from that that we are in the wrong and that she doesnt have to do anything differently.
It is impossible to make any suggestion to our daughter about anything at all without her shutting down the conversation or shouting and slamming doors. She refuses to have any sort of physical affection from us to show love. And appears completely ungrateful for anything we do, and rude and dismissive.
when I told the therapist that I am worried that our daughter uses comfort eating as a mechanism to help cope with low mood (she eats really badly and way too much sugar) in th absence of any other techniques, she said we should let her eat what she wants as her perfectionist tendencies (which we don’t really observe) mean she could tip into restricted eating. I wasn’t very impressed with this. I feel the therapist should be helping her to develop healthy mechanisms to manage her emotions. Our daughter regularly says “nothing makes me feel any different/helps” so refuses to engage, this from a girl who used to do all the clubs going and have so much fun.
i am thinking of changing her therapist because we are seeing no improvement, and our family dynamics are much worse, since she started working with the current one. I am regularly in tears about how bad things are and worry that antidepressant medication is the only answer.
I also wonder about going down an ASD assessment rout
all we want is for our daughter to have some joie de vivre and self esteem back, and for us to have a loving relationship with her but this seems impossible at the moment
Thank you for reading this far if you’re still here, I would love any constructive comments that are made in a kind way as this is making me feel very fragile and heartbroken . I never thought we would be in this position.