It was good though!
(this is Clog btw, name change in honour of yesterday’s extraordinary day in trans news)
I mentioned earlier that I had done a sort of therapy by proxy for my youngest - she was suffering from anxiety at trying to fit back into school after pretty much a whole
year off for serious illness. Not quite family therapy, but similar. I’m not sure what it was called but I will dig out the textbook the therapist gave me in a sec.
One of the aims was to better understand her behaviours and what the I acknowledged motivations were. My specifics are totally irrelevant to you (my littlest DD is primary age and was trying to stay home all the time! And refusing to cultivate any interests away from me, so the complete opposite of a run away teen) but the methods of unpicking and understanding are going to be similar and perhaps even the same). In my DD’s case, it was a relatively low level intervention (fortnightly for 12 weeks) to try and ward off school refusal (very very common in kids who have survived life threatening illnesses).
I’ve also done 6 months of MST therapy with my eldest, which is a really rigorous intervention (3 times a week for 6 months!) used as an early interview for youths at risk of criminal offending, he was 14/15 at the time and is now early 20s, with no criminal record. A definite success.
There were some overlaps between these two interventions.
My poor DstepD (the one who identifies as a boy) slots in between my two bio kids. Her trans identity began very shortly after her little sister reached remission for illness, and I believe it was at least somewhat motivated by a subconscious need to pull back some attention, to borrow a phrase from the quote above, to suck back some of the oxygen that the little sibling had been been using up for so long (and I mean that without any negative judgment on my DstepD, a seriously ill or profoundly disabled sibling uses up an awful lot of the family time, emotion and resources which must be really fucking hard when you are in a rapidly-changing-phase-of-life, such as the teen years. Probably didn’t help that we minimised the seriousness of the illness in a misguided futile attempt at ‘protecting’ her, and she was just ever so slightly too young to visit PICU or the Stem Cell Unit. Her experience of her little sister’s illness was probably one of impossible to understand overheard whispers and loneliness).
In children and teens (and probably adults too!) most behaviours are functional, in that the kid is getting something out of behaving that way, but it might not be the thing that we expect it to be. Often the kid/teen/adolescent/young adult unaware themselves, they are working on instinct, not logic.
It’s up to parents and professionals to find the logic behind the behaviour, and then, depending on the age of the child, you can find other ways to fulfil the underlying need and having that need met makes the negative behaviours lessen and fade.
This is much harder to implement when your young, wayward adult is out of the house, of course, but it should still be somewhat possible, as long as you maintain contact and keep in mind that a good outcome might not be her returning home, permanently, to live full time, it might be her going to uni but visiting home in the holidays as if this interlude at X’s house never happened, or it might be her becoming an independent young adult with a job who comes home on Sundays for a roast with a bag of dirty washing.
The economic situation has lulled some of us into thinking we will still have our kids in the family home in their late 20s, so we are shocked when our kids leave home in their late teens. 20 years ago it was completely normal. I certainly left home at your DDs age and never moved back and I had a great relationship with my late mum (she died when I was in my 20s).
Try and think about push and pull behaviours - what pushes your dd away from the family and what pulls her back towards you? eg if she’s likely to be shouted at or interrogated by dad on arrival home why would she put herself through that?
To be honest, I WAS partially motivated to move out at 17 because my dad was a difficult and controlling man (push factor) but I also wanted to live in a city with live music, rather than the boring village I grew up in (pull towards the bright lights of the city factor).
The potentially coercive relationship and the culty behaviour of the trans trend does make it a little tricky to unpack, but try and have a think about what the push and pull factors are for leaving home/identifying as male/picking x as a romantic partner.
and try and increase pull factors in the home using tips like the ones in the quoted post.
And get your husband to make his own lists of potential push and pull factors too, don’t take on all the emotional labour, he is clearly keeping himself up over it at night if he’s issuing instructions to you in the mornings so give him something productive to do! I totally understand the desire to problem solve, but you can’t solve the ‘dd unexpectedly moved out’ problem unless you figure out why moving out was something she felt she needed/wanted to do.
There are patterns and commonalities in all our stories but ultimately every family had it’s own unique pathway into this and every family will have it’s own unique pathway out.
I’m just a stepmum to a gender distressed teen (16) so I have a more backseat role than you do.
I respect her mum and try my best to be a support for mum and not cause any additional conflicts even when my opinion differs.
This means that while I can be pretty good at observing and unpacking the functional behaviours I am less effective at making the changes to meet DstepD’s subconscious needs via other means than I have been with my bio babies.
My DstepD’s mum speaks English as an additional language which adds another layer of complication, especially with all the strange language rules in transland!
Ultimately I will still love my DsD even if she goes on to medical/surgical intervention so while I would prefer she keep her perfectly healthy body as is (christ knows we’ve got a shit ton of experience of a child with an unhealthy body - I lived on hospital grounds in Ronald McDonald House for the best part of a year) nonetheless the door is always open and this will always be her (additional) home.
(I shan’t apologise for the length of this post, even though my female socialisation desperately wants me to!)
Which reminds me, are family expectations for your DD different to those for your son? And even if they aren’t, might they appear to be to a not-yet-fully-grown brain?
I’m sure my DsD looks at her big stepbrother and covets his relative freedom compared to hers.
This might, on the surface, appear to be an unfair difference, rooted in sexism (which can then be resolved by the functional difference of her ‘becoming a boy’) when really it’s because he’s 6 years her senior and I and her mum have different parenting styles, the boy/girl bit is irrelevant and gender transition changes nothing.