Dear bigglasses:

I appreciate you writing back. I am sure you felt uncomfortable reading my posts to you and that is why I admire you, once again, for starting and continuing this thread.

You wrote above: “I feel I’ve snapped out of it..” I understand you mean, snapped out, or stopped hurting your children with your words, shaming and rejecting them (“I hurt my children with my words, my reactivity and shame responses, I shamed them, and rejected them”)

This must be done. My compassion is first to the children because I know how very, very difficult it is to heal from being verbally shamed and rejected. And how easily these injuries in childhood can be prevented by the parent. Once you stop that kind of behavior and instead consistently comfort them, much healing can take place already in childhood.

I am sure that the moving around and other factors affected your older child before the behavior I focused on so far, responsible for his over sensitivity in earlier age. I believe every child is born with the predisposition to get overwhelmed with fear, and overwhelming fear, ongoing (anxiety) is in the core of most mental disorders.

Regarding compassion for you, I am ready to avail myself to it. I wanted to attend to first priority topic, which I already did.

You are in a very difficult situation and I have to believe there must be a way to make it better. There are a few factors:

1. The husband.
2. Your parents in the UK (and your own childhood issues)
3. Home (no longer moving so often)
3. Schools in the UK that you disagree with
4. Income/ work.

It seems to me that your husband is an irresponsible parent and husband and is useless to you as far as helping you live a better life. And it seems to me that you have issues with your parents, and if you live with them, you will be stuck there, emotionally. From the little info I have, I would cross husband and parents from my future.

I would think of applying for government help somewhere, if such is available, so you can be present at home to parent your children and not experience all that stress of full time work. Maybe in the UK, away from your parents. Maybe there is a way to find schooling in the UK for your older child or do with what is available (is there such a thing as “home schooling” as there is in the US?)

What do you think so far?

anita