You Know What You’re Doing

I was think­ing of what to write in regards to how your classes have helped and to be hon­est I don’t know where to start!

As you can prob­a­bly remem­ber I came to your Empow­er­ing Par­ents (now Par­ent Cham­pion) course when E was one year old, gosh three years ago now! I was tired, bro­ken and had no faith or con­fi­dence in myself. Com­ing from not a good home myself where I was men­tally, emo­tion­ally and phys­i­cally abused.

I wanted to make sure I did every­thing I could in regards to cre­at­ing a lov­ing sup­port­ive home for my fam­ily. I was told about your class and to be hon­est was ner­vous about join­ing because I felt ashamed of myself. I’m really glad I took the plunge because I got so much out of your dynam­ics and I have been bet­ter able to man­age some of his behaviours.

We have E being seen by a Clin­i­cal Psy­chol­o­gist in ASD and now he has been referred to CAHMS Tier 3 with an Occu­pa­tional Ther­a­pist, trauma spe­cial­ist and sen­sory room. They are look­ing at SPD (sen­sory pro­cess­ing dis­or­der), ASD more so along Asperg­ers because of his intel­li­gence. As even though he has had a few prob­lems since birth, along with a highly intel­li­gent mind, to add to what his half sis­ter did to him (sex­u­ally inter­fered) this made mat­ters a hun­dred times worse.

This in itself sent me over the edge because I was con­tin­u­ously stig­ma­tised hav­ing Bi-polar and Per­son­al­ity Dis­or­der for over re-acting about all the prob­lems and what was hap­pen­ing to him. As I said ear­lier I was com­pletely bro­ken and no con­fi­dence in myself to fight to prove that it wasn’t ‘in my mind’ and that my son really did need help.

I knew from age 14 that I needed to sort things out, that’s when I first started down the ther­apy road for men­tal health, to which I have used it to the full poten­tial and I now no longer need it. I can lead a nor­mal life where I’m back at work in a train­ing job I really enjoy.

When I came to your classes I felt totally unemo­tional inside, but strug­gled to show how bad the feel­ings were. I couldn’t believe I was lis­ten­ing to “ I can make a change, I can make it pos­i­tive”. To be hon­est at first, I felt I didn’t deserve to be a mother because nobody was help­ing me after con­stantly ask­ing. It was a strug­gle to get well, cre­ate a bet­ter fam­ily life and deal with so much drama.

Please don’t get me wrong, I had my break­downs, sui­cide attempts and self-harming etc. but when I was lis­ten­ing to what you were say­ing about we can make that dif­fer­ence. It def­i­nitely started to empower me to believe that I can make the dif­fer­ence and help my child. I was very ill when I was preg­nant with E, the stress of being poor, fam­ily abuse, both myself and my hus­band work­ing two jobs to live basi­cally and hav­ing Psy­chosis which started due to stress and los­ing my sons twin, it has been an extremely hard time.

E was born two weeks early and it was a very dif­fi­cult birth, I wasn’t treated well at the Hos­pi­tal. This left me so ill I couldn’t even go near my son for five months because I felt I would con­t­a­m­i­nate him, with how dam­aged I was. Adding to all of this we started hav­ing over night con­tact with my step-daughters, at my hus­bands request, as he wanted the whole fam­ily together. I can under­stand to a degree but I was so unwell and strug­gling to get peo­ple to see past me to see the early signs with my son. Unfor­tu­nately my hus­band was one of these peo­ple. I was made to feel iso­lated every time I spoke up, but using your knowl­edge gave me the strength to go in there and fight for my child.

For exam­ple, he has night­mares, head bang­ing (even in sleep), hears voices and sees peo­ple who are not there like you or I. He switches from this lovely great humoured lit­tle boy into a lit­tle boy with no emo­tions or feel­ings for oth­ers and will do any­thing to hurt peo­ple or bugs. He was refus­ing any female to come remotely near him, let alone wash him, he will claw at his own face or mine and flat down refused to eat.

So we were forced to place him back on bot­tle milk for three months, bit­ing, kick­ing, want­ing to kill every­thing, sit upside down, anger and aggres­sion — we would even have to bear hug him in the town cen­tre as he went into frenzy mode.

Now E still has his prob­lems but they have become a lot eas­ier, like you said change your way of think­ing, I hon­estly don’t always man­age it but the major­ity of the time it works. I have started to believe more in myself that I can make a decent life for my fam­ily and myself.

I feel that peo­ple should back you in every way with what you are doing, because you know what your doing and it’s effec­tive. It’s peo­ple like us that actu­ally want to be bet­ter for our­selves, and our fam­ily, that we place our trust in your teach­ing and it pays off. It’s just a shame for all the par­ents that miss out because they don’t realise the ben­e­fits of mak­ing a change in their life.”

Mrs GS, Par­ent, Kent