I find with my son’s negative symptoms, I get upset when he’s so friggin messy. Spills, dirt, ash, hygiene, you name it. If I was to harp on everything I believe it would make him feel worse about himself than he does, so I let most of it go and go insane myself instead. I am going to get a dry erase board, hang it in his room and put daily things to do on it, we will see how that works for the weekends that he’s home. Any other ideas about getting my kid to meet appts. go to activities, etc. without becoming a constant nag.?? We are having him home weekends and discharge is coming.
I try to ignore poor hygiene, and my son at least has reached a point where, if he has let it go, he realizes he might be stinky!
I don’t tell my son too far in advance about appointments - it typically didn’t help anyway. A day or two before, I will bring it up and establish a time we will leave - but often I include a cushion in there for him to be slow to respond.
Might try establishing a ‘zone’ in which his mess is okay, and encourage him to do things that might leave a mess in that zone.
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At Family to Family they told us we could expect them to be able to do one thing a day. Was one of those “room went really quiet” moments.
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Even if on medication? Still only one thing a day?
I found that to be true. I pushed, prodded, nagged, etc but in the end it doesn’t work. All it does is make my daughter feel awful about herself. My daughter is mi and her brain doesn’t work like mine or her sisters. In the last few months it dawned on me that expecting too much creates a lot of anxiety in her and she does try to to do what I ask but she can’t. It’s like asking a person in a wheelchair to walk but I will never have her live with me again. It’s just too much.
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The didn’t say it was any different between medicated and unmedicated. I would have to think it might depend on how well the meds worked? The one thing everyone agrees on is that stress makes their illness worse.
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One of my friends can’t live with her daughter either. The daughter choked her until the family dog intervened. The daughter constantly promises to kill her mother and her younger sister. The day she tried was the last day she lived with them.
One of the class leaders suggested we try to think of how much we would expect a severely ill cancer patient to do each day. I once saw a cartoon that helped me understand better. The young woman in the picture is holding an umbrella in the rain. The whole thing is done in shades of blue. The caption was: “Do not confuse my bad days as a sign of weakness. Those are actually the days I am fighting my hardest”
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@hope. I love the quote: " “Do not confuse my bad days as a sign of weakness. Those are actually the days I am fighting my hardest”
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