Up and down and around

So it's been a couple of weeks and kiddo has met with the social worker twice so I thought I'd give a bit of an update. 

I spoke to the social worker last week and she seems to think that things are going well; that kiddo is doing the work she is asking her to do and that she's responsive.  She's not just sitting there like a lump.  At the end of the meeting las week, she asked kiddo if she wanted to go back and kiddo said yes so I think that is positive.  Even kiddo is starting to make little jokes about it.

On the downside, we've had a couple of outbursts relating to "I'm a horrible person, I'm a failure, I'm never going to amount to anything...".  In fact, one of the outburst was "I thought I was done with this and didn't care anymore - why am I caring?".  We try to handle these as calmy as possible and give her positive feedback, like "you are not going to be an expert ukelele player in one week, it's unrealistic to put that burden on yourself".  I'm not sure that our positive images are working but we are trying.

We had another outburst on Sunday and again we tried to turn it 'realistic'.  I'm realizing that positive is not the right word; we are really trying to help her see that she is placing unrealistic burdens and expectation on herself and becoming disappointed because she can't reach her goals. It's not her goals that are unrealistic, its her expectations surrounding her goals.  Again, you cannot expect to be an expert ukelele player in one week. 

But she is a fantastic actress; we thought the situation was diffused but she went ahead and cut herself that night.  I know because I found the evidence in her pjs and in her diary.  I've refused so far to read it but stumbled across it last week and she's marked when she has cut.  Sort of opened it yesterday morning and say the notation 'and now I'm going to go cut'... Didn't make me feel good let me tell you.

Anyway, we spoke to the social worker about how to handle and her first reaction was 'CRAP'.  We were to call her out on it (which we did) and see if she wanted to talk about it (she didn't).  In fact, kiddo completely shut down and refused to talk about it. In her opinion we were humilating her by talking about it and that she was never going to say the word, blah, blah, blah.  I have to admit that I'm a little pissed that she's trying to blame us for this.  I know we screwed up but I didn't put the razor blades in her hand - she made that decision on her own and she will need to deal with the consequences of that action.