Unbreakable Bad Behavior

Posted by fxckfeelings on May 20, 2009

Everybody has bad habits, but nail-biting is one thing, theft is another. When someone has a habit that is so obviously awful, we’re certain that such bad habits must have an equally obvious and easy fix. These cases show that what isn’t true for junkies also isn’t true for pyros– bad habits are hard, if not impossible, to break.
-Dr. Lastname

My husband and I have tried everything, but we can’t get my stepdaughter to stop stealing. It started with shoplifting at the mall—clothes, jewelry, even shoes a couple of times—but once she got caught and actually sent before a judge, she did some community service and hasn’t shoplifted since. So now she just steals from us. She started sneaking into our bedroom and lifting money from our wallets. When she ignored our punishments and wouldn’t stop, we put a lock on our door, so she started stealing anything else she could get her hands on (and some things, like DVDs, she’d then sell so she could go back to the mall to buy things she used to steal!). She’s not my daughter biologically, but I’ve been married to her father since she was a toddler, so this isn’t acting out due to a divorce. Still, neither her father nor I can control her, and if we do somehow get her to stop stealing from us, I’m afraid she’ll go back to stealing from others and wind up in jail. I just want her to stop.

Sometimes you can’t get kids to stop stealing and they can’t stop themselves. It’s a sad truth that parents and therapists and tough judges and kind reformers don’t have the answer. We all know nice, concerned, fully functional parents who have out-of-control kids. Kleptomania is just nature’s little present to your offspring.

I don’t mean to suggest that we should ever stop trying to help our sticky fingered children stop stealing, but if you expect them to stop, or expect yourself to get them to stop, you can drive them crazy, the stealing gets worse, and you’ll sink into feelings of failure at a time when you need to persevere and stay strong for the long haul.

Treatment sometimes helps kids stop stealing, and so does punishment; it’s tempting to believe that any method that helps sometimes will do more if it’s done right. It’s also tempting to believe we should be able to understand stealing and that understanding is the key to control.

So when nothing works, we’re sure we’ve used the wrong treatment or inadequate treatment or failed to understand, or that it’s the other guy’s mistake, and we need to change the mind of, or get rid of, the other guy in order to save the child.

That’s why it’s important to accept the possibility that you can’t necessarily stop stealing, understand why, or find a treatment that works. Your goal isn’t to stop the stealing; it’s to try to stop the stealing.

Saying this is not defeatist, because you can’t be defeated by a storm or earthquake as natural forces don’t fight you since they don’t even know you exist. You succeed by trying to survive, not by yelling at them or rating your results.

It sounds like you’ve tried everything to understand her and change her behavior. If that’s right—and you and your husband are the ones who know this best—prepare to accept the fact that you love a kid who steals, you can’t stop her, and there is, almost certainly, in the plainest terms, a great deal of pain and danger and humiliation in your future together.

To accept this awful prediction is to accept that you carry a much heavier parenting burden than most parents…and that you’re doing a good job with it. You will not feel like you’re succeeding, because pain never feels like success, but if you’ve ever read this site before, you know I think those feelings are to be ignored.

What all parents know is that loving and caring for a child who steals is one of the toughest jobs in the world and is its own success, a much higher success than loving a child who achieves and behaves.

So respect yourselves, dig in, and pay attention to the rest of your lives. Keep trying to help, but don’t bother with things you know won’t work. Try anything and everything, but don’t keep trying something that makes things worse. Use your power whenever it might do some good, but don’t expect her to change. Stay positive about the possibility that she will change. Tell her you love her and that you hope that she’ll gain better control some day. And, if the shit hits the fan, at least promise to visit her in jail.

STATEMENT:
Prepare a statement to protect yourselves, and her, from feelings of failure. “We will try to help you stop stealing. We believe there’s a part of you that knows stealing is wrong and doesn’t want to get people angry or make them mistrust you, but you can’t stop and we can’t make you. We’ll create rules to help you control your impulses and we’ll try to follow-up on those rules. We’ll ask other people to help us. We’re a good family with a bad problem. And, however long it takes, we’ll get through this.”

My whole life, my mother’s had a habit of lying to other people, usually to elicit a reaction. She’s not exactly crazy, because she’s been a good mother, is a respected professional, has friends—but the fact is that she frequently says things that are patently untrue, often with the purpose of provoking people. For example, my sister and her husband had their car towed in a snowstorm, and when she retold this event, it was that her daughter and son-in-law were car-jacked in a bad neighborhood and left to freeze to death. I invited an old school friend to join us for dinner, and my mother told this friend that I was in love with him when we were teenagers, which is absolutely not the case (as he well knows—I was one of the first people he came out to!). I hate to call my mother on her lies in public, because I don’t want to humiliate her, and besides, she’d never admit she’s lying anyway. It drives me totally crazy though, and frankly, I’m kind of ashamed of her at this point. I guess I want to get through to my mother, maybe figure out why she does this, let her know how much it bothers me—ya know, tell her the truth.

I don’t know if you’ve known other dramatic liars, in addition to your mother, but, if you have, you know it’s not an easy behavior to stop (much like, say, stealing). If you think there’s an answer to why your mother lies, then there would be a solution and, usually, there isn’t.

Her kind of lying floats on the emotions of the moment, which makes them more intense, and that intensity denies any concerns about your disgust or the loss of her credibility. If the dramatic version of events is more interesting than what really happened, it seems more real and true to her and she believes what she says.

And then, after the conversation is over, what she said is gone from her mind; she lies without thinking, and she lies without remembering. That makes your goal even more impossible, since it’s hard to make someone stop something they aren’t even aware they’re doing.

If you could study her with new brain imaging techniques, I bet there would be a characteristic picture of her brain during a “confabulatory performance” that would look different from the brain of a cop giving a factually accurate description or the brain of a crook lying deliberately. We’ll never know, because it’s hard to capture such a spontaneous event, but my guess is that it’s in her brain and bypasses choice. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were linked to genes that are common among people who are creative storytellers, actors, and politicians.

Your goal isn’t to change your mother’s bad habit, because doing so will stir up trouble and prevent you from feeling like a good person. Your mother’s lying humiliates you and makes you feel bad about being her child, and these feelings cry out for expression, relief, judgment, and intervention…which is why, naturally, you should ignore them. Once again, they’re like a fart: quick relief now, lingering stink later.

Your goal is to accept embarrassment as the cost of a close family relationship with someone you love and can’t stand. It’s to come away feeling like a good person. Because the real truth is that your mother is never going to change.

STATEMENT:
Compose a statement to insulate your good goals from the bad feelings you will nevertheless have to endure. “I wish I could stop my mother from lying and humiliating me, but I can’t and neither, probably, can she. Time with her is often painful. I’ll spend some time with her if it will do good for her, me, or other family members, because I believe that’s important, but it will probably stir up disgust and embarrassment that I wish I didn’t feel. I’ll try to take pride in doing positive things when the feelings are so negative.”