If I can be candid I can recall my own maladaptive behaviour play out, a slow, but determined and purposeful self isolation. Things were bad at home, as bad as they can get. I shut down, turned off feelings and slipped in a self preserving and palatable version of 'blocked care', the nemesis of the 'therapeutic parent'. Not good but it worked, I kept going, one step in front of another. I don't drink but I can find my own version of maladaption. I withdrew at the very moment when everyone needed me to be present I couldn't be present and continue to meet the basic and essential needs. It was bloody awful and two years on we're in a new place.
Now, I can articulate what was going on. I've read the literature and understand my own response. Time and time again a come across parents who are slipping into strategies to cope that aren't great.
I'm not writing this to shame or blame but point out what I've seen.
These strategies can be the usual parental dysregulation or often I see parent slip into maladaptive parenting, authoritarian attempts to regain control or permissive parenting a giving up to find a safe way through the challenges. It can be staying up way too late or disappearing physically or emotionally. It can be a myriad of things.
These behaviours can compound the complexity of what professionals have to consider when are invited or are have to come into the situation. They immediately see parental behaviour, maladaptive behaviour, and perhaps identify that as the root cause of the challenges in the home. The parents are the problem and the children are responding accordingly.
It's a well worn path. Listen to adoptive parent Nicola's podcast, after years of immeasurable stress culminating in a high stress incident inappropriate words slipped out of her mouth, a maladaptive but understandable response to stress. She was then assaulted by her child to the point of serious physical injury and hospitalisation but the investigation was focused on her words. Not seeing them as maladaption, an inappropriate but understandable release of tension, but rather a justification for a child's behaviour.
Go listen here, you decide. That's an extreme example but speaks of the challenge many parents face, official systems meant to support not supporting or remain unavailable, children's challenging and violent behaviour continuing over long periods of time, family and friends withdrawing. Then isolation, adversity, vicarious trauma and trauma consuming all.
Parents repeatedly ask to not be judged and to be believed, that still holds true. Professionals need empathy and compassion, they need to work with parents to reflect on their parenting amidst supporting them to parent. It's not easy but certainly not impossible, a difficult but necessary conversation.