If you feel like you're in a lingering fog in your adoptive family, this is for you. If you're feeling these feelings of fear, obligation, guilt consistently in your relationships with your family within your family, within your household, you may be dealing with manipulation. Now it may be willful or not. That is not the point of this, this episode…but feeling like you're in a fog and being manipulated is not the place for you. It is not the place where you function best in your role — any of your roles — whether it's as mom or as spouse, as household manager, or whatever your role is. 

Another thing that could be going on, either separately or simultaneously is that you may be promoting those feelings of fear obligation or guilt in another person.  You may be doing that on the rebound in a reactive way to help yourself get free of the fog. You may feel like you're doing it for a good reason, to hold them accountable perhaps. But think about it… If you are trying to make another person feel consistently fearful, obligated or guilty, you may be the one doing the manipulating and not operating within emotional health. 

So you must decide; you must choose. Will you choose to be direct, honest and live with integrity?  This is what it will take in order to get you out of the fog first — the fear, obligation, and guilt. None of these help us build healthy relationships. None of them provide healthy emotional stability. For yourself, or for your children. 

 So ask yourself, are you acting in a way to promote fear, obligation or guilt in your children and your spouse? If so, stop it. Stop it right now. And you CAN do that — you CAN change gears. 

For example, it may be because you're feeling fearful yourself. So that's an area that you can work on within yourself as you let go and step back from these controlling measures, which is what it is, and deal with your own fears. 

If you're promoting fear, obligation or guilt in an effort to regain control or to establish control, maybe to keep yourself from drowning in the fog,  it's not the right type of effort. I want you to direct your efforts in a more beneficial direction. Because controlling someone else is not really the way to help yourself, either. And it's certainly not the way to help them. 

I remember many many years ago, when I was doing lifeguard training, being taught that when a drowning person is panicking they can also drown the rescuer the lifeguard, they can be panicking and thrashing and grabbing a hold of the rescuer or the would be rescuer to the point where it puts them in danger as well. Well, a lifeguard can't rescue a drowning person if the lifeguard is also drowning. So that was an important lesson to learn. 

As the parent, you may need to step away from the fog if you're being manipulated either by your child or by your spouse. Or by someone else in the in the mix in the relationships. And you need to step back so that you yourself are not drowning in the fog. And then you can decide how to proceed in a way that is not  panicking, but strategic; not thrashing about trying to control the other person through fear, obligation or guilt. 

We can't drive well through fog. We need fog lights so that we can see through it. And it's very difficult and treacherous to drive in a heavy fog. 

So pause, step out of the fog yourself first so that you can then see clearly to reach out and offer help to those around you: your family,  your household. I hope this helps

And if you’d like my help getting through your own fog of parenting in a complex adoptive family where there’s a history of attachment trauma and perhaps other complicating factors don’t hesitate to contact me to learn how to get started with post-adoption coaching.

Publishing this podcast & companion blog is one way that I stand in the gap for second moms with similar challenges to what I’ve gone through myself as an adoptive mom. 

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