Morning @Shaz51 .... 🤗💕
Pleased to meet you @Jesse2012 ..... 👋.... and welcome to the forums .....
Hiya @Appleblossom ..... 🤗🌸💕
Thought it was a better topic choice to answer you here .....
S2 had something of a collapse around three months ago under the stress of our situation. Turns out WH has Anosognosia, as yet undiagnosed, and the e.d. is as yet undiagnosed, but he had come down like a tonne of bricks on S2 when he realised he was faltering - instead of realising it was a breakdown, he just viewed it as failure and flew out of control with trying to control him out of it ....
S2 landed swiftly under a pdoc and just as swiftly WH was diagnosed ocpd ..... wow .... didn't know that was there ..... but the diagnosis extended beyond WH to his whole family. That is actually what I have been battling in the rest of them all these years .... it finally had a face and a name.
If you think of it as a spectrum, the e.d. triggered this to an extreme in WH where he wasn't like that before, at least not at home. His work environment supported this personality disorder, especially the workaholism aspect of it, but also the rest - the passive-aggressive, black and white thinking, need to control .... did I mention need to control ? Through-the-roof need to control ..... and emotionally aggressive .... with no insight into being unwell.
So ... it's all in the pipeline now. We have been referred to various therapists as family, couple, and S2 and WH as individuals. Both S2 and WH are reeling, S2 because he has been identified as having the same ocd / perfectionist traits, and under the constant pressure from his dad's illness, that internalised into GAD and depression .... but in one sense it's good .... he will learn from here how to recognise and drive his own nature to prevent this from happening again, and know that just because he has a lot of similarities with his dad, doesn't mean he has to go the same path into the same mi issues, which is in part what he had convinced himself.
Usually I don't take food to their room, but social anxiety featured large in S2's collapse, and I was really pleased that he extended himself yesterday, nit only taking me with him in a walk (rarely out of the house at the moment) but also stopped at a kiosk after first declining, and tried a new drink without me even suggesting it ... he has to climb back out of the box he retreated into, and this was a very good effort. That's one reason it was a big deal that he didn't respond aggressively to having his online gaming interrupted too.
