part of the reason i’m not still married to his dad is that his idea of bonding w his kids was bashing me. used to say- i ground them, and he comes home from work and takes them out for pizza.
he never actually did that, but he may as well have.

W R O N G !

Mental illness IS NOT a result of bad parenting!

Put simply, your son's brain is not wired in a way that makes relationships easy. He is accountable for his behaviors, but the trope of "bad parenting" (especially "bad mothering" ) persists in psychiatric mythology. It was the mis-guided core belief of behavioral science for centuries.

I speak from nearly 20 years on the same journey. What I have learned:

Protect yourself. Do what YOU must do to be safe.
Communicate and enforce clear boundaries in your relationship.
STOP any of your own codependent (enabling) behaviors.
Try to be involved in his treatment team if he has one.
Get help YOURSELF. You can not help him if you are not centered yourself.
Take an honest look at whether YOU are working harder on his recovery than HE is.
Live your life.

Hate the disease...not your son!
Parenting a child with behavior disorders is a really hard road. As hard as it is to believe sometimes, you are not alone.

I truly hope he finds a road to health and positive, appropriate relationships.

this group has gotten me through a whole lot of this mess, which has been brewing a long time.
got other kids w issues, too.

i’m not the sanest person who ever lived. but i’ve done a pretty good job of writing off those who shit on me, no matter who they are.

it does kill me here when some mi person does something tragic and many here jump on the ‘bash the mom’ bandwagon. and i know on my case it was more his dad’s inaction than my actions that did the damage. but that’s a hard case to make.

but yeah, the ghost of freud still reigns in the psyche profession to the detriment of many. my experiences therapy have been universally bad.

but threads like this make this the best cyberhome ever.

Sad thing is I probably inherited both of those tendencies from my dad and there wasn't much of anything my parents could have done to change that.

The truly crazy stuff I inherited from my mom's parents. They were wild things. In too many ways my mom had to raise herself, which is probably why, seeking some kind of structure in her life, she turned to religion as a young adult. She was a Jehovah's Witness when I was a kid until they booted her out because she wouldn't stay out of politics. After that we were Quakers. My mom is a Pacifist Catholic Social Justice Warrior at heart. In our family we joke that we are pacifists by necessity, not by any natural inclination.

My parents are both artists who had day jobs until they retired and became full time artists.

Sorry about your troubles. I have one brother with intractable mental health issues who is always making trouble of one sort or another.

Knowing what kind of trouble I myself was (and occasionally still am) there's not much my parents could have done to change his path.