Telling teens why

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I guess I’ll be the odd one out here. I say don’t ease up on the jeans. But I only wear skirts to Mass, so I realize I’m a bit different than the others who have posted.

Why don’t I wear jeans (well, I’m 23 so not too far off from being “cool” I don’t think) but I wear skirts because I want to dress my best for the Lord. Do we wear jeans to weddings? Would you wear jeans to meet the Pope? Is not our Lord more important than these people? Why can’t we show respect by dressing nicely?

I think you become more lax on one thing and it only keeps getting worse.

Why shouldn’t she cut? Well, as a teenager I went through the depressed stage and wanted to hurt myself as well. But really, it doesn’t help. It changes the type of pain, but it won’t remove the pain that’s inside. Instead she needs to find another way to cope with that. I can’t tell how to cope as I don’t know what the pain is. For me it was my horrible self esteem. If I could go back in time I’d tell myself that I was beautiful and that it doesn’t matter what others think as God created me in His image. I’m beautiful. And that some day you will find a man who also thinks you’re beautiful.

Some people think she shouldn’t be an altar server because they are wanting the boys to step up and take those spots. They would like the men to lead. There will come a time when those boys will become men and will either become priests or single men, or married men. But they will need to know how to lead. I’m on the fence about this issue, so I can’t give more than that.

She shouldn’t hate her father because it isn’t right to hate others. Jesus loved even the worst of sinners, we are to act like Jesus.

Why should she eat more? Because, in actuality, men love women who have curves. They don’t want someone who is anorexic. They are biologically wired to want a women who is built with some curves, not bone skinny. You’ll be beautiful with more weight on you. And besides, food tastes good 😉

I went through some tough times as a teenager, and it isn’t that long since I’ve been one. So I’m not really the motherly figure. If you’d ever like to talk with me, just send me a message.
 
RachelKH said:
My 13yoDD wants to know why:
  1. why we go to Mass every Sunday?
  2. why she can’t wear jeans to Mass?
  3. why ‘emo’/‘cutting’ is bad?
  4. why some people think she shouldn’t be an altar server?
  5. why she shouldn’t hate her father from whom i am separated due to his bad behavior?
  6. why she should eat more/better to gain weight (5’4" 84lbs fully clothed) instead of being anorexic/bulimic?
    It is hard to get through to her about any of these things. Maybe your words would better reach her. Please help!
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I’m kind of a lurker here, but I’m going to answer to this post anyway.

I don’t think that she should be “made” to love him at all. I think that it’s very hard for a child to stop loving a parent, and I don’t think that it’s necessarily what she has done either.

Her father has been violating her and her privacy, and I can’t even begin to imagine how hurt she must feel! By saying that she hates her father, she is expressing that pain, and she should definitely be allowed to do so. It’s going to help her to recover from it.
 
smile2_me said:
By saying that she hates her father, she is expressing that pain, and she should definitely be allowed to do so. It’s going to help her to recover from it.
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Only forgiveness is healing. Hate and bitterness will not heal her heart. We are called to love everyone - and love is not a feeling, love is an action. It is not HOW we feel, it is WHAT we do. Expressing how she feels is indeed healthy, but it is not where she will find healing.

She needs to come to forgiveness - that may take awhile, but harboring hate and bitterness will never heal her heart.

~Liza
 
RachelKH said:
My 13yoDD wants to know why:
  1. why we go to Mass every Sunday?
  2. why she can’t wear jeans to Mass?
  3. why ‘emo’/‘cutting’ is bad?
  4. why some people think she shouldn’t be an altar server?
  5. why she shouldn’t hate her father from whom i am separated due to his bad behavior?
  6. why she should eat more/better to gain weight (5’4" 84lbs fully clothed) instead of being anorexic/bulimic?
    It is hard to get through to her about any of these things. Maybe your words would better reach her. Please help!
Click to expand...
13yo?
Because if you are not working hard, paddling upstream - every minute of every day, to get closer to God, you are drifting downstream to be dumped over the waterfall onto Satan!
 
lizaanne said:
Only forgiveness is healing. Hate and bitterness will not heal her heart. We are called to love everyone - and love is not a feeling, love is an action. It is not HOW we feel, it is WHAT we do. Expressing how she feels is indeed healthy, but it is not where she will find healing.

She needs to come to forgiveness - that may take awhile, but harboring hate and bitterness will never heal her heart.

~Liza
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I agree. It’s quite natural to have a feeling of anger, but the more we feed that anger the more it actually makes us feel good in away. Could be a realse of chemicals in the brain, I dunno know. But the point is if we don’t try to over come that feeling it’s going to continue and we won’t forgive. Some people just love the feeling of hatred, and that often continues for a long time and makes us bitter.
 
very interesting thoughts! just recently I had a very bad encounter w/ dh and spent a little time screaming and crying out my sadness/rage/bitterness alone in the car in the lonely dark. after that release of emotions, i was able to calm down and listen to God and others who are helping me through. i think i need to allow dd to verbalize her anger and betrayal and hurt, and then move on to the understanding and forgiveness from there. but yes, we need to be very careful to not get that ‘high’ from anger and use it to push out all good feelings and thoughts and stop us from growing and becoming stronger, better people because of our trials.
 
RachelKH said:
My 13yoDD wants to know why:
  1. why we go to Mass every Sunday?
  2. why she can’t wear jeans to Mass?
  3. why ‘emo’/‘cutting’ is bad?
  4. why some people think she shouldn’t be an altar server?
  5. why she shouldn’t hate her father from whom i am separated due to his bad behavior?
  6. why she should eat more/better to gain weight (5’4" 84lbs fully clothed) instead of being anorexic/bulimic?
    It is hard to get through to her about any of these things. Maybe your words would better reach her. Please help!
Click to expand...
These are great questions that most if not all kids ask at some point.
  1. Going to Mass every Sunday helps fill your spiritual hunger to get closer to God and The Holy Spirit. Some kids need time to mature in order to understand that.
  2. I’d rather see everyone in jeans than women with low cut shirts and guys with their paints barely covering the rear. I’d say pick your battles on this one, the cutting issue is certainly more important than attire.
  3. Harming yourself physically or starving to be anorexic/bulimic is never good. It’s ok to eat, and life is full of pain why cause more? Most emo kids say: “we cut ourselves to know we’re alive. if we feel pain, we know we’re still breathing”. That’s the thinking of a large majority of high school students that don’t necessarily consider themselves emo. It’s a larger problem than you’d think. What’s also interesting is, most of the kids I’ve run into that think this way have no religious beliefs whatsoever.
 
She needs a doctor fast, not just a counselor. A psychiatrist should be involved.

Anorexia is a dangerous and often deadly disease. I’ve been around figure skaters all my adult life and they tend to be thin, but not as thin as your daughter. 5’4" and 84 pounds means that her body is in a very precarious condition. Don’t wait to get her to a doctor. I’m surprised the counselor hasn’t told you this.

Cutting is another dangerous and sometimes deadly disorder.

What you’re describing isn’t just a rebellious phase like all other teenagers. This is serious, serious stuff, and your daughter is in danger of her life. With respect, you are not helping her by making an issue out of jeans and Mass attendance and by approaching this issue on a “moral” level. Those things don’t matter right now. She needs medical/psychiatric intervention. Please get it for her.

After she is well, which may take many months, THEN she will be able to understand the answers to the questions she is asking. Right now, it wouldn’t matter if the Pope himself explained the answers with angels hovering visibly next to him. Your daughter is dangerously ill and needs help. Stop debating with her and stop trying to treat this as just another teenaged rebellion phase and stop coming to an online site for validation of your own beliefs. Get medical help for her.
 
My parents’ business partners lost their daughter to an eating disorder. She wasn’t much younger than I am and my parents remember when she was born.

I agree with Cat. It doesn’t matter right now, about jeans and Mass. This is a girl who’s killing herself and who’s been scarred by her father. I’m surprised she’d willingly go to church at this point!
 
So you all know where we are now:
She is being admitted to the eating disorder clinic in a psych unit at a hospital, to get the help she needs. The special emotional problems school she attended for 2 months doesn’t feel she needs this, nor did her previous counselor, but the doctors I’ve changed to are in agreement that I am pushing for the right treatment. This has been taken seriously by me, but no one else thinks it is, so it has been hard feeling I’m doing the right thing. Right now the ekg and bloodwork all came back normal, so that part is ok.
Her dad insists that he is his looking is normal and natural and does not at all involve lusting about his children, which I don’t understand – how do your eyes seek out the breast and butt and not be getting something wrong??? – but anyhow, he is out of the home until the counselor thinks it’s ok.
She asks these questions, not in a confrontational way, but a questioning way – these are not battles as maybe they came across, just confusion and her wondering why. Of course if it were a battle, I would have to rethink and readjust and make us both ok with things. She doesn’t cut or throw up – just can’t eat. That is big enough. She loves God and defends her faith and can speak wisely about many things, but has messed up thinking on many areas, obviously, especially weight and men etc, and ‘sees fat oozing off people’ and is totally disgusted by it, so it is not even just herself she views unrealistically.
Prayers appreciated always.
 
Please get ahold of Teresa Tomeo’s work. She had an eating disorder herself, and has written for Catholic young ladies.
 
Good for you! You’ve made a courageous and wise decision, and may God help you and your daughter through the hard times.
 
RachelKH said:
which book?
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On dial up, so, my search is limited. You might want to send her an email at her website (google her name to find it - her radio show is called “Catholic Connection”) and ask what she advises.
 
RachelKH said:
My 13yoDD wants to know why:
  1. why we go to Mass every Sunday?
  2. why she can’t wear jeans to Mass?
  3. why ‘emo’/‘cutting’ is bad?
  4. why some people think she shouldn’t be an altar server?
  5. why she shouldn’t hate her father from whom i am separated due to his bad behavior?
  6. why she should eat more/better to gain weight (5’4" 84lbs fully clothed) instead of being anorexic/bulimic?
    It is hard to get through to her about any of these things. Maybe your words would better reach her. Please help!
Click to expand...
Many adolescent girls insist on continually wearing jeans/grungy clothing because they don’t feel safe wearing dresses because they were *not *safe wearing dresses because they were repeatedly sexually assaulted/sexually fondled as children and wearing dresses made that extremely easy for the perpetrator.

Most adolescent girls who do emotional cutting were sexually abused as children, sometimes even as infants, by sexually addicted, immature, and abusive caregivers, oftentimes their own *fathers *, often minimizing the issue and its effects on the child while silencing the child, and loudly proclaiming their denial, innocence, pious religiosity, and/or “normal and naturalness.”

Most girls who were sexually abused by their fathers as children end up feeling hatred or revulsion toward their fathers for good reason, and often don’t even have the adult words to express what happened to them as they were children at the time. Most repress/forget the memory in order to go on living and dealing with the parental incompetence and betrayal, but the issues will resurface problematically later in life in one form or another.

Most girls who were sexually abused as children end up anorexic/bulimic (or overweight), particularly at puberty, because they are desperately trying to physically suppress conflicting emotions by fasting them out (or stuffing them back down). It is an attempt to control the bodies and emotions that “betrayed” them as children, when they were in fact betrayed by those who were supposed to love and respect and protect them, and failed to. It can also be an attempt to avoid menstruation and pregnancy by one’s abuser. Anorectics do not menstruate.

Most girls who were sexually abused as children view the natural roundness of the female body, including the impending roundness of their own adolescent developing bodies as grossly revoltingly obese and disgusting. Womanhood and its attributes and problems are viewed as a disgusting curse when one was sexually abused as a child and experienced those problems as a child. It’s the “fat oozing off people” issue. Repeated washing/scratching/pulling out one’s hair to the point of removing one’s skin and hair can also become major issues, as can serious emotional cutting, drug use, and attempted suicide.
None of it is a matter of “thinking unrealistically.” It is a direct consequence of childhood sexual abuse.

The symptoms your daughter is exhibiting are extremely typical for any adolescent who suffered sexual abuse as a child.
The issue of “some people” not thinking she should be an altar server is clearly yet another direct assault upon her dignity as a female human being.
The issue of God, the father and priests, fathers, can also be a major one for anyone who has learned the hard way from one’s own father that fathers cannot be trusted

You are right to take these issues seriously. These issues should be taken very, very seriously.
If she is only anorectic and not bulimic, you can count it as one very small blessing. The bulimics tend to lose their teeth and their esophaguses from the repeated exposure to stomach acid, even if the rest of them survives. It’s not pretty.
 
Rachel, I wish I could give your daughter a hug right now…Let her know she’s got tons storming heaven for your entire family!

I’ll pray that your daughter sees herself as nothing less than the beautiful child God made her to be.

My dad does not agree with the Church teachings on sexuality but he would NEVER look at me or my sister like that. You’re right to take all these issues seriously.
 
sanctamaria17 said:
Rachel, I wish I could give your daughter a hug right now…Let her know she’s got tons storming heaven for your entire family!

I’ll pray that your daughter sees herself as nothing less than the beautiful child God made her to be.

My dad does not agree with the Church teachings on sexuality but he would NEVER look at me or my sister like that. You’re right to take all these issues seriously.
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I feel the same way, I wanna give her a hug too! I will pray for your daughter’s physical, mental, and spiritual healing. This is not something to take lightly, be strong and firm with this.
 
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