Emily's Playground aka Let's Process our Feelings III

Been frustrated with my coach/boss because of my illness. He’s requiring that I have a doctor’s note before I can go back to any sort of training.

Considering that I benched myself, that the doctor basically told me to rest, never confirmed that it was indeed mono (unfortunately mono tests are falsely positive about 20% of the time) I’ve been really ticked about his reluctance to let me at least do some bodyweight training around my teammates.

At the same time: my girlfriend has decided to spend an indefinite period of time in California. She’s from Alabama, born and bred, went to UA. We met on a missions trip in Los Angeles and have been together about two years. She’s getting a little resistance from her family (they’re very, very close-nit).

To deal with my OCPD and anxiety I’ve started going back to an LCSW, basically just for talk therapy. My fear of failure has started getting in the way of my coaching a bit.

[quote]biker wrote:
As long as you over budget costs, expect inevitable delays, and keep laughing, you’ll both be fine. As the 8th generation to live in my house I have ample renovation experience even though I’ve only lived in it 32 years. Heavy doses of laughter do work.

Good luck with the renovation. [/quote]

Thanks! We’re doing it ourselves, so we’ll have some control of budget. The main problem right now is keeping the plan reasonable - not deciding that we might as well add a second story onto the garage for pingpong and air hockey tables since we’re disrupting everything anyway. There’s been a lot of "while we’re at it we may as well. . . "

When we decided to do it this year we talked about the emotional piece. Once we start, he’s going to be impatient to finish, and undoubtedly impatient with me since I’m unskilled and thus will be a pain in the ass for him to work with. He’s an easy going guy, generally, very cheerful and upbeat, but when he’s focused on work he’s laser-focused. I worry about that, but we’ve talked a good bit about it (will it sound like he’s yelling at me, will I react badly to that) so hopefully that can be framed in a humorous light each night when we put down tools and reconnect.

The money piece should be fine. We’re banking my salary entirely at this point and have a pretty generous budget. A greater consideration is whether the house will be worth what we put into it if we go too crazy. On the other hand, if we do go crazy and love our overvalued house does it really matter what it’s worth on the resale market? (Well, sort of, yes. lol)

I’m looking forward to it all. A challenge, and then at the end what I think will be the worlds best kitchen and eventually a more workable mudroom, laundry area, and master suite.

My kitchen, though. OMG, it’s going to rock so much. I live in the prettiest place on earth and the back wall will be all windows. We’ll have a sitting area in front of the wood stove, which can be opened up and a screen used for a fireplace effect. Plus appliances and all. But the wall of windows and cozy fire are my main things. Oh, and the screened porch. We have one now, and I adore it. I’ll adore it even more when it’s attached to the new kitchen rather than a 35 year old one.

Like LoRez, Hockey is chuffed about cooking hardware. Should be a nice arrangement for us both!

[quote]nkklllll wrote:
Been frustrated with my coach/boss because of my illness. He’s requiring that I have a doctor’s note before I can go back to any sort of training.

Considering that I benched myself, that the doctor basically told me to rest, never confirmed that it was indeed mono (unfortunately mono tests are falsely positive about 20% of the time) I’ve been really ticked about his reluctance to let me at least do some bodyweight training around my teammates.

At the same time: my girlfriend has decided to spend an indefinite period of time in California. She’s from Alabama, born and bred, went to UA. We met on a missions trip in Los Angeles and have been together about two years. She’s getting a little resistance from her family (they’re very, very close-nit).

To deal with my OCPD and anxiety I’ve started going back to an LCSW, basically just for talk therapy. My fear of failure has started getting in the way of my coaching a bit.[/quote]

Is it easy enough for you to get to the doctor? (Insurance and all?) I work at a family practice and I think my people would print off a “return to work/school” letter without any fuss, and possibly without being seen. I think you should just quickly jump the hoop and not worry about it.

Are you in LA? I’m confused whether you’re getting more girlfriend, or less. Are you glad?

Therapy is always a good idea when people who struggle with anxiety and ocd stuff start boiling over. One thing I really like about my current practice (I’m an LICSW) is that people can come and go - I don’t have to close cases. So when things are smooth they drop out and when they get overwhelmed they can come back in for support. It’s a nice setup.

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:

Thanks! We’re doing it ourselves, so we’ll have some control of budget. The main problem right now is keeping the plan reasonable - not deciding that we might as well add a second story onto the garage for pingpong and air hockey tables since we’re disrupting everything anyway. There’s been a lot of "while we’re at it we may as well. . . "

[/quote]

Pretty woodburner, I have never seen a smokestack like that, it doesn’t seem like it would draw well.

How about a 30/60 Gambrel (barn) roof? You lose a bit of floor space on the second story but don’t have the added expense of walls. Takes more roofing materials though.

I so wish my dad had put this kind of roof on our cabin.

Your guy’s patience is going to pay off.

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:

[quote]nkklllll wrote:
Been frustrated with my coach/boss because of my illness. He’s requiring that I have a doctor’s note before I can go back to any sort of training.

Considering that I benched myself, that the doctor basically told me to rest, never confirmed that it was indeed mono (unfortunately mono tests are falsely positive about 20% of the time) I’ve been really ticked about his reluctance to let me at least do some bodyweight training around my teammates.

At the same time: my girlfriend has decided to spend an indefinite period of time in California. She’s from Alabama, born and bred, went to UA. We met on a missions trip in Los Angeles and have been together about two years. She’s getting a little resistance from her family (they’re very, very close-nit).

To deal with my OCPD and anxiety I’ve started going back to an LCSW, basically just for talk therapy. My fear of failure has started getting in the way of my coaching a bit.[/quote]

Is it easy enough for you to get to the doctor? (Insurance and all?) I work at a family practice and I think my people would print off a “return to work/school” letter without any fuss, and possibly without being seen. I think you should just quickly jump the hoop and not worry about it.

Are you in LA? I’m confused whether you’re getting more girlfriend, or less. Are you glad?

Therapy is always a good idea when people who struggle with anxiety and ocd stuff start boiling over. One thing I really like about my current practice (I’m an LICSW) is that people can come and go - I don’t have to close cases. So when things are smooth they drop out and when they get overwhelmed they can come back in for support. It’s a nice setup. [/quote]

The hoop is my coach wants a definitive "he can start workouts that are x min long at y intensity, from a doctor who hasn’t actually formally diagnosed me. Because of my symptoms and the lump in my neck, I’m in a wait and see period to see if it all goes away. If it doesn’t I’m pretty sure the next step is a Complete Blood Count. I just want to lift as a stress release. Plus, since I’m not lifting, and my teammates are all adults obviously, the lack of training with my team has taken away from a good portion of my support structure.

I’ll be seeing more of my girlfriend. I live in Southern California. I’m very glad because this will be the first time since we started dating that we’ll be living within 2000 miles of each other.

Yeah, that’s what I liked about my old LCSW. Went back to him on and off for about 9 or 10 years. He recently retired and referred me to another one he has faith in. Our first session was pretty good. Will see her again on Monday so I’m looking forward to that.

[quote]Testy1 wrote:

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:

Thanks! We’re doing it ourselves, so we’ll have some control of budget. The main problem right now is keeping the plan reasonable - not deciding that we might as well add a second story onto the garage for pingpong and air hockey tables since we’re disrupting everything anyway. There’s been a lot of "while we’re at it we may as well. . . "

[/quote]

Pretty woodburner, I have never seen a smokestack like that, it doesn’t seem like it would draw well.

How about a 30/60 Gambrel (barn) roof? You lose a bit of floor space on the second story but don’t have the added expense of walls. Takes more roofing materials though.

I so wish my dad had put this kind of roof on our cabin.
[/quote]

I’m no expert on wood stoves or their needs, but this one worked well this winter. We were able to easily heat the house with it and it wasn’t at all hard to get going after a 12-hour work day.

I think a gambrel garage would look odd attached to this house, which is a saltbox. We’re also talking about leaving the current garage be and instead building a separate barn/garage with an upstairs party room. But who knows? We could do anything at this point.

[quote]nkklllll wrote:

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:

[quote]nkklllll wrote:
Been frustrated with my coach/boss because of my illness. He’s requiring that I have a doctor’s note before I can go back to any sort of training.

Considering that I benched myself, that the doctor basically told me to rest, never confirmed that it was indeed mono (unfortunately mono tests are falsely positive about 20% of the time) I’ve been really ticked about his reluctance to let me at least do some bodyweight training around my teammates.

At the same time: my girlfriend has decided to spend an indefinite period of time in California. She’s from Alabama, born and bred, went to UA. We met on a missions trip in Los Angeles and have been together about two years. She’s getting a little resistance from her family (they’re very, very close-nit).

To deal with my OCPD and anxiety I’ve started going back to an LCSW, basically just for talk therapy. My fear of failure has started getting in the way of my coaching a bit.[/quote]

Is it easy enough for you to get to the doctor? (Insurance and all?) I work at a family practice and I think my people would print off a “return to work/school” letter without any fuss, and possibly without being seen. I think you should just quickly jump the hoop and not worry about it.

Are you in LA? I’m confused whether you’re getting more girlfriend, or less. Are you glad?

Therapy is always a good idea when people who struggle with anxiety and ocd stuff start boiling over. One thing I really like about my current practice (I’m an LICSW) is that people can come and go - I don’t have to close cases. So when things are smooth they drop out and when they get overwhelmed they can come back in for support. It’s a nice setup. [/quote]

The hoop is my coach wants a definitive "he can start workouts that are x min long at y intensity, from a doctor who hasn’t actually formally diagnosed me. Because of my symptoms and the lump in my neck, I’m in a wait and see period to see if it all goes away. If it doesn’t I’m pretty sure the next step is a Complete Blood Count. I just want to lift as a stress release. Plus, since I’m not lifting, and my teammates are all adults obviously, the lack of training with my team has taken away from a good portion of my support structure.

I’ll be seeing more of my girlfriend. I live in Southern California. I’m very glad because this will be the first time since we started dating that we’ll be living within 2000 miles of each other.

Yeah, that’s what I liked about my old LCSW. Went back to him on and off for about 9 or 10 years. He recently retired and referred me to another one he has faith in. Our first session was pretty good. Will see her again on Monday so I’m looking forward to that.[/quote]

I still think you can talk to your doctor about it. Most of them are not interested in preventing you doing something no one told you not to do. The notes where I work say:

[Patient’s Name]

__is __is not

Cleared to return to work/school as of ____.

Signed,
Whomever, MD

Even I am qualified to sign off on the things.

It doesn’t hurt to ask.

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:

I think a gambrel garage would look odd attached to this house, which is a saltbox. We’re also talking about leaving the current garage be and instead building a separate barn/garage with an upstairs party room. But who knows? We could do anything at this point. [/quote]

I see, I thought it was a separate outbuilding.

Been out of GAL for awhile, and looks like I missed tractors and renovation plans.

We’re pretty well settled on the idea of having a house built at this point. We even found an unlisted lot that we’ll probably buy; already talked to the owner, and while it’s available, he’s in no rush to sell it. That gives us some time to figure a few things out in terms of house plan and builder, and it gives some constraints and direction to the design.

That said, we’ve spent a lot of time with pen and paper, and now keyboard and mouse, just playing with various design ideas. There’s no real sideyards on the houses in the neighborhood, so we’re trying to maximize windows and living areas on the front and back of the house, and storage/utility stuff on the side. A lot of our initial paper planning ideas didn’t survive the home design software, once we saw how things really worked in proportion to each other.

The 3D modeling has been really useful to get an actual “feel” for how things would work. There are tons of 3D models of furniture and appliances and such out there, and you can just plug it right in. That’s been pretty useful for space planning too, since you can answer stuff like “well, if we have the kitchenaid out all the time, and keep it over here, how does that affect things?”

It’s still pretty much revolving around the kitchen, and working out from there. After pricing a few things out, I think we’re actually going to just go with a cooktop and double wall ovens. That also makes it easier to separate the different work flows, so that food prep, cooking, baking, and cleaning can all be done at the same time without running into each other. Still haven’t settled on anything, but we have gotten some ideas figured out.

A lot of what we’re trying to do is get a better understanding of what will and won’t work for us. That way we can go to an architect or builder with a few plan ideas, and have them tweak from there (or just select an existing plan of theirs that captures those same ideas).

Plus, you can do some renderings and stuff.

The 3D is nice. We’re lucky in that we can move around our space (and onto the back porch, which will ultimately be part of the kitchen) looking at where things will be relative to each other. We’ve turned the kitchen table the couple of ways it could go to see what we think, opened the pretend fridge, and hung out at the site of the proposed window seat to see if someone sitting there would be conversant with people who are cooking or whether it would just be a wasted space.

It’s a lot of fun. My ex-husband and I built (had built) a custom house, which process I enjoyed very much. I’m apprehensive about this business of US doing the renovation, but Hockey has been making noises about making sure I have plenty to occupy me this summer, which makes me think he’ll be kicking me out of the way. Which is A-OK by me! Just let me know when I can start putting the dishes away. . .

Em, I have a question:

Let’s say I’m a parent and I have two children, one is 13 and the other is 7. It doesn’t matter how, but I find out that the 13 year old has on 3 occassions inappropriately touched the 7 year old.

I want to seek a professional’s help for both children. Is it possible to do so without the 13 year old entering the legal system?

[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
Em, I have a question:

Let’s say I’m a parent and I have two children, one is 13 and the other is 7. It doesn’t matter how, but I find out that the 13 year old has on 3 occassions inappropriately touched the 7 year old.

I want to seek a professional’s help for both children. Is it possible to do so without the 13 year old entering the legal system?[/quote]

That’s tough. I’m not sure - the therapist will be mandated to report, so into the system it goes. However, at 13 there shouldn’t be criminal charges, just cps/dcf involvement. My experience has been that they’ll be after counseling for both kids, which matches your goals, so should be okay.

However, I’m the first to admit that DCF is unpredictable and hence frightening.

I’m so sorry this is happening. I would note that through my exposure to so many people I’ve come to an awareness that it happens all the time. I’m going to guess off the top of my head that 25% of people you encounter have had some experience of it. The key to dealing with it emotionally for both kids seems to be openness and an attitude of “hey, it happened, it’s not going to happen again, and we’re all okay.”

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:
I’m so sorry this is happening. I would note that through my exposure to so many people I’ve come to an awareness that it happens all the time. I’m going to guess off the top of my head that 25% of people you encounter have had some experience of it. The key to dealing with it emotionally for both kids seems to be openness and an attitude of “hey, it happened, it’s not going to happen again, and we’re all okay.” [/quote]

Thank you, but it’s just a hypothetical. All the news around the Duggar’s had me thinking about what I would do if it did effect my family.

I assume the older the abuser gets, the more likely the legal system would be involved. At some point, a parent would have to ask themselves if it’s worth branding their child as a sexual offender in order to get professional help. I could see arguments made on either side.

[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:
I’m so sorry this is happening. I would note that through my exposure to so many people I’ve come to an awareness that it happens all the time. I’m going to guess off the top of my head that 25% of people you encounter have had some experience of it. The key to dealing with it emotionally for both kids seems to be openness and an attitude of “hey, it happened, it’s not going to happen again, and we’re all okay.” [/quote]

Thank you, but it’s just a hypothetical. All the news around the Duggar’s had me thinking about what I would do if it did effect my family.

I assume the older the abuser gets, the more likely the legal system would be involved. At some point, a parent would have to ask themselves if it’s worth branding their child as a sexual offender in order to get professional help. I could see arguments made on either side.
[/quote]

I was thinking about this on the way to work - if I were advising someone, I would say they should retain an attorney, just in case, who is prepared to fight whatever CPS might do, THEN find a therapist who can work with the family.

But yes, both kids need help, and secrecy is one of the worst things a family can engage in. It fucks people up.

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:

I was thinking about this on the way to work - if I were advising someone, I would say they should retain an attorney, just in case, who is prepared to fight whatever CPS might do, THEN find a therapist who can work with the family.

But yes, both kids need help, and secrecy is one of the worst things a family can engage in. It fucks people up.[/quote]

As a mandated reporter, do all cases of child sexual abuse have to be reported, or only if the child is in imminent danger? For instance, what if a family came to you and said, “our 15 year old touched their younger sibling inappropriately and we’d like your help. We’ve sent the 15 year old to live with their uncle (who has no children) a few miles away.” Would this need to be reported?

I understand the concept behind mandated reporters, but can’t help but think it discourages some percentage of people from getting help they need and would otherwise seek.

[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:

I was thinking about this on the way to work - if I were advising someone, I would say they should retain an attorney, just in case, who is prepared to fight whatever CPS might do, THEN find a therapist who can work with the family.

But yes, both kids need help, and secrecy is one of the worst things a family can engage in. It fucks people up.[/quote]

As a mandated reporter, do all cases of child sexual abuse have to be reported, or only if the child is in imminent danger? For instance, what if a family came to you and said, “our 15 year old touched their younger sibling inappropriately and we’d like your help. We’ve sent the 15 year old to live with their uncle (who has no children) a few miles away.” Would this need to be reported?

I understand the concept behind mandated reporters, but can’t help but think it discourages some percentage of people from getting help they need and would otherwise seek.

[/quote]

Doc, there would be some variation in the law depending on state.

In CA, there is no language in the Board of Behavior Sciences regulations like “imminent danger.” There’s also no specification about the age of the minors if it’s a situation where everyone involved is underage. The language is “reasonable suspicion.” So, there’s a lot left up to the judgement of the mandatory reporter. See the language below.

For purposes of this article, “reasonable suspicion” means that it is objectively reasonable for a person to entertain a suspicion, based upon facts that could cause a reasonable person in a like position, drawing, when
appropriate, on his or her training and experience, to suspect child abuse or neglect. “Reasonable suspicion” does not require certainty that child abuse or neglect has occurred nor does it require a specific medical indication of child abuse or neglect; any “reasonable suspicion” is sufficient. For purposes of this article, the pregnancy of a minor does not, in and of itself, constitute a basis for a reasonable suspicion of sexual abuse.

[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:

I was thinking about this on the way to work - if I were advising someone, I would say they should retain an attorney, just in case, who is prepared to fight whatever CPS might do, THEN find a therapist who can work with the family.

But yes, both kids need help, and secrecy is one of the worst things a family can engage in. It fucks people up.[/quote]

As a mandated reporter, do all cases of child sexual abuse have to be reported, or only if the child is in imminent danger? For instance, what if a family came to you and said, “our 15 year old touched their younger sibling inappropriately and we’d like your help. We’ve sent the 15 year old to live with their uncle (who has no children) a few miles away.” Would this need to be reported?

I understand the concept behind mandated reporters, but can’t help but think it discourages some percentage of people from getting help they need and would otherwise seek.

[/quote]

In the above scenario it has to be reported. I completely agree that in some cases this is counterproductive, but in those cases I have to ask myself if it’s worth my license.

I think, though, that you should distinguish between child protective services and the criminal justice system. In most cases protective services just wants to ensure safety and get therapeutic services in place. Once that’s done they close the case. However, let me again acknowledge that sometimes the state behaves in ways that defy comprehension, so as a parent I would be very fearful.

[quote]EmilyQ wrote:
I think, though, that you should distinguish between child protective services and the criminal justice system. In most cases protective services just wants to ensure safety and get therapeutic services in place. Once that’s done they close the case. However, let me again acknowledge that sometimes the state behaves in ways that defy comprehension, so as a parent I would be very fearful.[/quote]

Thank you both, Puff and Em, for your thoughtful replies. Again, I have no reason to be thinking about this other than I tend to torture myself with “Sophie’s Choice” -type of scenarios.