At the September CAC meeting, participants were invited to reflect on their experiences within the PRI program and share a “message in a bottle” capturing valuable advice, insights, and encouragement for caregivers just beginning their journey in the program. The following is an excerpt of one of the messages from a CAC member.
I’m so glad that you found me, washed up on shore, amongst all the other flotsam and jetsam of your life as you struggle to make sense of it all. It can be overwhelming, disorienting and heartbreaking, but all is not lost, nor are you any longer!
If you’re reading this, you’ve found the good people at PRI, the ones who are going to give you and your child real help, the kind of help that you’ve searched for, for so long, without success. Your problems aren’t solved, but there is a path; it started some time ago, somewhere else, and leads somewhere else, some time in the future, where, we don’t know. There will be many forks in it, hard choices to be made, and we won’t know where any of them are going to lead, but with faith, you will go more forward than backward, you will have many days of small improvements, and perhaps some days of big setbacks, but there is hope, real hope now!
Fate has decided that this message in a bottle is just for you, not for your child for they are on a very different path than you. Your journeys have run in tandem for a long time, although with some significant detours along the way. Now they’re going to consciously diverge, and that’s ok, that’s good; for their work is not the same as your work. To be clear, with your child at PRI, they have an enormous amount of work to do, but their path will be much clearer than yours. They may choose to follow that path, and if they fall off the path, someone will be there to help them back on to it, but your path must come from inside. No one will be there to make you do your work, to discipline you if you don’t, or likely even to remind you, but it will be noticed; your child will notice like nothing you’ve ever done for, or to, or with them before. If they feel, if they know that you’re doing your work alongside them, that you’re in it together, their burden becomes infinitely more bearable.
There are many different paths to PRI, to a life for which PRI is necessary (no one comes here unnecessarily), and everyone’s path out is unique, as are their lives after PRI, but the surest way to help your child on their path is to figure out your own, and how you may have contributed to where they are today is a great place to start (perhaps that’s the first task in your own work?).
You will have some guides along the way, PRI will be there to assist, but others won’t always be obvious and not all are helpful. Sometimes your best guides are in the most unexpected places. You would be surprised how many people have had similar challenges in their own lives, themselves, their parents, siblings, friends. If you can get to a place where you can talk and share and be vulnerable with the people who love and care for you, you will be amazed how much unexpected love for you is out there; but you have to be open to it, to ask for it, and perhaps even more importantly to be vulnerable enough to accept it (that’s probably the second task in your own work?
There is no single path and no matter how much a path may feel like a dead end, there’s always another if you’re prepared to look and to search, and to do the work. You’ve found a special group of people at PRI, so full of empathy, and ability and love that they will at times feel otherworldly in their ability to reach you and your child if you let them. We can never know what the future holds, but I am here to tell you that yours just got a whole lot brighter!