So, my daughter is a special case and my wife and I are at our wits end trying to figure out what is different about our daughter and how to get her the help she needs. Our daughter is 9 years old, we have a 2 year old son, and are currently trying for another one. My wife and I have a healthy relationship, have a loving household, eat well and exercise, and are all around healthy in just about every way. When it comes to our daughter, something is just...off about her and other people readily notice this. People that first meet her are drawn in to her personality but after getting to know her, they realize she’s a broken human being inside.
At around 4 years old, our daughter, would suddenly go into these trance-like tantrums that would last hours. For example, say she was playing with a ball and was asked to put the ball away to come eat dinner. If she didn’t want to, she would get angry and refuse. You could be nice, try to persuade her, bribe her, or do any other trick to get her to change her mind but she would become fixated on fighting with the cover of playing with the ball. If we were to take the ball from her, she would immediately become fixated on hurting anyone near her (scratching, throwing things, biting, etc) and would repeat the phrase “Give me my ball!” for hours until her episode ended and never say anything else other than that phrase (or “Give me [insert item]” or “Let me do [insert activity]”). You could try and talk with her, but all she would do is repeat the phrase while screaming and crying while also trying to seriously hurt you. It was seriously like she was in a trance because you couldn’t communicate with her while she was having an episode. They were unlike any tantrums we’ve ever experienced and the staff at her daycare, then school, had ever witnessed.
Our daughter is a compulsive liar. If you ask her if she did something like brush her teeth, without hesitating she will give you the answer you want instead of the truth (always no since she has very poor hygiene and my wife and I have to monitor her to ensure she bathes properly and brushes her teeth, even at 9 years old). One of her chores was to walk the dog when she got home from school in order to establish a routine for her, but she would take the dog out into the hallway and wait for 10-15 minutes, then come back in as if she actually walked him. She quickly lost that chore when I caught her abusing the dog by repeatedly yanking the leash so hard it knocked him off his feet after we once again caught her in the lie and she was mad at the dog for whining about having to go pee.
She constantly breaks things for no real reason other than she wanted to break them. I will randomly find things broken around the house and know how it happened. The other day, the vinyl lining on the new cabinets were peeling and I knew she did it (she lied at first, then copped to it). She breaks her brother’s toys, her mother’s jewelry, just about anything lying around. She does not care about anyone else’s things other than her own. If you break one of her toys, though, she blows up. She also does weird things to our 2 year old’s toys. We recently found out she was peeing in a bucket and soaking up the urine in her brother’s water-squirting bath toys “just because.” He enjoyed those toys and she didn’t like that, so she ruined it.
She is extremely manipulative. She had the school counselor wrapped around her finger from K-3rd grade, but this year the counselor finally admitted to herself that she was being played and put her foot down. This girl even manipulated her previous therapist into believing I was emotionally abusing her and had CPS investigate us for child abuse. The CPS agent did the investigation and concluded that our daughter was lying and that our household is not abusive at all. We don’t spank our kids, nor do we mistreat them (even after all she’s put us through). After realizing that she could inflict real stress and damage to our family by using CPS, our daughter began repeatedly threatening to call CPS on us to say we were abusing her. She had some bruises on her arms from a side effect from her Prozac and she lied and told the school that I caused the bruises. Well, another CPS investigation was conducted and the same agent soon realized my daughter was once again lying to everyone.
Her grandfather, who she was close with, recently passed away and the first thing out of our daughter’s mouth was, “Who gets his iPad?” She has no empathy for anyone and can not connect with anyone. She has no friends at school, is never invited to any parties or activities, and has been ostracized by her peers for her behavior. She constantly acts out in school and is a bully. When she was in 1st grade, she forced another little girl to squat over the bathroom floor drain and urinate in front of her just because she if she could make another kid do it. The little girl was traumatized but the school hid this incident from us for months for reasons we are unsure of.
We started taking our daughter to therapy when she was 5. However, after spending months with a therapist and getting nowhere and the therapists not providing any insight into what was wrong with her, we would try a new therapist and hope that maybe the next one will be the one to break through to her. Nope, they all kept telling us different things: that she has ADHD, that she is just depressed, that she has a generic mood disorder, etc. We took her to a neurologist who did blood work and an EEG at a therapist’s recommendation and got nowhere. She’s been on Prozac, Adderall, Intuniv, Lexapro, and vitamins and nothing has changed. She’s had five different therapists and each one has diagnosed her with different things. They all love taking our money but none of them have shown any interest in really helping her.
Where the heck do we go for help? What do we do? Therapy isn’t helping, medication isn’t helping, nothing we do at home helps. My wife and I are both afraid this little girl will grow up to be a serial killer if she keeps this up. We can’t connect with her, she doesn’t have any attachment to any other people, she mistreat animals, she destroys property for the fun of it, and we have to keep her away from her little brother because she will hit him just to see him cry. This girl has become so bad that we dread having her in the house with us because she’s either going to break something, hurt someone, or cause problems. We’ve resorted to video recording all of her episodes to protect us in case she reports us to CPS again. Where do we go from here? Please help us.
TL;DR: Our daughter lacks empathy, loves destroying things, mistreats animals and other kids, and has violent episodes. Years of therapy and medication haven’t made any progress and she is getting worse as she gets older. Where do we go for help?
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