Dear Jaqueta:

You wrote: “I wonder if my children will have what it takes to navigate life”-

They need to feel safe in their childhood home. If they do, they will navigate life better than most. To feel safe in their childhood home they need to not be exposed to hostility, that means to not witness fights between parents and to not be attacked by a parent physically or verbally, or experience a parent’s silent anger on an ongoing basis, such as a parent giving a child the silent treatment.

In addition to lack of hostility in the home, a child need to feel that his/her parents are in adequate control of things, capable to take care of the child and of whatever else needs to be taken care of. When a parent is visible anxious a lot of the time, the child figures the parent is not capable, not in control and therefore the child is in trouble, not in good hands, so to speak.

“How do I help build resilience in the children when I don’t have any?”- it is not too late to build your own resilience. Attend quality psychotherapy, or a free support group, go for daily walks, yoga or any of the many helpful things people do to lower their anxiety on a daily basis. There is plenty of literature on the matter, including on the Home Page here, I believe,  under blogs, click on mindfulness .

In the meantime, as you build your own resilience, in the presence of your children, pretend. Keep in mind that they need to see/ hear you confident and calm and pretend to be these things best you can. If you feel too anxious and your calm husband is present, take a time out, go for a walk, and leave your children with your husband for a while.

I hope your legal concern is resolved soon. Maybe seeking legal counsel on the matter will be helpful to you.

anita

Dear Jaquetta,

You might be too fixated on things going right/correctly in your life that you’ve developed anxiety over things going wrong. Well, that’s perfectly normal since no human on earth likes it when they mess up or when life just can’t seem to get any worse than what happening to you. No one wants the curve ball life throw at you which is why people try as much as possible to avoid bad things, but bad things will happen. When bad things happen, you could get burnt so badly that you’ve developed trauma or it reminds you your worth as a person that you begin to worry about when it might happen again. Then you begin to fixate on things being okay vs things going bad. Right now your situation is the latter and it’s really bearing down on your self-esteem because you might be the cause of its beginning.

But this bad situation can be a good starting point on the lesson of letting go of certain fears for you, one of which seems to be the fear of the future (and maybe the fear of being a bad parent).

First of all, you will mess up. You’re human, it’s difficult not to mess up in life. But you can mess up with grace.

Now, it might seem like a bad thing to let your children see you mess up, but it’s actually a good thing because you can model for your children that it’s okay to fail at something, that it’s okay to make mistakes. If they do not have a good model of failure, they will go onward to their adult life thinking they can’t fail because they will disappoint everyone they know so they will try to be the perfect student, the perfect worker bee, the perfect romantic partner, the perfect friend, the perfect child, etc., until they completely burnt themselves out, develop depression then turn to something that will take away the pain temporarily, usually alcohol and drugs.

So, exaggerated situation above, but your children does need a good model of failure. For if they were told their whole childhood that messing up is not okay, then they will try very hard to never fail. And when they fail, will probably develop the fear of failure because they failed the first time which probably means that they are a failure because they learned that they cannot mess up when they were a kid which means they cannot fail again. But that fear is very tiring to carry around because then your children will constantly tell themselves they cannot fail which means they either set out to fail before they can even fail or work themselves to the bone to never fail yet still fail so doesn’t that mean they are a failure?

See how that work?

So if this situation does involve legal work, it would be best to be honest with your children that something is happening, you don’t need to tell them the details, and that it might affect some things in the house so you will need your children to work with you when you think you might need help. Your children will be confuse, but they will also be happy to know that you trust them as their parent to tell them what is going on, even if they aren’t involved in the procedures. Because even if you try to hide it, children have the uncanny ability to know/feel when the parents are stress about something, but they don’t know what is happening so can only walk on eggshells around you while you deal with what it is that is stressing you and your husband. That would only cause THEM anxiety, even when you finalized things. Because by not saying anything, you left your children to speculate just who or what is stressing you out and then the house is just a depressing place to be because you’re going around stressed so your children has to be careful not to stress you out further and it continues and continues and continues. That is not the best scenario for anyone.

So be a model for your children in that every human being will make some kind of mistake, big and small, in their life, but it does not define them. Your mistake does not make you a failure unless you tell yourself you are a failure. So now that you did something wrong, tell your children that something is happening, again no need for details, but since you are responsible and accountable for your actions, you will deal with it gracefully. That is the kind of lesson that your children need now because if you try to protect them from making mistakes now, when they do make mistakes after leaving your house, it might cost them a very heavy price. At least now, when your children does mess up, you can be there to help them realize that it’s not the end of the world, they will get through it, that it does not make them a failure, while having them take responsibility for their actions to finding their own solutions to their mistakes.

So the best thing to do now is work on accepting the fact that you are human. Since you fear messing up, you fear the future and doing things that will bring bad things to your life so you try to avoid bad things. That kind of thinking is very heavy, it would be best to look into examining those thoughts. After all, the more you tell yourself that you have no strength, no courage, no resilience, it does mean that you have no strength, no courage, no resilience because you’ve already decided for yourself that you don’t have any of that. Only YOU yourself can decide whether you have any of that, regardless of what the world tries to tell you, so you decide, do you have no resilience?

You will mess up, that’s a fact, but that doesn’t mean it has to end there.

Dear Jaquetta:

Because of your tendency to worry and catastrophize, better than trying to fix a problem that was already created, is to prevent a problem from happening. Therefore, before you act in the future, stop and think, be careful and choose your words and actions thoughtfully, making sure you do not lie, that will save you a lot of distress.

Regarding the current problem, I will try to understand it best I can by repeating what you shared:

You live in a flat, in a building that you don’t own. The owner didn’t get the certification required from building-control/council certifying the building as safe. You contacted council. You lied to council on an email, claiming to have paid a fee to the council and following that email a fire officer came to your flat and gave you advice on how to make your flat safer. Smoke alarms and fire doors were installed in your flat. Next, you asked the council for certification regarding the safety of your flat.

The council then sent you a certificate declaring not only your flat as safe, but the whole building. You then contacted asking them to inspect the upstairs flat which does pose some fire risks. The council has not responded yet. You are worried that there a fire will break in the upstairs flat, that someone will get injured as a result of the fire, that you will be held partly responsible for the fire and injuries, that the council will lie about you as a retribution for the lie you told, holding you even more responsible for the fire and injuries, that you will not have evidence to defend yourself, that you will be prosecuted, found guilty, and end up in prison.

My input: is it possible for you to pay the fee to the council, the fee you claimed to them that you paid, but didn’t? If so, that will be a step in the right direction.

I am not a legal professional, and if I was, it would have required that I was aware of the laws and regulations in your part of the world. What I see is indeed catastrophizing: I don’t see how you can be held responsible for a fire you wouldn’t start or have anything to do with it. It is the owner that would be held responsible for lack of certification, not a tenant in another flat, my logic says!

I don’t see a reasonable possibility at all that the council will have an evil intent to get you into legal trouble, to send a tenant who is a mother to prison. For a lie. Even if the council finds out that the fee wasn’t paid while you claimed it was paid, how do they know that,  let’s say, that you believed at the time that the fee was paid by your husband?

Back to my suggestion of paying the fee now- maybe you can email the council the fee now?

anita

Dear Jacquetta:

You are welcome.

Before you do anything else (” we will report the man to his boss next week”), maybe you should see an attorney, a legal professional who is familiar with the policies/ bureaucracy of that council/ building control where you live and follow legal advice.

A consultation with an attorney can put your mind at ease, if it is a reputable attorney who tells you that you don’t have anything to worry about.

anita