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Moving an adolescent is a not
a simple matter. Of all age groups, they have the hardest
time adjusting to a move and it's understandable that your
daughter has very painful feelings.
As an adolescent, she's also
in the midst of a natural process of separating emotionally
from her parents. In addition to the fact that there are objective
reasons for being angry with her parents, you can't separate
emotionally from someone about whom you feel wonderful. In
order to separate from your parents, you have to make them
into the enemy. Developmentally she's doing what's appropriate.
It would be worse for her to hold in her feelings.
It's good that you want her to
express her feelings and doing so will help her. She needs
to express her pain to you. And you need to take responsibility
for uprooting her. Blaming is not the same as abusing. You
need to be emotionally ready to listen to what she has to
say. It won't work to say, "Talk to me but do so in a way
that I can hear you and enjoy it." Your daughter is dealing
with difficult feelings. You had good intentions, you thought
the move would be better for everyone, but basically you did
uproot her.
This doesn't mean you should
let her be abusive. You can say, "I'd like to listen but let's
try to negotiate some guidelines on the way we talk. We don't
want to be cursed or yelled at." But you do need to be ready
to really listen and to contain and absorb your daughter's
pain in a non-defensive and non-recriminatory fashion.
You did make a commitment to
her to send her back summers and if you're going to have any
credibility with her, you have to stand by your commitment.
It's probably going to be a long
journey of adjustment. You need to be strong enough to deal simultaneously
with adolescent separation and this specific problem.
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