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Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse... Have you considered that being critical, judgmental, or invalidating toward the other parent, no matter what she or he just did will only make matters worse? Someone has to be do something. This means finding the motivation to stop making things worse, learning how to interrupt your own negative responses, body language, facial expressions, voice tone, and learning how to inhibit your urges to do things that you later realize are contributing to the tensions.
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Author Topic: No contact with parent since seperation  (Read 431 times)
November_Rain

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« on: January 15, 2016, 08:40:59 PM »

I became separated  from my stb exhBPD when our daughter was 8 months old. He moved from the state 2 months later. We are in the middle of a divorce. I was awarded temp sole custody and he was given supervised visitation. He has not seen her since August. I have not spoken to him since November. During those few months he ran a smear campaign, sent multiple texts and emails a day. Called ranting and raving, and now not a word. Has anyone else experienced this. He missed our daughter's first birthday, missed Christmas. I'm starting to believe I was right all along, that he never really loved her. This truly makes me sad.
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livednlearned
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« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2016, 06:26:04 PM »

Hi November_Rain,

I'm sorry I didn't see this until now.

My ex is also no longer in my son's life (S14), and it's hard to fathom how a parent could walk away like that.

It took me a lot of reading about BPD to understand what the deal was, how a parent could do that. I do believe my ex loves S14, I also think he's very ill so it's complicated. My ex's narcissism was high, and the narcissistic injury of losing custody can be profound. In our case, ex saw S14 as an extension of himself -- this is part of the disorder. pwBPD did not successfully go through a developmental period where they individuated and developed a stable sense of self. It's one of the reasons why boundaries are such a challenge. So losing you, plus the baby would be a massive traumatic injury that would be hard for anyone to deal with, much less someone who has extreme rejection sensitivity.

That's how I read the situation with my ex. He wanted to have a relationship with S14 as long as S14 believed everything N/BPDx told him. It was not ok for S14 to have separate thoughts or feelings. When N/BPDx could not have that anymore, then the relationship seemed to make no sense to him. From time to time, he tries to reach out, and S14 tries to decode the messages. For the most part, he figures they are too complex and drops it. I know it hurts him deeply, although in a different way. He knows it's better to have some distance, and he also grieves having no loving dad in his life  :'(

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November_Rain

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« Reply #2 on: January 17, 2016, 09:07:19 PM »

Thanks for replying LivednLearned. What you are saying makes perfect sense. From the time that I left him until we had our first court date he harassed me daily. Phone calls, text messages, emails, sending me phony facebook requests... .He did ask to see our daughter.  Without any type of custody order and because of the history of physical abuse and recent abuse involving the baby I would only agree to him coming to my aunt's home and visiting with her there. He refused only wanting to pick her up. At our hearing in which he phoned in as he had already moved across the country, he heard me tell the judge the only reason I modified the restraining order I had for the abuse from no contact to no violence (which allowed us to live together again with the stipulation that he finish the batterer's intervention classes and go back to marriage counseling and go to anger management class) was because during our no contact period he got weekly visitation with our daughter, 5 months old at the time and I was having panic attacks. I was experiencing extreme distress because I had already witnessed his anger outbursts with her before and been a beating pole for him. I felt it was better to try and save the marriage to keep my child safe. So he heard me say that the ONLY reason I went back was because I was in fear for my daughter's safety. I ended up getting sole custody and he has supervised visitation, in which he has to get a mental eval, go to anger management classes, and parenting classes. He did not finish the batterer's intervention and he is scheduled in court next week on a violation and possibly jail time for that. It probably is better that he is out of her life because he is not healthy. I don't miss the harassment, the craziness of it all, but it makes me sad for her. He has not seen her in 5 months. I have not spoken to him since the day after the court hearing. He called from an unknown # to curse me. I just hung up. I don't reach out to him because I am prepared to raise her on my own. She has plenty of family members that love and adore her. But still, one day she will ask about her father, and why he isn't there. I just always want her to feel loved.
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livednlearned
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« Reply #3 on: January 18, 2016, 08:00:35 AM »

You've been through a lot, and it's tough to raise a newborn baby, much less deal with the stress of custody and DV. I'm glad you're safe 

I just always want her to feel loved.

This is complicated... .I'm speaking from lessons learned after the fact, so I hope it's ok that I share with you, even though you haven't asked  Being cool (click to insert in post)

Many of us here make the well-intentioned mistake of telling our children that BPD mom/dad loves them. As my T, and my son's T have explained, this can make love and intimacy very confusing. It means that they equate love with the absence of this person. Speaking for myself as someone with codependent traits, I struggle to let people experience negative emotions, partly because I didn't want to experience them myself. After a lot of therapy, I can see now that what my son needed was to learn that sad feelings are perfectly normal, and he needed to learn the deep satisfaction of self-soothing. My role is to be there to validate his sadness and let him process those feelings.

I didn't catch this in time, and as a result my son is very emotionally defended. He is also very sensitive, and does not trust his ability to deal with sadness. He tends to stuff his feelings, or get flooded by them.

The most powerful skill I picked up here was about validation -- there is a book called I Don't Have to Make Everything All Better that is wonderful, and if you have that skill in your back pocket when your baby is so young, you'll do more for her emotional health than you can imagine.

We can't make our children's parent healthy, but we can help our kids learn what it means to be healthy. I have a lot of work to do with my son because we left when he was 9. A lot of damage had been done by then.  :'(
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November_Rain

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« Reply #4 on: January 19, 2016, 07:27:44 PM »

I welcome your advice and appreciate it. I have 2 older children from my first marriage and I feel like in the beginning, right after our divorce, I did a lot of the blaming towards their father. He did cheat and he did leave for a younger woman but looking back, I wish I had kept that hidden. I was angry and wanted to blame him and I did let me children "overhear" it. That was so wrong of me because my son, to this day has not forgiven his dad. Regardless of what happened between the two of us, he has always been a great father. We may not always see eye to eye on everything, but he loves our kids, no doubt. He has always provided for them above and beyond. When he married his third wife a few years after our divorce (the one he left me for and married only lasted 4 months) things changed. His new wife has been such a Godsend to my family. She loves my children as if they were her own. She has helped me realized that the better me and my ex get along, the better it is for the kids. I started to stop all of the negativity towards their dad and started to speak positive of him. I show respect for him and he does the same. This is what co-parenting is. We make decisions together. So... .forward to my baby and my current situation. I am torn. Do I tell her the truth (of how I perceive things to be at the time) or do I tell or that her father loves her because ultimately, I want her to feel loved. I never want her to question herself, why she is unworthy of her father's love or acceptance. It's a hard place to be in. It keeps me up a lot at night. I know I have time since she is still young but soon she will start to notice other children have a ":)addy" and she does not.
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livednlearned
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« Reply #5 on: January 20, 2016, 09:19:13 AM »

The hard truth is that her dad did reject her  :'(

For many reasons, complicated ones. The key is to validate how she feels so that she can process her grief. She does not have a father in her life and that is deeply painful.

My son used to be the target of some awful rages when my N/BPDx was dysregulated. I didn't want S14 to feel bad, so I would say one of two things: 1. Your dad loves you, 2. He had a bad childhood.

I could've said: 3. Your dad is mentally ill, 4. Your dad is drunk.

All of those miss the emotional work that needs to be done, which is to validate that it feels bad when dad is mean. I wish I had held him and let the truth of his feelings wash over both of us. I kept fixing and fixing and fixing and fixing and in the end I prevented both of us from healing. I had great intentions, and they ultimately did not work.

There are ways to comfort and soothe our kids without confusing them, so this is not so black and white as it seems. Also, we seem to revisit the topic each time a new developmental stage is reached, so that more and more details can be offered.

":)oes it make you feel sad that daddy is not here?" can be a powerful validation that helps her believe that you believe she is strong enough to handle the pain she feels. And you are there comforting her, soothing her.

I think our kids will work through this their whole life, it's part of who they are. I wish it wasn't, and I also know I can't change the fact. My role is to bear witness to the pain he feels, to let him know he isn't alone, and to model ways of coping that are emotionally healthy.

There are good lessons about raising emotionally resilient children in the sidebar to the right that have helped me so much. My son was considered "at-risk" for behavioral issues (ADD/ADHD combined type, OCD, ODD, anxiety/depression). I know that the validation skills have had the most profound effect. That, and being a tirelessly loving parent 

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bravhart1
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« Reply #6 on: January 20, 2016, 11:17:12 AM »

I don't think I agree that a parent can reject a baby. I think I would frame it more about he rejected his responsibility and the privilege. It's not like by the time she can have this conversation with you that she won't be able to understand that, she wasn't even a person yet in the sense that she could walk or talk or interact with him, she did nothing to turn him away.

He left because of his own internal demons, maybe even out of love for her to protect her from his violence, he knew he couldn't control. No one can really know what goes on in the heads of these people, but I don't think it has to be spun as a negative.

Nov, you may be remarried with a wonderful step parent in your daughters life like your ex has in his new wife for all you know by the time your daughter starts asking questions about her bio dad.

Just raise her as well as you can, not forgetting to add plenty of male role models in for good measure, which by the way may even include your ex and his wife to help. Doing the right thing (click to insert in post)

try to keep a bright outlook. I know it's hard to think about raising a baby alone, but if you really look around I bet you could tally up more supporters than you are realizing you have, and don't be afraid to ask for help, good people are all around us if you look and accept.

I believe many of us on this board would agree that his getting out of your life is a MUCH better option than staying in it and making you afraid, miserable, and abused.
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livednlearned
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« Reply #7 on: January 20, 2016, 12:41:15 PM »

I don't think I agree that a parent can reject a baby.

... .looking at this from the child's perspective, not ours.

At an emotional level, my son's feelings of having his dad out of the picture = my dad rejected me.
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November_Rain

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« Reply #8 on: January 21, 2016, 11:34:40 AM »

Thank you both for the insight. My daughter does have plenty of people in her life that love her very much. My other two kids are older, 14 and 17 and love on her very much. She has such a cute and flirty personality that she draws attention everywhere that we go. At this point, I don't ever even want to think of remarriage (we are technically still married) but who knows what God has planned. I guess I am just looking for some encouragement and help on how to avoid making mistakes that will hurt her. Your advice was very helpful. Thank you both  Smiling (click to insert in post)
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Want_an_End

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« Reply #9 on: January 25, 2016, 07:12:53 AM »

I'd say that you should count yourself lucky that he exited. You seem to know what it is like to be harassed. Do you really want that in your life? When the mother falls, the child falls. The healthier you are, the healthier the child will be.

Raising an infant alone is extraordinarily tough. Take it one day at a time.

Being around a person that is a bad person is damaging. It will get you and it will get your kids. This I know, for sure.

As there are many stories about the absent father, there are just as many stories about the alcoholic father, the abusive father, the father that yells constantly, and the father that puts you down.

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