BPDFamily.com

... . And I'm not likin' 'em.

I've been out of the house for a month after my uBPDh made home feel unsafe. We've been married close to 4 decades, but I didn't understand a lot of what was happening till the past few years.

We have a daughter who is married with children and lives overseas (her H is from there.) She's adopted from a pretty rough background, not sure if that plays into it. Anyway, when I left the house and let them know she got online and immediately looked up what to expect when you leave an abuser. She told me to watch out for the smear campaign that he would likely start soon. Silly me, I didn't think he would do that since he wants me to come back, like wouldn't that be burning his bridges?

He's going to a counselor weekly and keeps texting me all the things he's learning, and it starts sounding good, right? I mean, I know it'll take him a long time to actually make the changes and put them into practice, but he's moving in the right direction, right?

Then a couple of days ago I got a texting storm from that daughter, and it was clear she and her husband were highly offended by my not wanting to get into the dirt of it all with them and let them continue trying to "fix" it. My s-I-l has been in consistent contact with my H, encouraging him, trying to tell me how I should respond, etc. I'm trying to keep our children (all adults) out of the middle of it. At first when my daughter sent me this crazy texting I was just hurt, like "why is she attacking me and kicking me when I'm down?" and got really sad and upset and cried and cried. fortunately I was able to talk to my T that same day and that helped. Then over yesterday and today things started to look so much clearer to me: my H is feeding them his story of how I "overreact" to him out of my childhood hurts. My daughter's words showed me that. I couldn't make sense of everything she was saying that day, but when I thought about it and reread it I could see his words and point of view being told to me as if from her.

I know he can be manipulative, and I always wondered if he knew he was being or was he just reacting out of his need for protecting himself, but this is quite an example of his manipulation of the facts to our children. It feels like a continuation of his goal to make things be my fault, even if it was him carrying on hour and a half rage-tantrums where he'd tear me down so far I'd finally break.

I've worked hard over the past year to change up how I would interact to try to enable us to communicate more effectively using the tools here at bpdfamily, but it didn't seem to make a lasting difference.

I'm a bit gutted by what has happened. Have any of you seen similar dynamics that changed your own r/s with your grown children like this?

I guess there will be lots of things that will challenge what I know to be the Truth of the matter of our marriage, and I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna like 'em.

Just trying to hang on for the ride,

dreamflyer99

Hi df99, I'm sorry you are going through this, but glad you are safe. It must hurt so much to have your daughter flip like that. And now you H is engaging in parental alienation of your adult children.

This is completely unnacceptable.

Your stateside children are keeping you safe now. They are here having to deal with these issues. Your expatriate children seem to be caught up in their own FOG, and are crossing unnacceptable boundaries by attempting to be fixers. And really, how much risk is it for them to do this over email or on the phone when they really don't have to deal with the reality of the situation on the ground? I'm sorry you were crying, but did you actually tell your daughter how you felt about what she said? Perhaps to set boundaries, you can use the DEARMAN technique. Make it clear that while you understand their frustration and possibly hurt over you moving out, that you did it to keep yourself safe. I don't remember if you actually told them the incident that resulted in you physically leaving.

Children or no, they are adults. If they want to meddle in the marriage of your parents, perhaps it's time to let them know a little more of the truth about what's been transpiring over the past few months, and what exactly led you to leave because you feared for your physical safety.


There is no overreaction to a partner who is exhibiting real, violent tendencies in front of you, on the cusp of perhaps taking them out on your own body physically. What he says is irrelevant. You were there. I don't think you are crazy. No one here thinks you are crazy. You know you aren't crazy, right?


It's great that he is in counseling, and is taking a hard look at himself now and his issues. There is some truth to this. I heard the same thing from uBPDx in the months before she moved out. You know how that is going. When they feel better, they often stop, and then cycle back to the lifelong dysfunctional coping mechanisms that have allowed them to survive thus far. I'm not saying this is the case with your DH, but he crossed a line. Now he is crossing others by manipulating and drawing your children into the dysfunction. I know she is you adopted daughter, but he is not doing the same thing with you kids here, is he? There are probably a few reasons for that, the main one being that he knows he can't get away with it here.


At least you tried. You should get mondo credit for that!


It's ok if you don't like them. Just try to take input from sources that aren't being manipulated by the disorder and chaos.

Hang in there, df99!

Turkish

Turkish,

thank you for your lovely, thoughtful, encouraging response. There's a whole lot of truth in it, i'll reply later when I have some energy. This whole deal is KILLIN' my Fibro!