Cannot reason with irrational daughter - an endless battle that cannot be won -

[atmywitsendtoo]

I will be starting therapy with my daughter thus weekend to improve our relationship and at times I ask myself why bother.  Her personality disorder or mental illness or whatever combination of the two it might be cause her to have a very distorted perception of me and it seems there is nothing I can do about it.

She has false memories of me doing things I have never done that I detailed in another thread here. Lately she keeps telling me that I "freak out" over every little thing when I am actually pretty level headed. She also criticized me telling me that I act like a child repeating "See, I was right" in a sing song voice when I am able to prove that she has miss-remembered something, and I doubt I do that.

The latest outrageous false claim she made about me just a few minutes ago. My (pregnant) daughter lives in a small apartment above our garage. We are having it painted before the baby comes and while that is being done she is camping out on a mattress on the floor of the family room which is just off our kitchen and a bathroom that opens into the kitchen. I stay up late and sometimes get myself a snack and or something to drink past midnight. When I do this, even though I turn on minimal lights and try to be quiet, I wake my daughter up. Because of this she has started telling me when she is about to go to sleep so if I want something from the kitchen I can grab it then to avoid disturbing her later. This bothers me because - Having lived in all sorts of uncomfortable circumstances myself through thy years -  I do not thinking waking her a bit as I roam through my own home is that big a deal, but apparently it puts her out terribly.

So tonight she gave me my warning telling me to get what I wanted from the kitchen before she went to sleep. At the time I didn't want anything, but an hour or so later at 11:30pm  I had to use the restroom that opens up into the kitchen. After I used the restroom I kept the restroom light on for a few seconds while I grabbed a drink out of the fridge. Of course this woke my daughter up. She said something and I told her that I had to come in there because I had to use the restroom and I went back to bed. A few minutes later my daughter barged into my room sarcastically thanking me for getting what I needed from the kitchen before she went to bed and telling me that I had not in fact used the rest room so that was not the real reason I went into the kitchen. This is just crazy! How can she convince herself 100% that I lied and I did not actually use the restroom. She is calling me a liar and it is times like these that I just want so badly to tell her to get out because I don't see how dealing with someone who is not rational can ever go smoothly or come to any kind or positive resolution. If she is going to have false thoughts about me there is nothing I can do about it and there is no convincing her that she is wrong and completely out of line. What is the point of going to therapy with someone who will be making up stories about me. She is sick but at times like these I just so much want her out of my life. I do not want to have to manage interacting with someone who is not in their right mind for the rest if my days. I had to do it as a child with my bipolar father and now again with her.

I work in social services and I have interacted with many, many mentally ill clients. I remember one of them in particular right now. His mental illness was causing him to behave in an unreasonable manner. I tried very hard to reason with him to get him to see how his thinking did not make sense and as we talked around in circles I would say things like "But that's not true, you just feel it is true due to your mental illness" and after having said this to him a few times he finally put an end to my efforts to reason with him by telling me that his mental illness was stronger than I was. That is how I feel it is with my daughter. Her irrational thinking is stronger than the both of us and it dooms us into a never ending struggle to identify what is and is not real which will pit us against one another forever like Sisyphus and the stone. We can never be close, and we can never be at peace with each other, and we will both always be exhausted and cranky from being doomed to keep pushing that stone for the rest of my days.   

Things seem hopeless and dire tonight as I imagine what kind of mother she will be. Will her daughter, my granddaughter, have to endure a childhood marred by being at the mercy of a mentally ill parent as I did? And I will have to watch that happen? It is all just too much.

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[Lollypop]

Hi atmywitsend

I'm very sorry that your feeling at a loss right now. Things can get quickly out of proportion sometimes when everybody is so emotional. You're of course right about there being no quick fixes for your daughter and this fact can be very overwhelming. Understandably you've got worries about your daughter and her baby.

Have you heard of FOG? This refers to our own feelings of being fearful, obligated or guilty. I've knocked around in these three for many years. I know better now, I don't always succeed in pulling myself out but at least I can accept the state. I never make decisions when I'm in FOG - in fact I hardly ever make decisions straight away any more preferring to mull things over.

You don't know what the future holds for your daughter. so if you can, try and stay in the present.

Your description of your daughter getting very irritated was so very good. It could have been a description of my DS. Living in a shared space is never easy and I can see that you don't want to change your way of living (there's no judgement here). It is of course your home and you should be able to do whatever you want to. However, that's not the case when there's another adult invited in - there has to be some degree of cooperation. For instance, I'm fed up of my kitchen counter never being wiped down and there's always somebody else's leftover crumbs on the breadboard. There's crumbs inside the tub of butter. These small things drive me crazy. I do ask, it gets ignored most of the time and I don't push it because in the larger scheme of things these are irrelevant.

Sleep isn't a small thing though. You're asking your daughter to put up with having her sleep disturbed without complaint. Personally, I get very irritable if I don't get my sleep and I'd struggle. I can see the camping out is a temporary arrangement - how long will it be until her space is ready?

Her irrational thinking is stronger than the both of us and it dooms us into a never ending struggle to identify what is and is not real which will pit us against one another forever like Sisyphus and the stone. We can never be close, and we can never be at peace with each other, and we will both always be exhausted and cranky from being doomed to keep pushing that stone for the rest of my days.   

It doesn't have to be this way. Your daughter can't help the way she behaves. Yes, her thinking is skewed and whatever she feels is fact to her. An emotional environment is triggering and a calm, loving and nurturing environment is needed. You are in control over yourself and how you react to your daughter. It's up to you to decide if you are prepared to learn the new skills you need to more effectively interact with your daughter. We all understand and are here to lend you support if you need it.

Hugs to you. I'm very sorry you're down. Try to do something for yourself today if you can.

LP

[atmywitsendtoo]

Maybe I am in a FOG, but it seems to me that my daughter could put up with some inconvenience considering all we do for her. As for disrupting her very important sleep it is not like she has a job to go to or anything. She is unemployed (got fired) and jumps into a bed that is vacated at 5am and sleeps as long as she likes.

We provide rent free housing for her and paint and furnish and fix it up to her specifications for free.
I drive her everywhere because she has wrecked her car twice in 6 months and she cannot belittle herself to take the bus.
We support her financially and emotionally as she goes through her ups and downs
She is having a baby with a boyfriend she now despises and we have to deal with all the drama caused by that.
She is on public assistance ans she cannot support herself or her baby and she has dropped this situation and life-long responsibility in our laps and does not understand why her father is upset with her for disrupting our lives.
She descends from her apartment and comes into our home and dictates rules to my husband and myself as though the house belongs to her and she is the adult and we are the children.
It is an noxious situation and the fact that I cannot get up at night to use the bathroom without being called a liar is insane, FOG or not.

[Lollypop]

Hi atmywitsend

I can hear your frustration and I do understand, I really do. It's extremely good of you both to open up your home and provide her with some private space for herself and the baby. Things may be a little less fraught when she's got a little more distance from you (even if it's only a few more metres away!).

The family therapy is a very positive step for you both. Hopefully you'll be able to work out some of the problems together.

Whatever you do, no matter how much or how little, you know she'll have something to say. My DS had a sense of right and expected everybody to move around him. He was not grateful, he only felt a sense of further shame because he knew that the things I was doing for him were things he should have been doing himself. He resisted responsibility for himself.  I put that responsibility where it belongs - in his lap.  This is my story, and not necessarily yours.

You've made some decisions. Your daughter can live with you rent free, you're providing her some private space for her and her baby, feeding her, you're driving her around and subsidising her financially. You've said you are caught up in her dramas.

I can see that you're extremely unhappy about the situation. For what it's worth, I'd feel very resentful too.

How does your daughter feel about the baby?
Is the father going to have access or provide any support?

LP

[atmywitsendtoo]

My daughter and her boyfriend cannot communicate in any way without both of them becoming unspeakably angry. They were in therapy together for a little while but no progress was made and this was so frustrating for my daughter that she came out of therapy vary angry so we all, my daughter, her therapist and I, agreed that any therapy with the boyfriend should be put on hold for now because it was doing more harm than good because neither of them were ready for it.

Because of this the boyfriend communicates with my husband or myself, but not with my daughter at the moment. The boyfriend phoned me yesterday morning. He asked me how my daughter was doing, told me his side of their inability to communicate. He told me that he wants to be able to talk to my husband or me since he cannot communicate with the soon to be mother of his child. He wanted to tell me that he was moving and he would give me his address as soon as he gets it. He also told me that he is going to do whatever he has to do to get child support garnished from his wages. He has custody of two children he had with another woman and he is a very involved father so I know he will want to be in this baby's life.

My daughter is so angry with him that she goes back and forth about weather or not she will put his name on the birth certificate. She wants to keep his name off it because she wants him him to have to prove paternity and then go to court to get visitation. She wants to do this because she does not want him to take the baby home with him any time soon and she thinks this tactic will delay him getting access to the baby. I tell her that  she has to let go of her anger and make peace with the father of her baby and his family (who she is also at war with) for the sake of her child because he will be the baby's father and his family will be half of the baby's family.

We live in California and the baby's father is Latino. I have learned some Spanish and I want to try to bring the baby up speaking both Spanish and English because that would open up opportunities for the baby down the line, but my daughter is so resentful of the boyfriend and his family that she will not allow me to teach the baby any Spanish words. The baby's father's parents who will be the baby's grandparents pretty much only speak Spanish, but my daughter will become very angry with me if support the baby learning Spanish in any way. In this instance I feel she is not thinking about what is good for the baby at all. She is just thinking about her own possibly irrational anger. If she makes up stories about me and says I do things I do not do then I can only imagine that she does the same with the baby's father.