You are right Ats and AJ,
I didn't respond to her last text about needing to make a "plan". I haven't heard anything since. I think the fact that she is manipulating things so she can be in "control" is so hard for me to see because it is so not like the "old" W. She has always been "shy" in the past, especially around people she didn't know very well like the other parents at our kids school. She always would say how she felt "left out" with the other mothers when it really was just they didn't know her very well. It is just so hard to see her as the manipulative, selfish person she has become. I think she has always WANTED to be like that but was held back. I and even her kids have seen how she acts so different when she is around her father. She has a total personality change when with him. She has been like that for a long time and the longer she is with him, the worse she becomes. The girls have always hated when he was around not just because of how he acted but how their MOTHER acted when with him. Like the time he excluded me and her 7 year old daughter from a party he was having for "her". There were at least a dozen people but he told me that there wasn't enough "room" for the two of us. (we were visiting him at his home out of state). I thought for sure my W would notice that we weren't there but she just let it happen. It was like she enjoyed that he only wanted HER around after all the years of not caring about her. I understand that her choices are HERS, that she chooses to do the things that her father tells her to. But I also know that all the years of abuse he doled out to her hurt her deeply and having him finally seem to want her to be a part of his life, something she has always wanted since she was 10 years old, is a strong attraction to her. Add that she's in crisis and he's using that fact to control her and she is so suppressible to his crap.

To give you an idea of how awful he STILL is, he has told my D19's cousins that she isn't worth his time, trouble or wasting his money on because she had a rebellious period. She didn't do anything really bad but HE decided she wasn't "worthy". His son has 3 D's. We have 2. Just a couple days ago he told one of his other grand kids that he has 4 grand kids to help pay for college. That means that he is excluding my oldest D19. He has offered to help all his other grand kids BUT my D19. Funny how at the same time, her mother has started to do the same thing! She keeps telling D19 how she is making wrong choices, refuses to help her even though she is able, just like her father. He has total control over my W. She has started calling his wife (the OW that broke up her parents M) her "mother". My D14 is so freaked out by it. If her REAL mother knew about this it would break her heart. Since leaving, she has had little to do with her real mother and my D14 tells me she says "mean things" about her and see's her as a "pain". Of course it doesn't help that her father is blaming her mother now for causing him to not be a part of her life when she was younger (a total lie by the way). Her father doesn't like me (probably because I always call him on his crap and never allowed him to get away with saying the awful things he always did when I was around) and my W knows I don't like him. Anyone who stands in the way of him and her being together, even if only because her father doesn't like them, must be pushed out of the way. It's a sad, ugly dynamic that is really a form of abuse from a man who a IC called "the best example of a sociopath he has ever seen in 30 years of being a IC"!

I have watched her father try (and succeed mostly) to control everyone around him. When his son wouldn't be controlled, he forced him out of his life. He has tried many times to "make up" with his father and he refuses to allow him to be at all a part of his life. He even went to court when his son was trying to regain custody of his D's after a D from a drug using awful woman and testified AGAINST his own son. He could control his son's ex, so he turned on his own son. That's the kind of "man" he is! This is the person my W is taking her cues from. He is teaching her just how to control and at the same time telling her that she is right to act that way! When she is around him, she becomes a 10 year old little girl who doesn't understand why her daddy left her, why he doesn't love her any more and wants that love so very badly. Hence the tantrums, the acting out, the selfishness. MLC's always reach out to others, OM/W, new, different, friends, any family that backs their choices. In my W's case, it's her father and his wife. Both manipulative control freaks who live self centered lives.

None of this matters when it comes to what I need to do. I have to just understand that my loving, caring, W has become a sociopath just like dear old dad. Maybe she was all along but was fighting what she knew was "wrong", that could be why she became depressed in the first place, who knows. Or it could be that who she WAS is who she really is but the wanting her fathers love and acceptance combined with her MLC has caused her to become this way and if she is ever able to "reintegrate", she will see it for what it is. Either way, I have to understand that I can't trust her, that I can't expect her to do anything other than what SHE feels is in HER interest. It's why she doesn't even seem to care what is best for her D's if it puts her out in any way. If I don't step up and protect my D's, no one will. I have to be strong for myself and them. It will be a fight. A fight against the very person I have spent my life loving and caring for. The LAST person I ever saw as a threat.