I appreciate your post. I’m a big boy and I can handle honesty. But as you might expect, I disagree with a lot of what you said. Some of this I’ve said before, but I’m going to say it again and, hopefully, expand upon it a bit.
Number one, enough with the A. You people on the BB are making WAAAAY too much out of it. It was a long time ago. I don’t feel guilty about it. W does not hold it over my head. I don’t hold it over my own head. I don’t judge myself harshly for having done it. It’s over. It was a long time ago. It’s history. Water under the bridge.
I think there are two things that are causing this unnatural dwelling on the A. One is that I confessed it after I had been here for quite some time. The other is that it has cropped up from time to time in various posts. Let me try to clarify. I know that my decision to get into the A was wrong. I started out here being mostly honest, but I was still trying to paint myself as the good guy. An innocent party suffering under the mistreatment of W. We all know that’s not the case – ever. We’re both guilty. But it took me a while to come clean, and when I did, there was a lot of discussion about why I had concealed it for so long. IOW, the timing of the revelation caused it to get undue attention and be examined much more closely than it would have if I had come clean at the beginning. But it wasn’t any inordinate amount of guilt that made me keep it to myself. It wasn’t the bag of rocks. I just wanted to be seen as the good guy. Also, I had dealt with the A and didn’t want to rehash it. Like I said in the last paragraph, it’s ancient history.
The second issue is that it keeps coming up. I’m assuming that it’s raised its ugly head yet again because I mentioned it in this thread. Believe me, my mention of the A in this thread had nothing whatsoever to do with the A. I only mentioned it as a way to illustrate one of the differences in the way W and I relate to the kids. I never mentioned the A, but years ago, in a fit of anger, W told them about it. A very distorted view too. She used it to try to hurt me, to get the girls on her side. About two years ago, one of them finally told me about it. My response was almost exactly what I wrote here: I admitted to it, I told them that it was wrong, and I told them that it wasn’t any of their business and that I wasn’t going to discuss it with them. The whole point of my bringing it up in this context was to point out that W fights dirty and that I refuse to sink to that level. That’s it. No big guilt complex. Now can we drop the A? It’s simply no longer germane to anything.
The next overriding issue seems to be the abuse of the children. I’ll agree that all of you may have a point with this one, but it doesn’t seem that way from here. If W isn’t mentally and emotionally abusive, she’s certainly right on the cusp of it, but I just don’t think that the girls are in any physical danger. She hasn’t hit any of them in a long time until this dog kicking thing. And we all know about W and dogs. I’ve long contended that given the choice between any or all of our family or her dogs, we would be gone. She’s said very plainly that she likes dogs better than people. D14 just did the one and only thing guaranteed to set W off. (That fact might be worth pursuing…)
Another thing is that I think all of you have this distorted view of W as some horrible Wicked Witch of the West character who is either abusing her children or busily plotting and thinking up new ways to do so. That’s simply not true. The vast majority of the time she’s really a pretty good mother. She’s no June Cleaver, but she’s not an ogre either. Now I know that this sounds like battered wife syndrome, and I admit that there are a lot of similarities. But things have improved in the last few years rather than escalating as they normally do in domestic abuse.
I agree that I need to be more assertive and stand up to my bullying W. Isn’t that what I’ve been saying? Isn’t that the very thing that others here have just complimented me on doing? What am I missing here?
As far as counseling for the kids, the older ones have done that. Both with my/our C and with another one. The bottom line is that they are incredibly well adjusted. They’ve learned to deal with W much better than I have. D14 has gone before and will no doubt go some more. But the C says that now is not the time, and regardless of what you may think, I think this C rocks.
And while I’m on that subject, let me answer your questions and clarify a few things. No, I have not been seeing him for ten years. It’s more like sixteen. W and I started seeing him sixteen years ago. We went regularly for somewhere around a year and a half. Since then, there have been a couple of six or seven session visits, but it’s been sporadic. It hasn’t been sixteen years of C. He diagnosed the NPD quite early and has seen nothing since then to call that diagnosis into question. He’s not slow on seeing things, and he did much of the year and a half pro bono, so I can’t buy the milking thing either. You hit it on the third one though; he said that mentioning it was pointless since I wasn’t prepared to deal with it.
I also believe that I need to empower myself. The C agrees. He’s said so repeatedly and quite forcefully. Why would you say that it’s been in very gentle terms? Wouldn’t you say that the email I quoted to you was pretty strong? Let me quote him again:
Quote: Make her leave. That is the only way you can get control. You have to tell her that it is time for her to grow up. She is creating problems with the whole family. Tell her to leave VB. Please tell her to leave. Do not beg her to stay. If you do she will think she has the right to make everybody sorry for how they have mistreated her. Make her leave.
What exactly is gentle about that? What would he have had to have said for you to think he wasn’t being gentle with me? I repeat, he has repeatedly and forcefully told me what needs to be done. It’s me that has resisted.
Why was I so resistant to his advice in the past? I don’t know. I guess part of it was my own perception that even though I was a contributor, W was the bigger part of the problem and he should be working on her. I was resentful that he wanted me to look at my little problems when there was this giant elephant of W’s issues there in the room with us. I wanted him to help me fix her. It didn’t occur to me that working on me was working on her until after I came here. Another part was that in some part of myself, I thought I was smarter than he was. I thought I knew better. I know that it doesn’t make sense to go to someone for help when you think you know more than they do, but that thought was buried inside me. I wasn’t really conscious of it. He has helped me see that in myself.
What he has said about me mostly revolves around one simple issue. I need to grow a backbone. I need to be more assertive. I need to be more decisive. I need to be less passive-aggressive and just say what’s on my mind. I’m working on those and I think I’m making progress. Apparently, a lot of people here think I am too. The C has also helped me to come to the realizations I tried to articulate in my last post. He’s helped me to see that W has no real power over me, that she can’t hurt me.
And once again, thank you for your reply. Although it may seem like it, I’m not dismissing what you’ve said.
