unsure where to go with daughter

[Mummiehunnie]

I am a single parent and the youngest has always been hard work, this has been noticed by everyone who has seen her in action, it was always worse with me than with her father however she was the same with him when he was around. He is the most controlling person going and he could not control her either! She is good at school! I took her with the ex a few months before he left to see the gp to get a referral nothing happened, I took her privately and asked if she had adhd or something they said as she sat in school she did not... ex blamed her behaviour on me, our other child is normal range of behaviour...

I am sick to the back teeth of being beaten up, I am sick to the back teeth of being a slave to her physically and emotionally... I feel trapped and the situation is bringing me further down...

I have escaped abuse from other people and I feel I am trapped with her, there is no one else around, they were all abusive and would not help anyways, I have begged twice for social services to take her on short term care, they say they would go to the family, if that happened she would just beat me up more...

i am having therapy for the abuse from the past and the therapist knows the situation, she is trying to help me build up my self esteem.

I had a ed psy come for two years to the house, dd would not engage, I worked on myself...

A friend once suggest dd had oppositional disorder, I am worred getting her counselling as I am scared she will say something wrong, for example if you go on the computer once for half an hour when she is watching tv she will say I am on the computer all the time.... and I am worried that someone will believe her. I am also scared as ex told lies about me to the authorities in the past... I feel trapped I know she needs help, I feel if I get her help she will hang me, and I am sick of being hanged for other people's issues...

I just want to add, DD attacked other dd so badly (beyond normal child to child fighting) and I rang social services about it, I wanted them to take her as I can't restrain her... they told me that I could get her arrested and as part of the bail she would be ordered by a court to not live with us until the situation got resolved, I seriously thought about it, I looked into it and saw that it would affect her criminal record for good and thought how she would be after living with a relevative for a few months and thought she would be more damaged from it... I told her I was considering the arrest and that she would be forced to live elsewhere, she has left other dd alone since then it is just normal stuff, i think she scared herself and calmed down a lot since then, the thing is the deep problem is still there, I had two lots of an hours worth of being kicked and punched (trying to push her off) this weekend as I said we could not go and see harry potter until she had tied up after herself the major problem (partly my fault as I was treated like a slave and thought I was one until a year or two ago and used to do everything for them so she thinks she is above tidying up afterr herself I was told to make her tidy up after herself)so she tried to wear me down, it makes the weekends so depressing and horrible with her trying to get back the control from me, it is a continual battle and if she was not my child I would have been long gone!

I hate the fact I am a failure and I feel so bad about this, I have only told a couple of people how bad the situation is as I am ashamed and fearful that I will be blamed, I don't know what else to do I keep working on myself...

How old is your dd?

ten, she has been like this since she was a toddler

How old is your dd? What about finding out about a family support worker (through social services) who will help and support you? They can be good.

how do you do that and what do they do?

It souds to me that a lot of the problem is your own perception of the problem iyswim. When I had PND I was convinced my toddler ds was incredibly difficult and I didn;t know how to deal with him. When I got help for that, I found things much easier.
Please don't write her off at such a young age :(

Re the ADHD - some children with this condition are quiet at school, especially girls who are more likely to have the 'daydreamey' type of ADHD. It might be worth looking into the condition more and going back to your GP. There's quite a lot of information on this site www.simplywellbeing.com/

I went on anti depressants before, things werre no different, no one wants to have her she is such hard work. When I went to court with ex, I asked some people to do some statements for me, I did not mention dd or ask them to, each and every one of them as part of their statement wrote about dd and how her behaviour is... this is not just around me this was around her father also when he was about, and he would try and restrain her and she would scream that he was hurting her, she says the same when I restrain her, and once when she went for me infront of ed psyc and ed psyc restrained her, ed psy said she let her go as she was scared that dd would make a claim against her, I said I understand... dd would hang anyone, this is not just me that finds her behaviour strange, as I say once a freind when observing suggested dd was opositional disordered as she had seen it in another child, and someone with an adhd child suggested adhd, there is something not right with her...

Through my own personal experience, I received support via social services, I think, (quite a while ago now) and for three months she visited me weekly and gave me support with parenting problems.

scaredofcows, thanks for the link, I tried the link it wont work for some reason, when i saw a specialist when dd was seven she said that as dd said as dd behaves in school that it was not adhd...

I feel sorry for your dd - but I also feel very sorry for you.

Do you feel that history is repeating itself regarding abuse and you will never be free of it? You need help now with this.

I have no experience of family counselling - I don't know if others have had experience of this.

Garden that sounds good for some people, I don't think that is what I need now, I have worked on myself a lot, I am continuing to do so, I really feel that I need a break from dd and for her to go somwhere each second weekend with normal people rather than extended family. I think she needs to understand that normal people do not slave after children, she has warped idea's that I am her slave and that she is entitled to superior treatment and that includes not taking responsibility for her own mess...

i took her two and a half years ago to cahms she refused to engage as with private ed psy...

I feel very sorry for her also... I also feel that she is ruing her life and ours with what ever problem there is... yes I feel trapped and abused by her bad behaviour, when she behaves normal and is not trying to control the family works really well... I also find the family unit works well when I am a slave and she does not have to do anything so I am stuck between getting removing her control which means family unhappiness or me being downtrodder and her and her sister being happy...

If your dd won't engage, as you have said with the psych ed, you still carry on working on yourself to build your self-esteem (as you are doing with therapist) and need support for your parenting confidence/tools to deal with situation differently.

I have already changed a great deal, the ed psy introduced me to some books and she guided me gently through to understand some things that I had been doing that were not helpfull, hence telling me I had to get dd to take responsibility for her own mess and that I had to leave the mess for dd to pick up... She helped me also to stand up to dd,she said dd was very manipulative and was running rings around me...

I have no specialist knowledge, other than my experience of a family support worker being helpful to me, weekly, for a few months - and I needed the support badly at that time.

I also know that boundaries with children can have been not put in place as a by-product of being in abusive realtionships.

Hard lesson to learn, speaking personally.

I know you are right about boundaries, I have worked so hard on them and it is this ongoing struggle as she took control bless her when her father left, poor kid, she saw the sort of relationship that was had and that her father was in control of me and she probably felt she had to take his palce as the next strongest, I am so upset, inadequate and ashamed that I was so pathetic that a seven year old felt she was better equipped than I was at that time...

Family support worker helped me with starting to enforce some boundaries and that I would stick to them, rather than being walked over.

Have sent a PM

It is a huge struggle at first because, if there haven't really been any before, then it is an uphill struggle at first. Without all the crap being around previously, these boundaries etc would have, in my experience, been in place already, but that is one of the many unfortunate effects of unhealthy relationships.

I know how to enforce boundaries, what I stuggle with is that dd just won't do things like regular children do, she get off on refusing to do things, I have to act now to not let her see that she is frustrating me and ignore her etc, the thing is that will only get me so far, eventually she corners me... ie she will not pick her uniform up, it gets to sunday night and I have pleasantly reminded her twice each day that she eneds to give it to me to wash or she will have no uniform as one example, then sunday night she will not do it, I will either nag as she calls it or give in and be a slave or she will have no uniform for school so she wins again, she has the control again and I am the slave again...

Garden, I have been going at this for two years... I know it was the weakness in me and her seeing her father and my family treat me like a slave and me thinking that was all I was worth... the thing is other dd saw that too and is not like the youngest, other dd is more in the normal range, so is this really nurther or is the something else going on with her?

i think the real thing I am scared of here is that she is going to turn out like the rest of the family, like ex, his mother, his sister, my father, my brother etc, that she is superior to others that menial tasks are beneath her and that other people are there to manipulate and use... I don't want that for her, it scares the hell out of me that I am responsible for that, it scares me the damage she is capable of to society when she gets older and it scares me that I will have to see that ....