Carpe? Where did I say stepford? Or gutless? Hmm?
I didn't say you did.
You chose to respond to my post re "would you approve of the same victim shaming strategies and terminology for an emotionally abused spouse?". Only you know why it provoked a defensive response from you. I am many things, but mind reader is not one of them.
And I responded to that response.
Norman Bates/Stepford Wife.....are comparable and highly insensitive, ignorant, victim shaming, knee jerk, self satisfied put downs. IMO
The salient point being BOTH. Ditto gutless
But if you read the thread it is evident that some posters feel that if a person is the vicim of a lifetime of emotional abuse, has a penis and is old enough to grow facial hair ..."but, that's different" comes into play. And it is open season in characterising them as weak and pathetic. Likening them to a profoundly mentally ill, violent, irredeemable, monstrous, murderous fictional character being just fine and all that jazz.
My question is, how is it consistent/acceptable/appropriate for victim shaming the now grown children of emotionally abusive parents to go virtually unchallenged in this forum? A board where pejoratives in the context of wives of emotionally abusive men would justifiably provoke a Tsunami like challenge of unabated ignorance and Everest sized mountains of self satisfaction ?
In my view any attempt to victim shame anybody, whatever their gender, whatever the nature of their relationship with their abuser, is ... utterly ignorant of the reality the victims have been and are living in.
And I think too that people are glibly ignoring the societal context in which the former children of emotionally abusive parents live in. There is no NSPCC for adults, no version of women's aid for the grown children of EA parents.
Society has come a long way in changing its mind about divorce being deserving of social stigma, not so much on its stance of chanting "blood is thicker than water" and "the abandonment of poor little aged parents". If I had a euro for every person who discovered I am estranged from both my parents and one sibling who went on to intimate "but they will die and you will drown in a sea of regret forever more!!" I'd be spending a lot more time in IKEA than is probably good for me. Yet nobody has ever been anything other than cool with my taking a sledgehammer to my first marriage certificate. (bar my first husband)
This old woman may have been a victim of abuse. She may ALSO be a complete cow. Being a victim of DV doesn't mean you're a good/nice person, although ALL the hundreds of women I've met haven't been. It's perfectly plausible that the DM isn't very nice
In terms of where the OP is right now it is more useful IMO to point out that she should not go in to this on an assumption that the potential MIL is "just an old cow". That she may get a nasty shock by expecting that behaviours can be modified or managed. That her love interest may have been irrevocably conditioned to react in one fixed way. That it is equally as likely that he isn't "just being a bit too soft" on his mum and both can and will sort himself out just as soon as the errors of his ways are pointed out to him. That the issues may be a damn sight more complicated and cemented into place and solutions that she can live with could well turn out to be very thin on the ground.
I think it is essential that she is aware of just how profoundly fixed the dynamic can be, and how normal strategies of behaviour modification may be as useful as a chocolate teapot. I think it is helpful for her to know that she may be letting herself in for a very very very long time of head/wall/bang with little to show for her efforts other than a bloody forehead.
She is in the early heady throws of romantic love, that is a powerful state which rarely responds to orders from strangers to "just leave him".
Stop the DM's shitty behaviour, what it is and why is immaterial, The op doesn't have to put up with it.
Quite. But...where has anybody suggested she should ? How much clearer a picture of how hard, how complicated, how pervasive, how exhausting, how depressing, how unsolvable, how enduring, how infuriating, how draining, how distressing being a DIL to this kind of MIL could me and my ilk have painted ? How much clearer could we have been that had we had a crystal ball prior to a profound emotional connection to our husbands we would have looked at what our lives were to become and ...probably run like fuck.
NOBODY is worth THIS amount of crap
IYO. My husband, my son. They were worth it. And as much as it will potentially irritate you that I have grudging and unwelcome compassion for "a cow", MIL was worth it too. She wasn't a monster, she was an ill human being. One I once had to talk myself out of smothering with a pillow by rerunning episodes of CSI in my head, but all the same, a human being. Who like it or lump it needed being taken care of and the state made it very clear it wasn't going to do it for us. In retrospect, with the help of hindsight, I am not sorry I did it. Although I am still not sure how I got through it without throwing myself off the roof or being arrested for strangling a "defenceless little old lady". But, sorry, no.
Does that mean I think the OP should throw herself under a bus into this newish relationship regardless of the challenges she will most likely face in terms of his mother's manipulations and her love interest's lifetime of conditioning to submit to her demands ?
No.
Not least because knowing a husband was worth it is only something you discover in hindsight several decades later. It's a massive massive gamble, that perhaps you can only throw the dice on if you have no idea that you are playing roulette until it's too late. For every person who found a man to be worth it there are probably hundreds still licking their wounds after Herculean efforts for somebody who simply wasn't worth the pain they went through trying to chip away at the chains of a highly disfunctional child/parent relationship.
But I think anybody who has read my posts and come away with the impression that I am recommending full steam ahead has a reading comprehension issue potentially caused by their one tool toolbox.
Not every problem is a nail.
Which is why it is worth trying tweezers, spanners and scalpels as well as a plethora of hammers.