Helping children get used to two homes

[justanillusion]

My children spend a lot of time with their Dad. We separated last year. I encouraged this initially for many reasons. I'm probably responsible for the set up. I don't think i have got it right with "two homes".

My just turned 3 year alternates between being really clingy and detached. He sleeps with me every night. When talking about going to his Dads he "hates" me and distances himself.

He doesn't refer to either place as home. Mine is "the house".

They don't want to come home from their Dads, they are hard work when they get home, then it fades after a while and both will be sat on top of me for cuddles. Maybe this is all typical. It is a less than ideal situation after all.

My older child was very difficult for a while and wanted more time at Dads so let him. Things improved a lot when i realised that was a mistake and spent more time with him. He was much happier.

When i tried suggesting last year that the then 2 yo was struggling to be away from me and we perhaps needed to reduce overnights my ex had a really strong reaction so i got nowhere. Before separating the youngest and i were together all the time so it was a huge change.

My instinct is that things aren't right for my youngest but i don't know how to fix this.
Would doing family things with ex help the children feel more secure about 2 homes rather than a disconnect in their lives? Or be more confusing.

I wonder if anyone has any advice/thoughts.

springy I'm not sure I belong. I'm not sure about the abuse thing. Sometimes I wonder if everything that went wrong was triggering feelings that were already there related to past events. I also feel like there were things i could have stopped and didn't because of my own issues.

That's the best i can explain it. i think i need to work through some of this before i can take further steps.

I hope you manage to work through the things you didn't all those years ago. Things don't just go away do they? I made a conscious decision a long time ago not to be defined by things from growing up and tried to ignore them - yet find myself talking about them years on. You are right, burying doesn't work.

I do hear you.

I thought that i need to ignore things and pull myself together to move on and make a life. But maybe facing things will help me move on. I tried much harder to engage with therapy today.
Thanks again.

But i absolutely was normal with a functioning brain once upon a time!

To quote you..

What happened between then and now? You suggest that what happened triggered previous trauma - same here ie a damaging childhood meant my choices were skewed and I chose to marry an abusive man. But that doesn't negate that my husband was an abuser.

Anyway, you seem terrified and it's that that comes across to me. I do appreciate that terror I really do. Imo (and ime), information got me off the ceiling ; I recognised the uniform patterns of an abuser (all abusers display remarkably similar traits, curiously). That 'normalised' the abuse for me, especially when I met other women who had experienced the same. I felt I was conned into being terrified, that the threat of the abuse didn't have the weight I thought -and had been led to believe by my abuser - it had. Abusers have a knack of plumbing into primal fear - of survival? - in their targets. It's all a con. It really, really is.

Info got me there. I would suggest you get a copy of Pat Craven's little book 'Living with the Dominator' (she wrote the Freedom Programme) but ime the info, though clear and unthreatening of itself, was too incendiary for me at a time when I was still gripped with immense fear. I needed to work through it with others (interestingly, I felt the same about Toni Morrisons book Beloved, which I read with others in an A level class and wouldn't have been able to read alone).

Time got me through and out the other side I suppose, but time well utilised re I went to the courses and groups, and I could eventually read the books. I've said before on here that although we were all traumatised women in the WA support group - the coffee table was awash with spilled coffee bcs we all shook so much - i have never laughed so much as I did there, every week. We cried with laughter. We regularly cried with sorrow and fear, too, but my overriding memory is of laughter as we popped the bubble our abuser had sealed us into - we laughed at them, and their ridiculous behaviour, with scorn and release. Ah, so healing.

Please forgive me if I am being pushy, though. I want you - and your kids - free, it's hard to hold back.

Not pushy. I appreciate it. I'm just not there right now. I can't call my husband who i spent nearly 20 years with my abuser. And right now i cant read about it. Sorry I know how frustrating that is because ive frustrated people before, i probably frustrate my counsellor, i know i frustrate myself.

But i've left and even if i cant make sense of things, im trying to establish a new life so hopefully that mitigates how annoying i am - at least a bit. And I'm determined to talk to my counsellor and start to make sense of things.

Fair enough. Absolutely fair enough!

I don't find you annoying, as it happens. And i do think I was pushy.

I wish you the very very best, just. May the road rise up to meet you etc

Thank you springy. I think you said more of the right things than you realise. Best wishes to you too.

I said I'd find the link for your local WA service here it is.

Once again, very sensitive service.

Just saying