I received this letter anonymously in my role for an adult ADHD & ASC forum and I don't know what to do with it. The man writes:
Dear Moderators,
I do not know what to do. My youngest daughter is in a 5/6 year relationship with a young man, both of them are aged 23 and they have three children aged 5, 4 and 18 months.
My daughter was violently raped aged 19 and when off the rails and left home, got into trouble and ended up living with this boy and his family.
The rapist was never prosecuted because the police who interviewed her decided that she hadn’t said no enough for seemed certain about the rape, and they did not believe they could get a conviction in her case, so it was reported and no further action was taken.
I believe this has affected my daughter’s struggles with mental health the most.
She has tried to kill herself twice with overdosing on prescription pain killers, the 2nd time she did so, the doctors told us she had sustained damage to her kidneys.
Her current relationship with this boy, who is the father of all three children, I believe to be a negative one. He also definitely has ADHD. The 5 of them have now been evicted twice and they have no savings, no assets, no qualifications, no jobs and no idea of how to run a household or budget, because they are both separately and jointly responsible for approximately £15,000 of debt.
The worst of it is the debts aren’t just them living beyond their means, they are for stupid things like rent arrears, council tax, utilities, things the rest of us pay first, but they didn’t because they preferred to spend it on take aways or whatever took their fancy. The point is, up until now, they have been acting like they have no responsibilities and no dependants to look after.
They are now living with me and my wife, who is disabled and in a wheelchair. This has been the situation for 3-4 months now and I have learnt that there problems are not all down to one of them and a run of bad luck. It turns out, the boyfriend has a gambling problem. They both smoke, or vape, which is costing them both in excess of £300 a month, mostly because the boyfriend keeps on. Vaping more often, increasing the need to buy more, etc, vicious circle that can only be fixed by stopping altogether, but how many of us listened when we were told?
The most worrying and troubling thing now is that my daughter explains that she doesn’t do the things she wants to do because it’s easier than listening to ‘the grief’ she would get from him. She explains it using those words when I asked her about why she doesn’t do things, but her partner does. For example, she would like to go to an exercise class with her sister, at a cost of £10 a week. Her boyfriend plays football with a local club, which costs them both £28 every 4 weeks, but she says that she doesn’t think she would be allowed to do it because it’s more expensive than her boyfriend’s football.
The boyfriends dad is the type of man who thinks ‘a woman’s place is in the kitchen’ and cleaning and cooking is women’s work, etc. and I personally think my daughter’s boyfriend thinks the same way, although he would never ever admit it to me. I do see little snippets of it seeping through. He asked my daughter after she had prepared breakfast for their three children, why she hadn’t made breakfast for him and I thought to myself, what’s wrong with his arms and legs? Why can’t he make is own food? But, to my utter horror, she began to explain that she wasn’t eating because she wasn’t hungry.
So, I had a conversation with my daughter when we were alone and that’s when she explained to me (in a vague kind if way, deliberately avoiding being specific) that if she thinks he will disapprove, she won’t even try because if she does, she feels he will argue with her until she does what he wants or he will walk away and sulk, until she comes round to what he wants, and she will even apologise to him, not because she’s wrong, but because it will shut him up about the whole thing.
I personally think this is an abusive relationship, I mean to say that I think this meets the criteria to be labelled as an unhealthy, toxic and abusive relationship and it is continuing to cloud her mind, elongating her mental health, almost as if she might have gotten over her past traumas, had she not taken up with a boy who treats her like he does.
How do I convince her that her situation if left as it is, will only increase in its abusiveness, just like a frog in a pot of water, (drop it in boiling water and it’ll jump right out, but put it in cold and slowly warm it up, you get soup).
The idea of her raising three kids alone scares her more than staying with him, yet he’s never managed to hold a job, usually gets sacked or just stops going to it. Always seems to put himself first, never his children of his girlfriend. If my daughter was to try and do it on her own, her life would actually get better, much quicker, but she won’t even consider it because she has convinced herself she is in love with him. But 3 days before they met she was moving into another boys house who hadn’t told his mother and when she found out (on moving day) she stopped it, so she sofa surfed rather than coming home and 3 days later, we were told she was living with this boy and his parents.