Recovery from dysfunctional step families support thread

[SnowWhitesSM]

This thread is for anyone seeking support and wanting to share their WTF moments now they're out of the dysfunctional dynamics of step families where there's the classics of - Disney dadding, dad guilt, over compensating, exes on power trips, not being able to share a bed with your husband, loyalty binds, feeling guilty about your own dc.

Please post any articles you want to share, any insights, any thoughts you've had now you've reclaimed your power and voice in your own home again.

We did not deserve to be in the middle of their dysfunction. We did not deserve to be the scapegoat for their mess of a family. We did not deserve to be painted as a monster for wanting basic boundaries and house rules. We are no longer the unpaid nanny 👊

Good morning all. How we all doing?

I had another counsellor session this week, which was super helpful but has left me drained and sad. I’m so frustrated with myself. I have no intention of reconciling, I don’t miss him (at all), but I think I’m just still grieving the loss of the hopes and dreams whilst simultaneously asking myself why on earth I stayed so long and tolerated what I did.

My counsellor thinks I need to be more compassionate with myself and less critical, (especially as that harsh internal critical voice is a flag for lower self esteem). He also is clear that my recovery will take as long as it takes and there is no way of predicting when this will all become easier.

One part he and I are both clear on is that getting into another relationship is a big no for me. The priority has to be working on myself, and getting really comfortable being in my own skin and being very happy with who I am. Which I am focussed on. I’m doing all the right things, I just need to give it time.

I think I just need to accept the grieving part, let myself be sad and heartbroken over the loss of what I had hoped for. And this too shall pass.

It’s a nightmare. I don’t know how I can concentrate on anything today.

I feel dreadful. I feel sick and can’t eat anything. My body is full of unnecessary adrenaline. I’m going to start the day with some breathing exercises and try to go for a swim or a bike ride at lunchtime.

I have blocked him on my phone and emailed him telling me not to contact me. I need to protect my own well-being. I stupidly got drawn into a conversation with him where he starts out as if he’s reasonable and willing to listen to me and take me seriously. But then took what I said and turned it against me in the ways he knows will be most hurtful to me. So I’m not making that mistake again.

That sounds tough @sassbott. Grief is really hard.

The fact that you are grieving for something that mostly existed in your own hopes (rather than the reality) is tough. The person you’d invested your hopes in is still there but you are facing the fact they were never who you thought and hoped they were.

It does sound like you’re doing really well and making progress. Sad as it all is.

Thanks @BurntToastAgain. I think I’m also a little angry tbh. I entered the relationship with an open heart, naive and trusting. And he took that and manipulated/ abused it. He had moved on before I even ended it, he was getting his supply elsewhere as I increased boundaries. So his life remains unaffected. I on the other hand am now in therapy, spending a small fortune on unpicking the damage. Whilst simultaneously trying to get over a break up. I don’t envisage being in place to even consider a relationship for months (if not a year). And being on my own is no bad thing, it’s healthy. But I deeply resent that he is off living his life with not a care in the world and I am here picking up the pieces.

I’m not in victim mode though. I recognise that I have had a very very lucky escape. There was one pivotal decision I made about 2 years ago. It was a difficult decision and at the time it was so hard. Now? I look back on that and recognise that having the strength to do what I felt was right. Saved me.

I’m so sorry with all you are having to go through.

@sassbott I can really identify with your last few posts.
My parents had a good marriage & though not without his faults my dad was to all intents & purposes devoted to my mum. Aside from the tradition of man as provider & woman stuck in the house (which most mothers I knew were) I had fairly positive relationship modelling.
One of the things that caused me so much stress after my marriage split was precisely the whole How on Earth did I get it so Wrong? thing. How did I end up with a man who constantly & consistently undermined me; a man who always put himself, & never me, first; a man who cheated and was unbelievably selfish & emotionally cruel?
I spent ages really believing that it had to be me; that I was defective & that I really had made his life a misery (the narrative he still sticks to to this day). Through therapy I came to see that (though not faultless) the issue really had not been me. I made peace with it but still don't really understand how I chose so badly.
With exdp I really thought I'd hit the jackpot. And in many ways I did. Exdp is a good man in many ways - he just chose not to prioritise me & again I went into that spiral of How did I choose so badly & why do I go for selfish/weak men? Yes exdp had dc that needed care & attention but he actively chose to tolerate a toxic situation & expected me to do so the same because he didn't want to take on the awful behaviour of his df & exw.
Like you I've been grieving neither exh nor exdp but rather the belief I held that marriage & partnership were A Good Thing & that a relationship should be the mainstay of any family & that the two people in the relationship should really look out & care for each other.
I didn't want to be bitter when with exdp so I put up with being sidelined so much more that I should have. I have good self esteem now but honestly? - I don't trust myself with men. I have such good judgement regarding nearly everything else but always seem to accept less that what I'm worth in relationships.
I'm not sure I'll ever get to the bottom of this. I think some of it is that male privilege is still so embedded in all aspects of society that even the 'good ones' cannot always see that they expect WAY too much of their partners (in all aspects of life) & of women in general.
I'm reading The Lost Daughter at the moment & boy is it stirring. I've read lots of that writers books & she is so honest in depicting the widespread denial of female emotion & the blithe way in which (not all but the majority of) men move through life expecting & getting exactly what they want.
I think it is very hard to meet a man who knows himself well or who is prepared to question himself. So many just choose to hide behind blame & shame.

@sassbott I think it’s ok to be angry and resentful about that. It’s not ok.

But ultimately you will emerge healthy and whole and able to be happy and have positive relationships in the future. He’ll still be repeating the same cycles again and again.

@Magda72 it is easy to blame yourself for choosing badly. But, as you say, male privilege is so entrenched - such a default in society - that we don’t recognise the negative effects of it until it’s too late.

I think a big issue that I’ve been struggling with is just how incapable my H is of supporting me emotionally. I think he intended to, but he isn’t able to do it. He’s able to take all the support I can give, and still expect or ‘need’ more. But it literally doesn’t occur to him that he’s getting loads of support and it could and should be reciprocated. Having women take care of his emotional needs is something that’s so standard to him that he doesn’t recognise the huge amount of work that goes into it or that they deserve the same.

It’s an entitlement born of a lifetime of male privilege. Combined with a personality type that’s all ego and a bottomless pit of neediness in terms of attention. And possibly a difficulty with empathy and a focus on the surface that result from some neurodiversity.

He is not questioning whether he is a good person as a result of all this. It’s me that responds to poor treatment by thinking it must be something about me that caused it. He just decides that I must be mentally ill and need fixing for not being delighted to have been allowed to experience his and his children’s dysfunction.

@Magda72 it’s so interesting actually working with this counsellor and it’s interesting how I’m finally able to really analyse this relationship/ me/ the whys etc.

Where I’ve gotten to is this. When it comes to my personal and very close relationships, I (historically) have backed away from difficult conversations and putting in non negotiable boundaries. You know the ones, the life defining ones. This isn’t just with my exp. It is also with my exh. When my marriage was going through a difficult phase, I tried to have conversations with my exh but completely lacked the ability to really bring it to a head. I knew deep down that something was amiss, but I chose to not pick at the scab. I instead buried my head in the sand and hoped that things would improve. When the children got older etc. Obviously they didn’t and things came crashing down eventually. My exh however was never abusive or manipulative. He was (and is) a kind person. So whilst the marriage breakdown was tough, I came out of that quite together in some respects.

Then I met my exp and again was unable to apply and stick to firm boundaries. I was able to have conversations, even say no this isn’t ok, and attempt to leave. But I completely lacked the ability to stay away and that part of me that should have kicked in that ‘this is a non negotiable’ didn’t. The verbal abuse actually showed up within a year from recollection. There was a dinner, I had taken him to a very nice restaurant. Over that dinner he called me the c word. I can remember the abject shock I felt to this day. No one had ever called me a C**T. I can picture the restaurant like it was yesterday. We left the restaurant separately that night, but, ultimately I stayed with him. He apologised profusely and promised it wouldn’t happen again.

If that was to happen back then in my corporate environment, I would not have tolerated it - at all.

So I knew what was acceptable and what wasn’t. But I allowed it. If that was to happen to me today, I would leave the table, inform the staff of what had just happened (leave him to settle the bill), and then block him and never see him again. There is no way I exist in a world where any form of language like that is acceptable and that includes my intimate relationship.

Where I have gotten to is this. My ‘external’ persona (for want of a better word) is very confident, the rules of engagement are clear. So in work/ less intimate relationships, I am totally fine.

My ‘internal’ persona is very different. And actually at the root of it is low self esteem/ confidence in terms of what I expect from an intimate partner. Which I mask very well via my external persona and perhaps via my confidence as a parent. Because again in the parent/ child relationship I have zero issue establishing boundaries and operating in a respectful environment.

If I had carried that ‘external’ confidence internally. The minute he called me the C word, it would have been over. Because there is absolutely zero justification for using that language anywhere in my world. (Yes I know certain demographics / regions in the world are more open and easy with the word, it’s more the intent / contempt with which it was said that made it utterly vicious.

For me, the work I now need to do is on me and me in the context of building up my inner self confidence So that I never ever come close to letting someone like this back in.

Also. I’ll say this. I ended up watching some videos by Matthew Hussey last night. He’s the person who initially got famous by telling women how to land their man etc. But his more recent stuff is deeper and more interesting. There was one video in particular on his insta that really resonated for me. And it was this essentially.

When we were in unhealthy relationships, we did our best with the tools and knowledge we had back then.
If today, we have stepped away from those relationships then we need to give ourselves HUGE amounts of recognition, because? Well because we’ve finally left. And whatever knowledge it is/ or tools that we have equipped ourselves with to do so, are new tools that we didn’t have a year ago or 6 months ago etc.

So actually. The fact that today we are able to write these posts and be single is something we should be happy and excited about. Because (and we also know this is true), many people are never able to leave these sorts of relationships.

It helped me to reframe some things. Yes I have work to do on myself and that’s ok. I’m no victim. This is now my chance to do some good work on myself that ultimately will result in a happier and healthier me.

Plenty of people (not just men), as they get older really do not resolve their issues/ baggage. It’s going to be harder to find someone healthy, as we get older, but you know what? That’s ok. I will pick singledom every day, for the rest of my life before I settle for anyone who thinks that calling me a C is how they can show up with me (that’s an extreme example but you get what I mean).

Sassbot I really resonate with your posts, especially the external vs the internal. I'm very much the same in that I know thats unacceptable, but I don't hold the boundary firm.

@SnowWhitesSM that’s interesting. My exp picked up on that fairly early on actually. I remember he and I went for a coffee during the workday to chat about something. I think I was finding something difficult. And as he sat opposite me he commented ‘your external face to the world isn’t who you are inside. To everyone you show this Uber confident, chatty, almost bulletproof facade. But inside you’re really actually really soft.’

At the time I remember thinking, wow he really has gotten to know me. And he had. He had spent his time observing me really closely. Now I remember that flashback (it popped into my head after my counselling session actually) and I now think, that’s when he knew I was his perfect target. I wasn’t that super strong and confident woman on the inside.

A part of that is probably down to the damage following my divorce. A part of is probably also down to what @Magda72 has touched on re roles of men/ women in society. In my culture, nearly all the women were at home and they are subservient/ respectful to the men. So there’s an element deep down of my no doubt thinking this is how women should be at home/ in their intimate relationships. Soft. We’re certainly not meant to be the brash / confident career women in the home/ in our intimate relationships.

Years ago I remember reading an article about a woman called Indra Nooyi. I was so shocked at how backward it was, it’s stuck with me to this day. Now I respect entirely that this is story of a female in a country very culturally different and with their own traditions etc. But tbh, IME the culture I was raised in was not too dissimilar to the story she told. Hold on I’ll find it and link it.

www.businessinsider.com/pepsi-indra-nooyi-work-life-balance-2017-8?r=US&IR=T

Like I said, I respect that this is a different country and culture. I also respect that the woman who said what she said to Indra was her mother and therefore a completely different generation (far more traditional).

What struck me is the fact that Indra shared it. And In doing so, potentially wasn’t aware of just how demeaning it came across, well to women in general. All I got from it, is do as well as you wish in your career, kick ass, run the world. But when you come home none of that matters, the priority is you being a wife and a mother. Maternal beats the confident, whip smart CEO. That needs to be left at the door.

Like I said, I was raised (albeit in the Uk) with a very similar culture. Whatever my external successes may be, they don’t count. What counts is when I come home at night, if the milk is out, that’s what i need to run out and get (even though I have a house full of servants I pay for to do it for me). Talk about putting a phenomenally successful women in her place.

Never have I ever heard a male CEO tell a similar story. What does that tell us?

@sassbott, really interesting insight.

I am further down the line from step parenting and was in the position of @burnttoastagain as had children with Ex and had previously brought many assets to the relationship. Ex was also extremely vindictive.

After extensive counselling I also realised my boundaries were too soft but I've also accepted that my approach came from lack of knowledge of manipulative people.

An example- we lock our front doors and perhaps some of us have alarms and cctv. This is generally accepted as "good boundaries" but should you be targeted by a burglar who befriends you, to learn your security, then you're into a whole other level of defences.

In hindsight I can see that my empathic nature can be exploited and I didn't have the insight or cynicism that other people seemed to have naturally (including my siblings). I can see the differences in my children. Some are more wary of people and less likely to be taken in whereas one is trusting and kind. That child is also extremely capable (sports, academic) and attractive so will be a target.

From my relationship experience I know I have to provide different guidance to each child as their innate personalities are very different. My experience will defintely help them avoid similar relationships.

For me knowledge is key - I assumed that toxic (narcissist, sociopath) would be easy to spot. Any red flags that came up I didn't take as a stop sign but rather something that could be worked on...because I assumed both of us wanted a mutually beneficial relationship. That was the flaw...ex doesn't want a mutual relationship, it has to be slanted significantly towards his needs.

For me knowledge is key - I assumed that toxic (narcissist, sociopath) would be easy to spot. Any red flags that came up I didn't take as a stop sign but rather something that could be worked on...because I assumed both of us wanted a mutually beneficial relationship. That was the flaw...ex doesn't want a mutual relationship, it has to be slanted significantly towards his needs.

This is a good point. It can be very difficult for someone to perceive the ‘red flags’ as such because you are working on the assumption that the other person has vaguely normal levels of empathy and views relationships reciprocally. It’s not that you are ignoring them. It’s that you cannot see them because you assume they’re things you’ll work together on towards a common goal.

You don’t recognise that they aren’t willing or able to look beyond their wants to support your needs until you find yourself in a situation where you are vulnerable enough that those needs become paramount.

Part of what prevented me from recognising how much my H struggles with empathy and all that comes with it was that, for the first part of the relationship, my needs were not particularly onorous and I was able to meet them just through my own everyday habits for the most part. All he had to do was the fun and frivolous stuff.

In contrast, he was so unbelievably needy. But I attributed this to a whole set of challenging circumstances in his life. I empathised and considered the problems he was facing. And offered help and support. Even where I had challenges (I have an autoimmune disease, for example), I was able to mitigate and alleviate these such that it didn’t manifest as a ‘problem’.

It was only when I found myself vulnerable that it became apparent that he couldn’t reciprocate. He wasn’t able to empathise or consider my needs. He was still fixated on the circumstances in his life that he found less than ideal.

By that point, they’d long stopped being new situations or crises. They’d become just the standard reality of his life. Things he should have processed and have developed habits (behavioural and mental) to live with them. As I had with my painful autoimmune condition. But he didn’t. He remained stuck and fixated on his divorced dad guilt, his own (self inflicted) injustices, how awful his ex is, his toxic mother, and so on.

All of which meant that, rather than supporting me in pregnancy, childbirth and with an infant, he focused on himself. In fact, he perceived himself as being let down by me because I didn’t have the resources to support his (frankly self-indulgent) worries. And actually, those worries and his choices as a result of them, were making my life much more difficult and increasingly intolerable. His response was to become hostile towards me and to make things worse for me (through his own actions and the way he let his children behave). That hostility increased even more when I started to implement boundaries to protect myself and my children from the dysfunction.

I don’t think he set out to trick me or to hide anything. And, on reflection, I don’t think it’s some failure on my part to have not seen the signs (even if I can see them as such in retrospect). It really was that I assumed that he was having a harder time and that my support would be reciprocated. It didn’t occur to me that he’d lack the skills and motivation to do that.

@Fireflygal thank you. I sometimes feel that my ramblings are into some dark hole. It’s hard to know how much of my experience / musings etc are relatable vs not.

I do also agree with you in the being naive to these sorts of personalities. My past relationships (aside from one, but I ended that quickly) had been healthy. I hadn’t encountered someone like this in an intimate relationship. Like you, it was incomprehensible to me that someone can lie and manipulate to such an extent, simply to get their needs served. When I said ‘we need to work on xyz’ it came from a good and genuine place. And I would go away and try and make changes. Whereas he? Said what he needed to to appease me and went on his merry way, with the inate belief that he needed to change absolutely nothing and I was the problem.

For me though, there is no avoiding the fact that whilst that got me suckered in. That doesn’t really excuse the fact that I stayed when the verbal abuse started and escalated, very subtly and interspersed with very nice behaviour.

I’m not beating myself up. As I said I’m trying to be incredibly compassionate towards myself and I did the best I could with what I had in my toolkit at the time.

I actually look back on it and think I did know what was happening. I knew that I needed my home to not be his home. I knew I needed a place away from him and his ‘dark clouds’ (as I used to visualise it). I created deliberate space to protect myself and regroup when needed. I guess I just hoped that with time and space, the guy I met would return. Until then I ‘managed, him and the situation. Including allowing repeated verbal abuse. When what should have happened, pretty much the second time he verbally attacked me? Was a non negotiable, enough.

For me and my particular situation. The conflict around this children masked his behaviours. They gave a justification/ rhetoric for behaving the way he was (and I swallowed those excuses). Then meshed into it all was his children, their behaviour, his behaviour, the expectations (on me). And the subsequent hammering on me (that we see on multiple threads here) of ‘why don’t you like my children?’. Which subsequently kicked off a whole other dysfunction and internal conflict and sent me off on a whole other piece of ‘what is wrong with me?’.

Now I see it as classic deflection. Attack me on something that is a core part of me (my mothering/ parenting/ maternal aspect). Send me down that rabbit hole. Use language to send me into an emotional tailspin. Because while I’m doing that. I’m not focussing on him and his behaviours/ dysfunction/ manipulation.

I mean at some level I take my hat off to him. That’s a level of manipulation that really takes some doing. It takes thought and planning. It takes calculating what to say and when. It is very deliberate and I absolutely have to believe that he knew what he was doing. He had a need and all he did from there on in is figure our how he could achieve that. It’s that simple, nothing else featured.

His account of it all is that I tricked him by being so nice and supportive and kind until I had a baby. Then I changed (having gotten what I wanted presumably) and was mean to him and wanted to ‘exclude’ his DC.

So the standard evil SM narrative that gets trotted out by hostile posters again and again on MN.

Genuinely that’s not what happened. It’s that I found myself in a new situation where the support I’d just assumed would be there was not only missing but I was being scapegoated and punished for not prioritising his and his children’s dysfunction (again, something I was only able to recognise as dysfunction and not ‘adjustment’ or resulting from specific, adverse circumstances when it continued and got worse even as those circumstances didn’t apply any longer).

I wasn’t excluding his DC. I was putting boundaries in place and withdrawing myself and my children as much as possible for dysfunction that was doing up palpable harm.

I’d imagine that many of the SMs who are painted by their (ex)partners, the SC’s mother, the SC’s wider family, and so on as calculating witches who pretended to be nice til they ‘got their man and baby’ and then rejected the SC have similar stories to tell. But people aren’t interested in listening to them because they don’t fit the cultural preference for ‘won’t anyone think of the children?’ narratives.

This all makes me think of a point I saw on here recently about the accusation of the children in the ‘second family’ being ‘cuckoos in the nest’. The poster said that actually it’s the SC who are more like the cuckoos in stepfamilies - especially those where there’s dysfunction based on divorced dad guilt, difficult exes determined to remain the most important woman in everyone’s lives, loyalty binds and all that crap.

They are the birds introduced into another woman’s nest. And the expectations of their father and mother mean that they take up all the space and resources. The woman’s actual chicks are pushed to the margin and she exhausted herself trying to meet the needs of the voracious chicks that have been introduced to her nest.

Note to all the ‘oh you sound vile; those poor children’ lurkers: it’s not that the SC are inherently bad. Cuckoo chicks are just doing what they do. It’s their parents that create the problem.

And yes, the SM did realise the SC were there and not hers (unlike the poor bird mother). But she didn’t know what she was getting in to. Because no one anticipates that the SC’s father (and the rest of their family) will make them into cuckoo chicks at the expense on the SM and her children.

Definitely be compassionate towards yourself @sassbott.

Even the ‘why did I stay?’ question is not something to judge yourself over. The answer is probably that you were a victim of your own empathy and your ability to see it as thr difficult circumstances not the man himself.

Whether or not he was absolutely calculating, people like that have an innate sense of people who will do that. Who will excuse their behaviour so long as it can be pinned on external conflict. Of course they do.

@BurntToastAgain we have similar stories. He too had needs when I met him (so called toxic EXW etc) that took priority. I therefore put my needs to one side, because like you I could meet my own needs and both prioritised his needs whilst simultaneously excusing his poor behaviour.

When I too expected life to return to some semblance of normality. It never happened. I always call it the pendulum swing. When it was time for pendulum to be about me or my needs, it could never quite happen. He’d try, because at some level he knew what was expected from him, but eventually (and after very little effort), he would explode in frustration.

I have to say now, I do view the ‘toxic’ exwife in a very different light. She was with him longer. She lived with him, married him and had children with him. I sit here today and actually wonder how her life must have been. Day in day out, stuck with this man.

Re your exh? Every one of our situations will be different and the people we are dealing with will be different. All of us have some form of narcissistic tendencies. It depends how far down the line each of these men are.

For me? 100% he set out to snare me and get what he could. Emotionally, sexually and financially. It was deliberate and planned. As narcissist supplies go? I ticked a lot of boxes.

@BurntToastAgain I think that cuckoo analogy is spot on.

My exp was VERY keen on us having an ‘us’ baby. And when I held him to details and tried to pin him down about how it would work, all he would retort is ‘we will manage and we will make it work’. There was absolutely no intent to actually seriously think through and commit to what having a new baby would look like. Zero discussions on logistics/ childcare/ finances. All he expected (and knew) is that because i had been doing the bulk of logistics for my children - organising nannies/ paying school fees/ etc, I would do the bulk for our joint child. When I hammered home to him that my exh and I, when the children were young shared childcare duties and were both hands on, enabling me to continue to work outside the home, he couldn’t say anything.

I categorically ruled it out because, bluntly, women are nearly always Left holding the baby. And the children who would have been most impacted by this would have been mine. With as you say, cuckoo chicks (his kids and the our baby), essentially now being in their home and taking the time and attention from their mother that they needed (as teens). But he didn’t care about any of that. And he certainly didn’t care about he impact to children who weren’t his.

And that latter point gets over looked a lot on step parenting threads. With all the focus and hand wringing and wailing focussed on the NR children. Well what about the step parent (normally the NRP) expecting and forcing dynamics that essentially deprioritise the resident children and their needs?

This becomes even more messed up when the resident child is also their child. Which wasn’t the factor for me. My exp never prioritised the needs of my children, I did. And it was my refusal to allow his children needs to be asserted over mine that was at the root cause of his anger/ abuse towards me. I held firm on those boundaries and regardless of which way he went at it, I refused to budge a mm.

I think you’re right that there’s a spectrum.

I think my H is more accidentally this way than your ex. I don’t think he has the wherewithal to be that calculating. And he doesn’t have the social skills to pull the manipulation off in such a calculating manner.

You may be right that his toxic ex wife is toxic because of the years and ongoing issues with him.

I think my H’s W is actually far more like your calculating ex than H is. But she’s not as clever as she thinks she is either. She displays (and their entire relationship history indicates) really strong sociopathic traits. Even more so than he does.

She wasn’t looking for narcissistic supply in the same way. She was and is motivated by what she can get from people in more concrete ways. She undeniably targeted him because he is a high earner (she’ tried the same on someone immediately before meeting him, but he agreed that she should abort the ‘accidental’ pregnancy). People are just tools for achieving her aims. Her children are a means to money and not having to support herself - and she will use them as bargaining tools to achieve that.

Their relationship was clearly a disaster. But she’s possibly worse than he is.

And I’ll add the other part that is lost time and again on threads is that 9 times out of 10, the NR parent may be living with his SC, but in logistics terms? With very little expectation of what they contribute. In most threads the RP (the mother) runs the household, does the food shop, WOHM and contributes/ covers her portion of the bills, and raises the children.

The Stepfather (again I stress this is in most the threads I read so is by no means conclusive) is less involved.

Then the NR SC arrive and the dynamic is tossed into the air with super Disney dad suddenly arriving and going into overdrive. Expecting everyone (including his spouse/ partner) to pivot to meet the needs of his children.

Eventually a frustrated SM posts on her, at her wits end that her needs/ the needs of the children are not being met and is met by a chorus of negativity (not completely as many people also call out the DP/ DH issue).

In what universe is it acceptable that SC needs time and again are our front and Center to the detriment of everyone else? And the only people pushing this agenda are the parents of said children. As you say, it’s not the poor kids faults. They’re simply following the lead set by the parents.

It is so beyond messed up. And it does point to deeply ingrained sexist thoughts about the roles of men and the roles of women.
Men live with children who aren’t theirs and so sweet FA? How amazing.
Flip that to women? Witches who should be burnt at the stake.

It’s horseshit and all designed to keep women in their place.

Oh yes. The misogyny engrained in it all.

The nest ends up being the woman’s for all the reasons you say. Her children have little impact on the man because she’s the one doing all the work. He’s not running around depleting himself for her children.

That’s why the cuckoo problem does manifest as other women’s children in one’s nest. The father has been doing the minimum in so many cases. And it’s his continued lack of input coupled with a massive sense of entitlement that make his children into cuckoos in his partner’s nest.

@BurntToastAgain my exp has superb social skills. Can be very charming and engaging, if he chooses to. If he decides the person/ people are not important enough to warrant his time, he can also be completely detached.

I remember one occasion, when he was neck deep in family court cases I arranged a nice long lunch with some of my friends. The rugby was on, in a great pub. I told all of my friends, talk to him, see if you can snap him out of it, but do not, at any point ask him about his ex/ his kids/ the court case. I was curious, could he remove himself from the drama and engage.
Short answer? No, he couldn’t. He initially made small talk and when everyone around him was talking about work/ telling jokes/ bantering about sports, he literally sat there silent. When he realised that no one was going to pay him attention and put his issues at the Center of everything, he just shut down and didn’t even bother to try and engage. Eventually he declared he was leaving (expected me to leave with him) and I refused.

At the time I put it down to ‘he’s stressed’. Now I view it in a very different light. For him, it’s all about him and it’s all about attention and that extends to his children because they are an extension of him. No one else’s needs factor.

How intelligent he is? Intelligent enough to manipulate. Not intelligent enough to do it without thinking and without it taking resources away elsewhere. The side effects of the manipulation were there - it consumed all of his energy. He gained weight, was listless, his career went backwards - everywhere he could have been flying and going perfectly well? Backwards.

A part of me feels that I have already unwittingly got my revenge on him. Yes he got my time. My energy and my body. But he didn’t get anything else he had set his sights on. And that will eat away at him. It was within his sights and yet, he didn’t achieve any of it. High five to me.

High five to me.

Yes. Definitely.

He’ll be angry because he lost you!

I think this is all so interesting & insightful.
I was brought up in Ireland in the 80's & noone's mother worked (bar the odd teacher or doctor). My parents heavily advocated education & jobs for us (in that they were being progressive) but I do think that we (my sisters & I & possibly most of our friends) still internalised the societal notion that while things might have progressed for women, our main value was still as primary carers (of partners & children).

"The State shall therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home".

This is actually written into the Irish Constitution!!!! Can you believe that?
Thankfully after years of campaigning it is now due to be amended!
However, this is the mindset we grew up with & while my sisters and I all kept working, we sidelined our careers for those of our partners & took on the majority childcare.

The rage this now induces in me is intense lol.
For me I think this internalised belief that being a mother is the most important thing a woman will ever do, combined with an empathetic nature left me wide open to narcissists. Like so many of you I believed my exh's issues were the result of his experiences & that they could be worked on. What I didn't see is that he actually suffers from NPD & therefore did not believe he had any issues & could not see that he needed to work on anything! EVERYTHING was my fault & because I had internalised the belief that I was somehow less important than him (that my role was to care & nurture EVERYONE). I bought into it & we trundled along until I began to (metaphorically) fight back.
When it came to exdp I was wiser but STILL found myself 'honouring' his work, his busy schedule, his difficulties with his dc etc. etc; somehow believing that his difficulties were more important than mine which was absolute bullshit. Exdp is not a narcissist & would have considered himself progressive but even at that he too, at heart, believed that his experience (& as an extension that of his dc) was more important & valid than mine or that of my dc.
What this discussion has made me realise that while I in no way consider my sons more important than my daughter & while I regularly tell my daughter (& sons) to take up space in the world & in her relationships with people & to ALWAYS advocate for herself, my core belief (from childhood & subsequent experiences) is that I am not as important - as anyone else!
Intelligently I KNOW I am & Magda of 2022 knows she is - but my imprint from years back is still creeping in and not letting me accept that I am.
Thanks for all the amazing discourse on this thread - you are all so well informed & smart!