Help? Need brutal honest advice.

[Chel14]

Daughter is 14.

just us for 10 years. Good life.

i was in abusive relationship, destroyed me, her, us. Changed our life.

long story short, I was in mental hospital, she had to stay with maternal grandmother, when we reconnected I wasn’t me. She didn’t receive the same love affection care effort as before.

•appreciate massively how fucking horrific this must have been for a 10 year old. Do not diminish this statement•

however

2 years, 1 relationship, mounds of professionals throwing help her way, school transfers, allowance of poor behaviour, to extreme levels later, I am unable to cope. She is literally ruining any remaining salvageable part of our relationship, ruining her entire life, ruining my relationship with my genuine love of my life, any chance she or I have at happiness. Can’t even ask how did ur day go without it ending in literal tears on my part because of the hatred, brutality and lack of respect or empathy for anyone she displays!
she treats everyone and everyone like less than, unworthy pieces of shit! Treats my partners children like shit, has recorded herself talking to teachers in school in a way I am still shocked about. Complete lack of any good quality right now. No joke. It’s THAT bad. Wish I could tell you it all.

caught her on FaceTime vaping once. Still denies it to this day. I saw it? Close enough to see the flavour? Still denies to my face.

we live alone. Things will go missing or be left out and she will try manipulate my mental health to make me believe it has nothing to do with her. It is scary. Makes up stories to other people that are nowhere near true. Scary.

i recovered so well. Went back to college, got a job. New relationship. New lease on life. Not me again, but better.

she is driving me into the ground. Hates me. Accepts to me it wasn’t my fault what happened in that relationship. Admits she has resentment towards me for various acceptable reasons ie lack of effort when seriously unwell, emotional outbursts etc. understandable. However says it isn’t our fault and doesn’t blame me?

she has adhd (on diagnosis pathway) and what I truly believe to be ODD, possible BPD (I have this)

I have exhausted every avenue tried every approach repeated everything for months day in day out 45 minute deep hearted chats before school she seems to take in. She returns that day from being suspended, to then after 2 hours - be suspended! So what was that mornings heart felt chat and agreement about?

I cannot do it anymore. I have no help.
dad useless. No1 to take her. Social are involved however they have not much advice to help in the immediate future other than wait 16 weeks for a measly parenting course and nowhere to even temporarily accommodate her as even a worst case.

someone please give me realistic advice.

I am not joking when I say I don’t know if I’ll survive this.
everyone who truly knows her agrees she is unbelievable. Deceitful. Has no empathy. Doesn’t care for consequences. Manipulates. Will use my mental health against me eg if I’m talking to her about something she’s done and she doesn’t want to admit it or is trying to twist how it happened she will say so calmly and seeming concerned ‘mum have you took your meds today? Are you ok I’m worried your going insane’

please hear the desperation of how severe this is. If needed I will give more examples. Just please need help.

im afraid for my life and afraid she’s ruined her own.

I am begging for help.

OP - you asked for help with your daughter, so you should end your romantic relationship and give 100% of your time and energy to your daughter.

She is not evil, she is traumatised and terrified. You need to provide stability, love and support by reassuring her that you won’t go away again, won’t be distracted by another man, won’t stop loving her even if you disprove of her actions, will always be on her side including by enforcing boundaries and ensuring she accepts consequences.

Your words and behaviour are not aligned, your daughter is testing you and you are not passing the tests right now. Move on from the past and stop allowing guilt to have a free pass in the present. What’s done cannot be undone, but you absolutely can do better now by consistently showing up for her.

What?!?!?!

Not so sure about your last para but the rest makes a lot of sense.

(PS I have been in a similar situation, meaning as the man presently in her life,. My now wife's son was acting up very similar to OP's daughter.
By setting very strict boundaries etc he and the rest of his siblings now, 35 years later, get on fabulously with his mum and me. It took a while and he was absent from our lives for a few years, mind.)

Too many people on this thread attacking the OP. As if she was to blame for the past abuse, for God's sake! SHE was the victim of the abuse, as was her daughter.

Frankly you have to have lived it, or been very close to someone living through it before you can judge them.

Pandering to her daughter's every whim, letting her run her life, will not end well, she needs to know where the boundaries are and when to stop. Her mother is being totally supportive, more than many would.

People keep saying "she's a CHILD" as if that gives her the God given right to treat her mum like shit. It doesn't.
And banging on about ADHD, COPHD, and any of the other labels mostly ending in a "D", sociologists and psychologists unhelpfully stick on people (without actually helping them) do not solve anything.

💯💯
The poster has gone through a great deal from the sounds of it.

Whether or not the daughter is a narcissist or just has narcissistic traits is uncertain but I don't understand everyone suggesting that the poster starts coddling her daughter instead of enforcing stronger boundaries

You’ve given some really excellent advice. The sad thing is that I doubt any of it will be taken.

@Chel14

Your daughter likely wants the one thing she knows she can not have - which is to go back in time to before when it was just you and her, before you met your abusive ex, before you were hospitalised, before you met this new man you have now. She is old enough now to realise this is just not possible! Imagine how upsetting and devastating this must be.

You have mentioned yourself that you are different now, that you have missing memories which must not only be awful for you but for your daughter also. She is experiencing the profound loss of the mother she once had, dealing with the aftermath of all trauma she experienced and now dealing with losing you again but in a different way, to this new man.

This new man (and his children) are a very real threat to her in every way. It really does not matter one iota how good of a man he is, whether he has cared for her, spoiled her or anything else, to her his is a threat! She cannot trust that he is safe, she cannot trust that your judgment of him is safe, and not only that but she now has to compete for your love for you affection when all she wanted was the mum she had back and I would imagine that right now that to her that feels further away than ever!! So she’s acting out, she’s punishing you, she’s testing you, and she is trying to exert control over a situation she feels she has no control over.

What she needs is you - JUST YOU!!! She needs your focus to be 100 percent totally and utterly on her. It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t see your partner anymore or that you spend time together away from her, she knows he is still there, and therefore she is still competing and the threat and danger to her world and to you still exists. She needs him totally gone, and I’m sorry to say that because I know you feel you’ve found a wonderful love that you feel you need, but sadly for you it’s literally the very last thing your daughter needs.

What your daughter would benefit most from right now is knowing that she has her mum all to herself, and for you to spend time with your sole focus just on her. She needs a lot of intensive and dedicated time with you rebuilding her trust and her ability to rely on you which has been severely broken not just once but several times. She needs to feel and see you demonstrate in every aspect possible that she is your number 1 priority.

In your shoes, as sad as I understand it is for you I would end the relationship with this new man and cut all communication with him. I would shift my entire focus to your daughter and I would start instilling some rules at home - because she needs that, she needs you to parent her, to give her boundaries and responsibilities even if they are boundaries and expectations she is going to break, they still need to be there in the first place. This needs to be done in small steps over a long period of time because it’s going to take a long time to even begin to heal the trauma she’s experienced, to rebuild trust and safety that has been broken, but you as her mother are at the very centre of that healing process and as I’m sure you know, what you do now and how you deal with this is so very crucial to the rest of your daughters life. If she can start to feel like she can have a little trust in you, than maybe just maybe she can start to feel like she can trust others enough to start letting the help in, therapy and counselling etc

This is going to be a very long and arduous road, but what you do now is really important and is crucial for the mother and daughter relationship you have not only now but for the future as well.

I wish you well 💐

@CatsangDogs ty! Im not always rational and have no time for destructively foolish advice now, but do my best.

I just hope the OP can wade through this thread and pick the gold out. There's a lot of experienced, wise and helpful advice in among the guillotine-knitters.

Have a great day too :)

Your child witnessed domestic abuse, your mental illness, had a new man and his family dumped on them and you had them placed in the care of social services? You really did that?

When you read advice on the internet for these types of situations it’s warming to see the majority of them make total sense but some people really spout shite. @atmywitsend1989 your advice is monstrous.

Some people think their children should be parenting them.

Me neither!
Don't understand why so many posters are telling her, TELLING HER, to get rid of her new man and devote herself entirely to her daughter, which it seems she pretty much is already.
The daughter is manipulating her to try and see how far she can go before she hits a boundary and so far there are none! Cos the OP is blaming herself for everything. Sure her daughter has had a bit of a hard time, but so has her mum. At the end of the day, the daughter will one day grow up and move away, one assumes! So she needs to be prepared for what life is like out there, where you cannot manipulate everyone.
She is already pushing the boundaries at school and finding them.
Which is partly why I suggested home schooling. As TBH I doubt she is getting much out of school and that decision would show her that her mum is taking control. In one field at least.
This thread suffers sadly from typical Mumsnet trolls.

Not at all.
Do you have kids who live with no boundaries?

Honestly, I think home schooling is the very last thing that this child needs. Her mum clearly can't offer the stability and psychological safety that she needs right now.

And she hasn't just been through "a bit of a hard time", she has experienced significant trauma at a very young age. Stop minimising.

Sure her daughter has had a bit of a hard time

A bit of a hard time? A bit of a hard time?

She was, by her mother's admission, destroyed by her mother's abusive relationship ("destroyed me, her, us"), had to live with her grandmother while her mother was sectioned and when her mother was discharged she was totally unable to parent. And now her mother is sort of back, just as she's in the worst part of puberty, she wants to bring another man and his kids into the child's life, have more children, and effectively blames her, the child, for not making it easy or being incredibly grateful. And she's 14, a child. She isn't old enough to buy a sodding scratchcard.

A bit of a hard time? Are you taking the absolute piss?

This isn’t a child with no boundaries this is a child who has both suffered trauma and a mother with mental health issues and is feeling very lost.

and this isn’t a normal relationship either you can see from the OPs posts that it isn’t healthy for her either - even if the daughter wasn’t like that for her own mental health she needs to figure quite a few things out in her own healing process before being ready to even start dating

It can be both - a child with complex and deep trauma, and no boundaries.

Sometimes everyone in a situation is hurting and vulnerable. It's up to the OP to be the adult here though, and use every good support structure available because they both need it.

So why are a lot of posters claiming that she needs to devote herself totally and selflessly to this girl, yet you are saying that she "can't offer her the stability and psychological safety that she needs"?
If she can't then the daughter should not be living with her at all. QED.
As for the "bit of a hard time" was she beaten up, stabbed, raped, locked in the basement? Do we even know? Was her mother part of and party to the abuse?
It would appear not, she sent her to granny to be looked after!

I am doing the opposite of what others are doing on here, not blowing the whole thing up out of all proportion.
The mother needs control, she needs to set boundaries so that the girl can learn self-control and awareness of others' needs.

As for the "bit of a hard time" was she beaten up, stabbed, raped, locked in the basement?

That's your bar??

I can't take anything you say seriously.

How do you want this child to learn self-control when her mother doesn’t have any?

Wow. So you want to just dismiss this child's trauma and focus on the mum taking "control". Just wow.

The mother needs to provide as much stability and psychological safety as she possibly can by focusing on her child. If she can't do that, and chooses to prioritise her relationship, then I agree with you that the child would be better off in the care of her grandmother who looked after her previously.

But removing a child from a parent is a very last resort. It would obviously be better to keep her in the care of her mother, with ample support from relevant professionals, including the child's school. Removing her exposure to external influences would absolutely not be helpful.

OP believes her child is evil. I don’t think tons of time with the 2 of them together & the daughter isolated from peers and other adults is a good idea at all.

I think it's very important to recognise that OP herself is also a victim and the key perpetrator here is the man who decided to abuse op and her dd to the extent op was admitted.

Does it absolve op of her accountability now or her responsibility as a parent now? No. But OP is not the guilty party, she's as much a victim as her dd is the problem is she's a victim who's now left trying to navigate parenting a traumatised child while still healing herself which is very complex.

Noone CHOOSES to be abused. Red flags are not always clearly visible. All op can do now is try to get them both back on track but it was not op who ruined her dds life, the man who abused them did that. Let's place responsibility at the feet of the perpetrator where it belongs.

Far too often vulnerable women are held accountable for the harmful decisions men make and its sad to see so many women piling on and perpetuating this on this thread.

Of course the OP is a victim, and many of us have expressed sympathy for what she has been through. But she is also an adult and a parent. That brings with it certain responsibilities, regardless of what else has happened. If the OP can't fulfill those responsibilities adequately because of her own trauma, then she owes it to her dd to sort out alternative care. She can't just demand that her dd gets over past trauma because she herself is ready to move on.

Beaten, raped or stabbed? That's your very narrow interpretation of what causes trauma, is it? I think it's safe to say you have no education or experience in this arena from a safeguarding perspective, nevermind common sense.

Back in the real world, it's obviously traumatic for a child to experience abuse from their mother's boyfriend (whether that was experienced firsthand, or witnessed), their parent having a breakdown, being removed from their parent's care and placed in the guardianship of another family member, and then the parent returning despite being emotionally unavailable and from the sounds of it, still nowhere near being in a fit state to take care of them properly.

But sure, what a lucky duck that she (as far as we know) wasn't raped or stabbed 🙄

Nobody is blowing anything out of proportion. You are just minimising it for some reason. There's only really one reason I can think of that someone would try and minimise the trauma caused to children by choices like the ones the OP is making.

She did say that.
She also said that she loves her to bits, that she is her world and she'd do anything for her, including maybe giving up this amazingly selfless bloke she has met.
Mixed messages.
But it would be interesting to see how the daughter would react to the 100% attention from her mother she so craves. And being denied the chance to kick off at school.
"Isolated from peers"? Maybe, if she has friends in the school, but home schooling doesn't mean locking her up, nor preventing her friends from seeing her.
"Isolated from other adults"? The only ones that would matter to her would be the ones she spends her time cursing at or not listening to. Again, better she is kept away from them and the opportunity to be "evil" towards them.
OP has not said that she respects any other adult, except, maybe her granny.
What it might do is show the girl that she misses the company of others and that she will only get it if she behaves well in school.
Which, fair enough, may just lead to her kicking off even more at home.

TBTH I think they both need a break from one another. Maybe she should go into care.
(Puts tin hat on!!)