![]() Give her time to shout, calm down, and finally tell you her real concerns. Sit with her either by yourself or with a mediator, and ask her to tell you what is wrong. “Her behaviour shows that she doesn’t feel heard. “It is vital that you listen to your daughter,” advises Stadlen. You are, of course, entitled to a private life, and I would suggest taking control of this: change the password on your phone, don’t give it to your daughter again (presumably you did the first time, otherwise your daughter should apply for a job with the FBI). “However,” says Stadlen, “you can’t ensure privacy until you’ve restored a certain amount of trust.” When we don’t feel safe, when we feel that information is being withheld, most of us will try to find out what’s going on. She is snooping because she doesn’t feel safe.” She is trying to find out the worst because this tells her how bad it is. Stadlen feels that “this crisis is an opportunity to turn things around for both of you and to find a way to talk to one another” – rather than the extremes of behaviour you both have at the moment. The psychotherapist Naomi Stadlen thinks that your daughter “hasn’t lost hope, her anger shows she hasn’t withdrawn”. When we don’t feel safe, when we feel information is being withheld, most of us will try to find out what’s going on That is not going to help anyone and does not reflect well on you. But stop sending your friends messages calling your daughter names (edited out of your letter here). You want to mend bridges with your daughter, which is good. If you forget, for a moment, about the way your daughter has gone about things, and concentrate on what you think she might be trying to communicate to you, what do you think that might be? Behind all behaviour there is a message, which we shouldn’t lose sight of. I strongly believe people should be responsible for their actions, but I also believe they should be allowed to grow into those responsibilities first. But then I mused on it a while and thought about how her life must have been these past few years: you in a “borderline abusive” marriage, her family home split up, her brother living somewhere else, her mother conducting a relationship in secret, which she clearly suspected. On first reading of your longer letter, your daughter’s behaviour does seem shocking. I’m going to concentrate on the daughter angle of your letter, which I have edited to protect identities. I feel like the world’s worst parent as well as feeling terribly sad about all of it. I have already made her life very hard by leaving the family home and don’t want to make things even worse by making her go back to live with her dad. However, she is still only young and is my daughter. Her snooping and blackmail has cost me an amicable divorce and my new relationship. My life with my daughter is now very difficult as I don’t trust her an inch and find all this very difficult to forgive. He doesn’t want any trouble or drama and can no longer imagine a life with me that involves my daughter. When my new partner heard about this, he was horrified. Basically, I was blackmailed by my daughter. I wish I hadn’t told him, although I believe my daughter would have spilled the beans if I hadn’t – she had already told her brother (he is fairly calm about it all). Predictably, he was hurt, angry and has barely spoken to me since, not even to sort out childcare arrangements or let me know my son is all right. I refused as it would just upset him and make our divorce even harder, but after a week of her crying, raging and telling me she couldn’t see her dad again now she knew about this other man, the next time I saw my husband I told him. She demanded that I tell my husband about it. After a few weeks she managed to get into my (password-protected) phone on a pretext and went through all my messages and phone logs and found out about my “affair”. My daughter is quite controlling as well and we have had quite a tempestuous start to our new life, with her being very demanding and quite unpleasant sometimes.
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