When your children love your abuser
Maybe it was you, the person sitting in your therapist’s office, listening to an explanation of “narcissistic personality disorder.” Maybe you were the person whose ex actually received an official diagnosis: something cluster B; mood disorder. Maybe no one told you, but you sought out information yourself, relentless in your search for what was going on. You learned that your ex has an incurable disorder and that he is too arrogant to seek help or hear how they’ve affected you. You learned that it psychologically hurts you to be involved with someone who is so consistently demeaning, controlling, selfish, dishonest, and abusive. You begin to untangle your own trauma issues and enter a healing journey where you take ownership for your part. Some mental health professionals you sought for advice told you the only thing to do is to go “No Contact” for your healing and protection. You learned terms like “love bombing,” ”discard”, and “flying monkeys”(people who are enablers of the disordered.) You learn to accept the situation and let go, realizing that this person can never value you as a human being, and will never change. As you heal and grow, life for you without an abusive, disordered person becomes increasingly hopeful, safe, and sweet again. And as you practice finding the wise adult inside you, your accountability and sense of personal power increases, opening doors to life and healing you never thought existed.
There’s one caveat- you have children together, and seeing this person trips every trigger you thought you’d healed, and brings up the protective parent inside you.
You can’t go "no contact" or avoid situations where you have to work together when children are involved. Except “working together” in the spirit of mutuality, cooperation, and doing what’s best for the children is incompatible with your ex’s disorder. And to add to the problem. people in that person’s orbit enable their offensive behavior.
As for your children, they think this parent hung the moon. You're the one who put in long hours of changing diapers and nursing and trying to juggle playdates and your job and you had a “coparent” who was checked out and off doing what they wanted, when they wanted. The children may or may not know the depth of the abuse you endured. But they understand, innately, the hierarchy an entitled parent sets up. And they intuit that one parent thinks the other is worthy of contempt and ridicule. But this is their parent, and they love this person. It doesn’t matter that behind the scenes, this person is cruel and their behavior demonstrates that the children aren’t the priority. When a person manipulates their family’s lives through family court, refuses to support the children financially, works behind the scenes to cripple a coparent any way possible, put the children in the middle, uses the children as tools to get back at the other parent, covertly or openly hates their other parent behind the children’s back, and consistently hurts someone the children love, they are not prioritizing the children. They are continuing a pattern of abuse.
How do you reconcile your ex’s “good parent” act and your children’s developmentally appropriate desire for a parent? These are your children to love and guide. Parent A abandoned the marriage and refuses to be a team player in co-parenting. But your children love and want, and have the right to, both parents. Parent A is locked in to a compulsion to control and an extreme entitlement that they will not fix. You understand how much that hurts. And you understand that it hurts the children when Parent A models a constant contempt for you. they don’t have to say a word, the children KNOW. They may genuinely be a supportive and beneficial parent in practice, but behind the scenes they are undermining Parent B without appreciating how this affects the children. It becomes disingenuous and performative. In reality, Parent A is dominating and dictating. Depending on the severity of Parent A ’s disordered behavior, this could result in:
-Parent A frequently using family court to work out co-parenting issues while withholding communication, financial support and holding to a double standard. The goal: to financially cripple Parent B (and the children, by proxy, making this child abuse) therefore, maintaining control
-Parent A initiating a custody battle as a response to your calling out abuse issues or again, to maintain control. Depriving a child of a parent through lying, ruthless use of financial advantage to disadvantage the other, and enemy-making is abusive to a child.
-disparaging the other parent, either openly or passive-aggressively, thereby teaching children the subtext of abusive control: “Parent B is incapable and unworthy and less than me. I have to dictate to Parent B what to do and how to do it ”
-starting smear campaigns to punish you for speaking out or not doing what Parent A says
-strictly enforcing the children’s loyalty to him and their participation in family enmeshment (a form of gatekeeping)
-emotionally abusing the children through tight control and harsh parenting methods, as well as denigrating their parent whether they denigrate verbally or not
-acting as if Parent A is in charge and can make decisions unilaterally, thereby effectively erasing your influence and diminishing your role (a form of gatekeeping)
-manipulating the children to turn against you, reject you, and join Parent A’s “side” and disparage you.
But what can you do to help your children? How do you reconcile the fact that they love a person who lacks empathy and whose judgment is impaired by an incurable disorder?
There are several things you can do. First, commit to your own healing. Having children means you must have contact with your ex. It is not within the purview of family courts to diagnose mental health issues. Their job is to ensure children have access to both parents as it is a fundamental right of children. Even the disordered have the legal right to raise their children. Who cares if this produces more wounds in the world. However, there are things you can do to mitigate the damage and guide your children towards emotional health.
-Teach them how to take no for an answer
-Teach them how good it feels to be validated and loved, and guide them towards learning to validate the opinions of others.
- Teach them full expression of feelings and self-awareness
-Teach them about gaslighting, emotional abuse, and dishonest manipulation in an objective, indirect way, just like you might help them with their math
-Teach them to resolve conflicts by using a restorative justice model: if you hurt someone, you make a repair, and you are able to apologize
-Teach them that their voice counts. While they are young, they will have very little power in their relationship with their father, and they will live in the fantasy world of the very young. My son, who is 8, told me that when he is older he will work at a Lego store but only two days a week because it would cut into his job as a paleontologist, and then he would find time between jobs to be an inventor. This is a beautiful aspect of childhood-this innocence in imagination. But that kind of magical thinking also applies to working with people who are disordered. Children are just not mature enough to assess character. Still, teaching them and modeling having a voice can help. I have a friend who points out characters in movies, such as the witch in “Tangled”. You can learn a lot about gaslighting and manipulative tactics from most any Disney movie. Pointing out where the character grew to say, “no more lies” can give children an imagination of what is possible when you use your voice, and that there is a way to have courage.
--Teach them that their preferences and desires matter, but that they must also consider others. There is a give and take.
-Teach them emotional intelligence all the way around, by modeling through your own relationship with your children. Do not be afraid to directly confront issues, have hard conversations, and provide solid guidance to your children. Adopt a policy of 100% freedom of expression, that your house is a safe place to do that
-Teach them healthy boundaries. Narcissists and their families tend to engulf their members, making boundaries blurry and permeable. Help your children recognize who they are as unique people rather than letting a narcissist define and dictate who they are.
-Be a role model. Be aware of your own issues and triggers, especially if you have c-PTSD or PTSD from the relationship. Be gentle with yourself and model self-care. Self-care is as much about taking care of your feelings as it is about taking care of your physical needs. If you ended up with trauma issues because of a narcissist, your children are likely to a) also have trauma issues from not being seen, heard, or taken into account or b) cope by becoming narcissists themselves. It’s difficult when the worst outcome would be for your children to end up with all the selfishness, control, lack of empathy, dominance, and retaliatory traits of their father. But you cannot always prevent that.
-Be aware that when your children go through their teens, they are likely to switch teams as they become more developmentally narcissistic. No, they are not necessarily becoming narcissists, but are simply exhibiting the egocentrism, lack of decision-making capacities and poor impulse control that marks their age. The trouble is, narcissists do well with other narcissists, and narcissism runs in families. So of course, you are on “higher alert” during this age. Get your children into counseling, keep talking to them and keep lines of communication open and do not take any dismissal personally. In fact, use this age to teach boundaries because even though they demonstrate bravado, they are subject to the influences of peers and often naïve. Keep teaching them the importance of good character.
A cluster B’s parenting style is less of a parenting style and more of a management style. They need to control the appearances of the situation, micromanage details, and judge and correct. To them, children are projects who need to be aggressively fitted into their mold. Children who become their own person are threatening in a dysfunctional family. To that end, they make decisions without considering the children or the other parent while appearing to be actually doing the work of parenting. They are like the managers who come into the office, work everyone into a frenzy, then retreat to their office. No sense of teamwork or fair play.
You can work to make sure your children have a parent who, through effort and growth, comes to the place where you can handle this. Grow out of the victim mindset, even though you have been targeted for every ounce of destruction your ex can wreak on you. Your ex will have dibs on victim mindset even as they are victimizing. They will continue to model retaliation, control, and unending bitterness while they accuse you of those very things. They will show the children that things and appearances matter more than people. They will teach them selfishness and how to reject people when you don’t get your way, no matter how devoted and loving that person was.
It’s not fair, it’s not right, and cleaning it up is painful, messy, and lasts a long, long time. But you can use this situation to clarify and grow yourself. Through oppression, you can grow wise, strong, and clear enough to show your children what really counts: unconditional love. Love your children fiercely, heal yourself, and hope always comes. No matter what your situation, know that you deserve complete grace. And so do your children. Let them love, let them learn their own way to forgiveness, don't judge them and protect them fiercely from influences of shame and blame. They will come to see their parent through adult eyes some day, and you will be there to help them pick up the pieces when and if they hurt over their awakening.
