Kids continue to get worse

[Jsinjin]

My oldest daughter (19) is in partial hospitalization while my youngest (14) has regular panic attacks.   I know that the oldest blames all of her mental health issues on he uOCPD mother.    Son (16) refuses to associate with either sister or mother and is the one in the family without depression currently.    We still can't clean or touch anything, we can't make rules for the kids unless every contingency is covered and we can't let anything go or miss any activity.   It's such a mess we live in.   My own counselor says to simply get out and take the kids with me but the son in particular wants me to fight for the family.  I'm just at a point I don't know if my wife is hurting her kids more than the marriage is helping.

[Poison Ivy]

Is there anything we can do to encourage you to act?

[athene1399]

Maybe write out the pros of staying together, the pros of leaving, then the negatives of staying and the negatives of leaving. It might help you sort out some of what is going on there.

I am sorry things are still bad over there.

Can you ask your wife to go to therapy with you? I can't remember if you said you've tried this before or not.

[Penny Lane]

First of all, your 16 year old son doesn't get to make this decision for you. Teenagers are famously bad judges about what parenting decisions are good for them.

Second of all, we've seen over and over on this board that kids' situations improve when their parents split up. Living in a house where they can't clean or touch anything and they have no rules but are expected to read their mom's mind about what to do ... that's not healthy. At least they have one house that's not chaotic, that's safe and stable.

To me, if you want to fight for your kids, what that would look like is to leave. I think you'd see improvements pretty quickly, especially if they can spend significant amounts of time with you.

You know your situation best, far better than me. Does what I just said feel right to you? What does your gut tell you?

I don't want to make this sound easy because it's not. It will probably feel like the hardest thing you ever have to do. But, I still think overall it's easier than living in that dysfunction for years or decades. You survived that, you can do this.