Long-lasting and significant effects of having family members with PDs

[Poison Ivy]

I'm not sure whether this is the best area for this post. Feel free to move it if desired or necessary.

My then-husband was fired from a job in 2009. Our children were in high school at the time. This job loss precipitated a second wave of financial disarray for our family. (The first began in the late 1990s, when H was fired from a different job. The children were quite young then and so had less awareness of what was going on.)

Today, our younger child, now in her final year of a Ph.D. program, asked me to look at some of her job-application materials. One of the documents confirmed something that I had long suspected: Our child chose her undergraduate major and graduate-school focus in part because of witnessing and being affected by her father's job loss.

I cried when I read the document. But I'm in a much better place emotionally than I was in 2009. So I guess the "working on us" aspect of this is that, just like the cliche, I mostly "stayed strong" for myself and our children, I built my own financial resources, and the children and I survived. (Ex-H might be disintegrating; it's hard to tell what's going on with him, and at this point, I will intervene only if I sense that he is threatening to become a burden on our children.)

[Pepin]

You know.....I don't know if this is the sort of response you are looking for but my youngest is in the midst of applying to college.  For about a second I caught sight of an answer to a question on an application that reflected on a moment several years ago when DH had a blow up during a family vacation.  It was to date literally the most devastating and scariest things that he has ever done to us.  It sent me back into time when my own father used throw similar tantrums and I retreated to fawn response.  Didn't feel safe and felt like curling up into a ball.  Instead I comforted my children who were in tears.  It was then that we knew that DH was NOT safe for any of us.  And while he hasn't quite admitted all of it, it was because his mother was on his mind and having some sort of health crisis again and he was too far away to do anything about it....after all he was the hero.  He took his angst out on his wife and children because of his mother.

Since then, DH has complained that our adult children don't come to him like they do to me....he feels that they don't like him.  And all I have said was this: you might want to do some inner work around why that is. 

He looks at me like I have 3 heads. 

Anyway, sadly, I am certain that this experience and many smaller experiences have amounted to something much bigger.  And my children and I will never put that behind us.  Until DH can talk with us about his mother and his relationship with her and how he was raised horribly by her, any sort of understanding around this, etc. there will be no real closure.  This is a huge scar.  Now that she is gone, we are all carefully watching and evaluating DH to see what he does.  Because he is never going to do to us what he did before that day...without swift consequences - and I think he sense that. 

As you write, we do carry certain experiences with us for a very long time and they can impact the trajectory of our lives in ways we hadn't intended.

[Poison Ivy]

Thank you for the response, Pepin. I'm sorry that you (and many other people) have had experiences similar to mine. Wanting the family member to "do the inner work" is spot on.

[Lookin 2 B Free]

Your daughter values and trusts you, Poison Ivy.  That's something very precious.

Recognizing the hurt my children suffered and any long-term consequences has been the most painful thing for me.  It breaks my heart, even though I did get out while they were still relatively young.  It's hard to live with the fact that lasting damage was done.

It sounds like you're aware of positive things they got from you.  Hopefully this brings comfort.

Having also been in the child's position when I was young, I can say much of my working with others, career wise and more, did come from those scars.  But the work has been so very rewarding because I was in a position to understand what others were going through.  Hopefully this will be true for your daughter, too.

[Poison Ivy]

Thank you, Lookin 2 B Free.