Infidelity and abnormal messages about relationships

[easterncappy]

I apologize in advance if it takes a long time to get around to responding to anyone who may respond - I remember last being active on here during my first pregnancy. Now I'm on my second, with a crazy 2 year old to look after, and lots of other things going on (nothing relating to PD's or abuse or really anything too terrible lol). And I also apologize if I've already made a thread like this - after now multiple years of therapy, starting my own family, etc. I often look back at stuff and think of it differently... usually in a worse way.

Anyway, neither of my parents were particularly good at the whole monogamy thing. My dad had a severe addiction to adult content (that he forced me to witness and participate in from a young age) and websites for finding extramarital partners, and my mom had lots of boyfriends and random men who she appeared to hope would whisk her away from her terrible life with my dad. They were not people who she would mention around my dad, but I knew about them, and she'd take me to their houses and to events with them. Her and I had some inside jokes about them, some nicknames so we could talk about them in front of my dad. She kind of tried to pass it off like this was cool and normal, and I guess to her it was, because her parents had a very similar dynamic. I was uncomfortable with it on one hand, but it was also all I ever knew.

On the other hand, they made fun of divorced people, especially divorced women. "That's why you don't get a divorce, so you don't end up like her, poor with no one to take care of her!" about my husband's grandma, who is twice divorced. My mom ended up eating those words when my dad died and she had to live with her parents again, but I digress. It was interesting that my mom both desired to be whisked away, and would frequently cry to me about my dad, but also insisted that all men were like this, and seemed to view him as one step below God Himself. She never really disobeyed him, she looked to him for validation on any opinion she had, she let him do most of her thinking for her. It just didn't make sense.

I remember being in 8th grade and there was a couple who were both teachers at my school. Looking back, they seemed really normal and well-adjusted. But back then, I remember thinking that the woman teacher was rather homely according to the beauty standards my family had, and distinctly thinking that her husband must be having affairs because of it. Now I find it incredibly sad that my perspective on relationships was so tainted by my parents.

I definitely had my share of fleas. Oddly enough, my mom made fun of me for being "boy crazy" and constantly picking trashy boyfriends as a teenager, as if she didn't practically worship the ground my dad walked on... while also wanting to be whisked away from his bad behavior. There were many mistakes I made in early relationships that were a direct result of my poor role models.

Can anyone relate?

How do you think being raised knowing your parents are unfaithful to each other affects a person? Or how do you think that being raised to normalize this behavior affects us?

[NarcKiddo]

Wow. So much of this resonates.  (Nice to see you again, and congrats on the second pregnancy, by the way.)

My father has never been unfaithful as far as I know. Not from any great love for my mother (as far as I know) but because he is just not particularly interested in relationships. He needed a wife for social purposes.

My mother, on the other hand, had a series of boyfriends and made no secret of this to us children. They were brought to the house on occasion and my father knew of their existence as people but never openly as boyfriends. I am sure he was aware, but so long as appearances were kept up it was all fine.

What particularly sprang out to me from your post was how your mother regarded your father as one step below God, despite her dissatisfaction with him. Mine was the same. She would complain bitterly to me about him but if I ever asked why she did not just leave him she would tell me divorce was out of the question and she was staying with him for the benefit of us children. Once we were grown she would change the subject if asked this question.

My mother cannot own her decisions, I have come to realise, so my father has always been a very useful avatar in her dealings with the children. "Your father would like it if..." "Your father has said no..." etc. If she wanted us to favour her then she would say things like "I will work on your father and get him to agree..."  My mother is struggling at the moment because my father is terminally ill. She has always assumed she will go first. That is no longer a given, and she will hate having to own all her own decisions because he is no longer there to hang them on.

I have struggled a lot with relationships. Mainly due to trust issues from an abusive home environment, but the normalising of infidelity has not helped. My mother judges a woman by the quality of a man she is able to "catch" and I was taught to have that view, too. Plus of course she judges her daughters by the quality of their partners. My sister has struggled with this more than I since I have been married for decades to a man my mother dislikes intensely, but respects. My sister has had a series of doormats (which is no surprise since my mother approved so highly of her first boyfriend that she stole him as a tomboy for herself). I was taught that relationships are purely transactional and that infidelity is simply not an issue. (However I am utterly sure that if my father had ever been unfaithful my mother's rage would have been nuclear.) I was taught that marriage means nothing and that if I wanted a married man it was utterly fine to go after him. When I was groomed by a married staff member at my school I fell for it completely and when I discovered he was married it didn't matter to me because of my mother's views on infidelity, transmitted onwards to me. I ended the relationship when I discovered his wife was pregnant. I'd like to think it was because my morals finally kicked in and I think that was part of it, but part of it was simply that I did not want to deal with baggage. I was sad to end the relationship, though, as I thought I loved this man. My mother's reaction was to give me advice on how to get him back!

So, yeah. This is a bit of a garbled reply to your questions but I am sure you get the gist.

[treesgrowslowly]

Hi Easterncappy,

It is good to have you back here!

A lot of insights stand out in your post here. You can see how your parent's unhealthy beliefs and actions, colored your thinking about relationships and marriages. We couldn't help that when we're kids. How our parents talk and their beliefs do seep in, because we were kids. We were sponging up what was around us.

Give yourself forgiveness for the stuff you thought about other people back when you were a teenager! Knowing why we thought those things is all that really matters now that it is years later. I had some crazy beliefs as a teen, thanks to my crazy mother. Yep, I could write for days about what she believed and some of the stuff I believed when I was still a teen (i.e. still growing into my own person). 

Honestly I think you've done one of the hardest steps already because when we are able to look at our parents objectively.

My parents had endless practices and beliefs that I didn't pass on to my child, nor will you. Its not going to happen, because we don't blindly accept the crazy things our parents believed - you are already writing about their stuff as "theirs" in your post. It is not as if you are going to tell your kids "oh its fine to act like grandma and great-grandma did" because you already know that's not true.

The fact that your mom's behavior didn't make sense to you, is a huge sign that you're not in the fog she was in. That was her fog. On the one hand she obeyed your dad - and she may have had a fear of abandonment. She may have been so dependent on him financially or emotionally that this is how she covered up her dependency, when talking to you. At the same time, she wasn't happy in her marriage to your dad, and so if she was unhappy, and dependent on him, it would explain why her explanations to you didn't make any sense. She wasn't being honest about her situation.

As I got older, it has gotten easier to see my mother as her own person with wounds she couldn't heal. Her explanations to me never made much sense. She'd try to tell me why she did or said something and the older I got, the more I could see for myself. When I read your post it looks like you are going through that same process - it is a good process. It helps us. But it can be a painful process sometimes. Realizing our mother did not understand what we needed from her. Realizing how different we are from her. Maybe realizing how disordered, immature and / or trapped she was when she was our age.

It makes us even more insightful about our own lives.

To answer your question, I think that being raised by parents with such crummy behaviors, can lead to very astute, strong healthy parenting for those of us who get ourselves Out of the FOG. A therapist once told me this. She said that in some cases, people with PD parents, become amazing parents when we have kids because we know (from the inside) what was missing and what kids need. And we're passionate about giving our kids love and protection while they grow up.
 
The overarching change you're making to your family system, is that you're bringing back the love and protection and care that was missing for you a lot of the time. Your kids will grow up feeling cared for, knowing (internally) that you're paying attention to their needs.

My mentally unwell parent also left adult content around when i was a kid - just like you wrote about. And I never did that to my child. That wasn't hard. Its relatively easy for anyone with a clue, to know not to leave adult content around for kids to see. It's crazy how our parents failed at such basic tasks! The older I get, the easier it is to see their neglect as something I survived. They did a lot of PD things. I'm glad you're writing about this.

So glad to see you on the boards!

Trees

[footprint33]

This post also really resonates with me. Not only did my mother normalize my father's philandering, she told me that ALL men cheat on their wives/girlfriends and that's just the way it is. I vividly remember her telling me that and even chuckling about it. In my 20s, I was in two very bad relationships, each about 5 years long. I was mistreated in many ways and just assumed that's the way relationships work. Fortunately, I broke out of that at age 30 and realized that I was gravitating towards abusive men. I've been with my husband for 20 years and fully trust that he would never cheat on me.

I remember being in 8th grade and there was a couple who were both teachers at my school. Looking back, they seemed really normal and well-adjusted. But back then, I remember thinking that the woman teacher was rather homely according to the beauty standards my family had, and distinctly thinking that her husband must be having affairs because of it. Now I find it incredibly sad that my perspective on relationships was so tainted by my parents.

I definitely had my share of fleas. Oddly enough, my mom made fun of me for being "boy crazy" and constantly picking trashy boyfriends as a teenager, as if she didn't practically worship the ground my dad walked on... while also wanting to be whisked away from his bad behavior. There were many mistakes I made in early relationships that were a direct result of my poor role models.

Since as far back as I can remember, both of my parents would mock people for their looks, especially women but also men. This had an impact on me too. I think that we are definitely impacted by the toxic parental role models we had as children. If we get out of the pattern of thinking the way they do, we are very lucky indeed. While I can't completely heal the dysfunction I lived while figuring out that I came from a toxic family and that the role models I had were not good ones, there is comfort in realizing I finally got out of it, and especially that I realized it right around the same time I had my first child. Our kids are living very different lives than the one I lived, and my daughter would never think it was normal to have a philandering partner.