When Your Child's Other Parent has a PD

[Lookin 2 B Free]

How to coparent with a pwPD, together or in separate households, is one of the most baffling problems I've ever had,  Many standard rules, which friends and therapists readily suggest, are harmful when one parent has a PD.
  
Be a team presenting a unified front?  How do you unite with someone who is a demanding, unreasonable and sometimes abusive emotional child themselves? 

Step back and let the other parent have their own relationship with your child in their own way?  Children need support and protection and help in understanding this isn't their fault when the other parent is constantly blaming them and making unreasonable demands and outbursts.
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Even keeping our own sense of reality can be hard in the face of the PD railing about how inadequate and wrong our parenting is.  We have to come Out of the FOG first.

Things I've experienced having a PD co-parent are: thinking I can fix them and attempting that (which never works) ... trying to people please them enough to keep them from erupting (which gave them space to behave even worse) ... pretending everything's fine or soon will be (which prevented me from making healthy changes and invalidated the kids' perception that something is very wrong, leading them to believe it's them.)  

To my delight  our friend Fjelstad, who wrote Stop Caretaking the NPD/BPD, has a more recent book "Raising Resilient Children with a BPD or NPD."

YES!  Great to see you can be assertive in ways that work with PDs; you can validate your child and unburden them of the idea everything's their fault without badmouthing the PD;  you can set boundaries and effectively remove and protect your child from raging and belittling.  This kind of advice for parents is much needed!  Along with support for the parent themselves who's drowning in bewilderment and guilt.  Healing for the whole family!

[bloomie]

Lookin 2 B Free - thank you for your post. Thank you for these wise truths and insights. This is possibly the most helpful post I have seen on this sub forum because it recognizes that standard rules or solutions that would help and apply with a reasonably healthy coparent do not work, and can actually make things more difficult, with a pwpd traits and a highly distorted world view.

The determination to put your child first, equip and empower them - because they are going to be in close relationship with a difficult person their entire life - is a worthy and honoring focus.

Thank you for the resource recommendation as well!

[escapingman]

Great post lookin, there is no such thing as coparenting with a PD. The kids should have as little or no contact at all with their PD parent for their own best. My DD has almost zero contact with her mum, her choice, and she is growing up to be an amazing girl. All her issues she used to have is going away, she is calm and she knows she can lash out on me and still be safe. My other daughter on the other hand is in the grip of her PDmum and is hardly having any contact with me or DD. For every time I see her or hear about her she is getting worse and worse. Her entire world revolves around the belief that I and DD are the worst people in the world and that we are the reason for the breakdown of the family and ultimately responsible for her PDmum to be unhappy. There is absolutely nothing I can do to help her and I  have had to radically accept that unless she sees the truth her selves this is what it is.

[firepoetry]

I love this post, too.

I am going through all of these things right now. I should definitely get that book.