The Mother of all Problems

A couple of weeks ago my oldest son left home and moved into a flat close to where he was working. Unfortunately it's also closer to where his narcissistic mother lives and I was quite alarmed to hear on my first visit to hear how much she'd started to "reel him back in" for narcissistic supply. She's already tricked him into supplying her with a key and he now thinks she deserves to be trusted again. I told him at the time that I thought his loyalty was misguided and followed up with this email.. Son, When I was a kid I was heavily influenced by my father, but in a slightly different way to your experience. The outcome was nevertheless the same. It ruined my life, causing me to make poor choices and left me broken. Often my Dad would go into a rage or be a bit too brutal, then later realise he'd been a dick. But he'd never, ever say I'm sorry or promise never to do it again. What he'd do instead was pretend it hadn't happened and try ...

Introduction In my last post  I mentioned that my oldest son lives with me. It wasn't a difficult decision for him to make, because when he went home one day and she'd packed his bags for him and demanded he return his key. He'd wanted to be able to freely come and go between the family home and my house, but this was at-odds with his mum's insistence on me pre-agreeing with her whenever he visited. The more she pushed, the more he pushed back, and it soon reached the stage that they just started lying to each other. It's no great surprise that this just made things far worse, and so on January 4th he moved in with me. Playing Favourites I was my father's favoured son and I'd seen first hand what it did to my siblings. To this day there's a real animosity between my sister and my dad, so there was no way I'd want to pass that down to the next generation. Yet if you look at the way my ex-wife treated our first born, it shows all the signs of t...