I have a 17 year old daughter who is in the process of being diagnosed with Autism and BPD. I separated from her father over four years ago due to DV and she is with me full time. Recently I have started seeing a man I have known for over 30 years (since I was a teen myself): we have always been attracted to each other but the timing was never right with him being married and then me being married. We are both now single and text all day plus calls every other day and have spent a couple of days together just chatting and having lunch/coffee etc. We have strong feelings for each other and I would like to maybe have him over at the house to hang out, etc but I am nervous about how to raise this with my daughter. I don’t want her to feel I’m abandoning her but I also feel that after a violent marriage and years of always putting myself last, I deserve some happiness. Any tips or things to avoid when mentioning dating to my daughter?
5 Replies
given your daughter's extremely fragile state/history and the fact you're only at the talking/get to know you stage, you exercise restraint and meet him at his place/outside the home. please, leave your daughter out of this. the majority of bpds have trauma in their past and it is such a LIFELONG debilitating illness, you owe it to her to try and unravel the damage done and be her safe person and let her home be her safe place. stop acting like a lovesick teen (texting all day, have strong feelings, it's called lust), he isn't who he was as a teen, he's a stranger, you don't even know him yet, wake up and proceed with caution. you deserve to be happy, really? well i think after all your daughter has been through and the consequences of that (BPD), her happiness and sense of safety trumps yours. you didn't put yourself last by staying, you put your daughter last and she now has a lifelong horrific condition.
Wow that is bloody rude. You don’t know what she has gone through so why are you acting this way? How do you know she put her daughter last? Well done on the victim blaming
Not rude - REAL. Her daughter probably has no trust in her mother's choices, given the hell she has been through from her mother's last life choices. Coming out of a DV relationship where her daughter was severely traumatised and talking about strong feelings for a guy she only texts and has barely spent any time with, talk about not learning life's lessons, Even worse, she wants to bring this guy to her house with her vulnerable daughter. You can know someone really well, see them day in and day out (which isn't even the case here), but you never know what happens behind closed doors and who people are when they are in a relationship. Sorry, not sorry, I will always advocate for the vulnerable who can't advocate for themselves. Risking her daughter's stabiliity and sense of safety for a guy you've only been talking to for a while is selfish. Keep seeing him by all means, but the daughter does not need to be included at this point. It's about priorities and her daughter has only just recently been diagnosed for god's sake. Do you know anything about BPD?
I bet the mother knows nothing about BPD either, too busy texting all day.
hey really sorry you've been diagnosed with BPD and autism, i know it's hard and we need to find a treatment that works for you, but i'm going to make this about ME and bring some stranger into our lives, just to make life more complicated for you at this hard time.