Here’s another family situation where relationship patterns are at work and the advice columnist missed them.
A teen girl runs off with a 27 year old ex-con, has his baby, and he gets caught with another woman. Naturally the girl takes him back even though he’s still living with the other woman, and wants to move him back in with herself and the baby with her parents. The parents object.
Now the advice the parents get from the columnist is just to practice “tough love” and say no. What’s missing is any seeming understanding of the girl’s real problems. A normal woman with healthy self esteem wouldn’t put up with a scumbag like that for a microsecond. Why would she do it?
More importantly, where did she learn it? Where did she learn that women have to put up with mistreatment, need men to feel complete, have no right to be treated with respect, etc? Let me make a wild guess – at home with Mommy and Daddy???
My guess is that the mother who wrote the letter has no idea that she is reaping the reward for letting her husband push her around and demean her and the daughter for all those years. The daughter learned that she has no real value somewhere, and Mommy and Daddy are usually the models for both good and bad behavior. And since the lessons are learned in the child’s mind, which can’t make the distinctions that we can as adults, it can be seemingly small things that make big impressions.
The daughter needs counseling, but so does Mom.
