Pretty successful and "normalizing" day yesterday.:)
I'm at a kind of forgiveness place with my ex at the moment. It's something I've struggled with A LOT. I think I'm realising what forgiveness is for me, in this situation.
He's impaired, no doubt about it. He pretty much fits the "psychopath check list" everything checks off and I can tick every box. Having said that, he's not a bad psychopath. I mean there are heaps worse, more dangerous ones than him. I don't even think he's a primarily brain-wired psychopath, maybe an Aspergers kid who was parented in such a way that he went that way, narcissist-creating type parenting.
I know his mum was the product of a violent alcoholic dad who beat her mum and maybe her, not entirely sure. His Dad was an alcoholic, a product of a native American vaudeville performer and one of identical twin sisters who both got pregnant to the same man and never spoke to each again. They had identical looking son's, who, one of which, was M, who had only one son, my ex, and two daughters.
One of the daughters got badly burnt when she was six and my ex was very neglected from then on. He turned to drugs, stealing, drug dealing, that sort of thing. He also tied his oldest sister up, and threatened her with a tomahawk .
None of his family has anything to do with him for many years. But eventually his Dad, after recovering from alcoholism, made efforts to reconnect and his older sister became a great aunty for my kids until dying of pancreatic cancer, in 2010, not long before I left my ex and kids and roamed the streets in agony and mania and acute stress being a nearly dying person.
My ex has nearly lost our children to suicide a number of them, a number of times. Born of his narcissistic need to demonize and exclude me and hate me for leaving him, instead of dying. My kids suffered a lot for lack of me and thinking that I'm a bad and "crazy" person, well, being told that I am/was.
I think he's scared now, he views his children as his life insurance, to take care of him when he's old, he doesn't want to lose them because he's into amassing power and because he's such a dodgy arsehole and jailbait, he's got a little kingdom of legitimacy as a father, and as a drug dealer ("medical" Cannabis). But he's getting away with that.
Strip him of the kids, though, and he's got nothing, no cover, no legitimacy, no "respectability". The thing is, he's my perp, my arseholes, coz he's dad of my kids, kids who are attached to their Dad, it's not healthy attachment its more like codependent and drug-muddied attachment, brainwashed and demoralized attachment.
But I do believe he's trying to be a better Dad, since all the suicidation, last year and previously. I just hope drugs don't ruin my kids like he is ruined, or worse.
So my forgiveness is around acceptance of his impairment. His brain is "not right" in the way of making choices that are "right" and not thinking and feeling for others, with any empathy.
He's dangerous, for sure, his mental hold and dependency on our kids isn't good, he tried to make them very dependent on him, well into adulthood, and lean on them, very heavily, but he doesn't want them to die, so he's improving his dad form, a little bit.
Still torturous for me, but not as bad as it has been.
