My ex, Ildiko, had this to say in a recent email:
I was told to get my daughter and myself out of our brutally toxic environment that lead her to drinking and drug use!
She was told that by amateurs. People who had no training in family counseling. Who had limited knowledge of the situation, and who’s knowledge only dealt with the most negative part of the family situation.
What was this toxic environment? I’d have to say it started with the dot com crash when I was thrown out of work along with thousands of other tech workers. For the next two years, work was erratic or non-existent. It was damn bad and the financial woes put a major strain on everyone. If it weren’t for some investments I had made that were worth a substantial amount, money borrowed from family (mostly my mom), and my wife selling her European property, we would have been completely sunk. My stepdaughter probably suffered a great deal under the stress she felt from us. It’s not easy being a kid and being dirt poor.
Eventually I found work. The pay was crap, but it was tech work. Attempts at getting non-tech job weren’t successful. Companies would take one look at my resume and not be interested, figuring that I would be gone the first chance I had. We were still poor, but not dirt poor. Our marriage started to improve, at first. Then problems began with my stepdaughter. At first she was too sick to go to school on occasion. The “on occasion” became two or three times a week. Medical exams came up with nothing. Eventually the real reason surfaced. My step daughter had started drinking. My wife refused to believe this despite the evidence. When I presented the proof, instead of being concerned about her daughter and seeking a solution, she denied there was a problem and said, for the first time, I want a divorce. I was astounded.
The toxic environment kicked in full force. It consisted of my stepdaughter binge drinking and doing drugs, my wife in denial about it, and me trying (unsuccessfully) to find help for my stepdaughter. Eventually my wife accepted that her daughter had a problem. What to do about it, however, was a different matter. Her plan was to send her to AA meetings, but nothing beyond that. There were no rules. There were no boundaries. There were no consequences. We would find her daughter passed out on the floor one day, and the next it was as if nothing had happened. No restrictions. No loss of privileges
If I tried to do something, I was the devil incarnate. After my stepdaughter disappeared from AA meetings every night for a week, not returning home until extremely late if at all that night, I refused to drive her to AA meetings with the reason being she was using the meetings to hook up with other teens to party with (it was one of these nights that she came home high on ecstasy). My wife told me I was interfering with her daughter’s sobriety. This is a typical and recurring example of how my wife blamed me for all the problems.
The toxic environment continued for two years. My stepdaughter ran wild. I tried to put limits on her excesses. My wife concluded that my actions were what caused her daughter to drink and do drugs. Not a day went by that my stepdaughter didn’t call me the most vile of names. My wife refused to punish her for it and became angry if I did. I was supposed to passively accept being called “a fucking moron” and worse.
My wife gained her citizenship. My mother flew in to witness the ceremony. My stepdaughter treated her badly as well. At one point my mother said, “if she had been within reach I would have slapped her.” My stepdaughter treated everyone with equal contempt, even her own mother. No one could call her on it. My wife stood by passively as her own daughter called her a, “fucking cunt“. If I reacted in any way to the bad treatment, my wife became angry with me. For my stepdaughter, it was the perfect situation. She could goad me all she wanted until I would react, typically by taking away her computer privileges. My wife could get mad at me, and our marriage would erode even further. All this time the drinking, drugs, and running away for days at a time continued. In fact, it became dangerously worse. She started having sex with strangers while under the influence. It’s a sad thing when a fifteen year old girl wasn’t sure if she had sex for the first time or not because she was so drunk she couldn’t remember.
I eventually got a better job with a huge increase in salary. Our relationship, however, was close to being dead. Instead of being happy about the much bigger income and how it would help us as a family, my wife said, “good, now you can afford to move out“. A few months later I did move out.
So now my wife had removed me and, supposedly, the toxic environment. The result was what any rational person would expect. My wife spent just about every evening away from home hanging out with her AA friends (and possibly having an affair even though it was supposed to be a temporary separation). My stepdaughter no longer had any limitations on her. She took full advantage of it. She would invite strangers over to the apartment for parties. Drugs, alcohol, sex.
The police visited often because of complaints from the neighbors. At one point one of the neighbors called my cell phone to let me know about a particularly bad party. All I could do was tell them to call the police. I did call my wife’s cell to let her know the situation. Her reaction was less than enthusiastic. Her fun with her AA friends was more important than her daughter’s excesses. She accused me of spying on her.
I spent the next couple of days thinking very hard about the situation and concluded that I needed to contact Child Protective Services and report my wife for negligence. I chose to wait a couple of days because we were to have a marriage counseling session. I planned to hear my wife’s explanation first, and only call CPS if I wasn’t satisfied with what I heard. It turned out that morning my daughter was finally taken to a camp for troubled teens in Utah. There was no longer a reason to contact CPS. My wife also chose that day to end our relationship permanently.
So what exactly was this toxic environment? It was my wife and I constantly disagreeing on how to deal with a difficult teenager. We saw numerous psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, and therapists. I was perfectly willing to go with the plans set forth by any of them. No surprise, they all said basically the same thing, boundaries and consequences. My wife, however, had her own ideas of how to do things, backed up by the blathering of ignorant AA friends of hers. It didn’t matter that her system of ignoring the problem and it will fix itself hadn’t worked for more than two years. In fact, it made things worse. Far worse. I would try to do what the professionals suggested, my wife would disagree, almost always in front of her daughter. Her daughter would be overjoyed because she was still free to do as she chose and I was in trouble yet again.
Despite my wife denying that she blamed me, the facts speak for themselves. There was a toxic environment and the only way to fix it was to remove me from the picture. She could not look at her own actions. She was (and still is) incapable of accepting criticism when it comes to her handling of her daughter.
