I agree with TL, too.
But I think the ex-husband is the engine here, and I think he is doing what he is doing skillfully and with malice aforethought.
A forty year marriage....
***
It helps us to have a place like this where we can determine what it is we are feeling, where the primary hurts are. Then, we can address those specific things in the best way we know or can learn.
What is the father's role, the ex-husband's role, in this?
To me, that is where the answer will be.
You left him after 40 years for a reason. And you stayed with him for 40 years. You had children to raise; and he was that good a manipulator of your emotional reality.
You must be a very strong woman.
I would say he is doing the same subtle, blatantly out in the open manipulation with the daughter that he practiced on you, and on her, for all those years that you lived with him and were at his mercy.
And that eventually, you left him because of, once your children were safely raised and there were no more hostages to protect.
Now, there is no one between the daughter and him. He may be using her as he uses everyone.
I am sorry this is happening to you and your daughter. I read once, a long time ago, that the kids will act out most honestly with the parent they most trust. They know beyond the need of questioning that we love them rock solid. I don't know whether that thought will help you, but it helped me to understand from a different perspective and then, what was happening did not seem such a gummy, dark thing I could not get a handle on.
The thing I keep wondering about is whether the father is using the daughter's empathy for him with malice aforethought. Triangulating to beat the band and playing the same, predatory game he's always played, he could be using your daughter to hurt everyone involved by intentionally drawing her into an alliance against you.
This is the nature of the game for my mother, too.
I don't know why they do it. I do know the name of what they do is called gaslighting. They weave a hurtful reality out of little shimmerings of things. They cry loud and long about loneliness, and about how they have been done wrong. They are viciously determined to create division, like a cat playing with a terrified mouse hour after hour with limitless patience and endless joy in the smallest win in the game.
Maybe, he is using loneliness; maybe, regret for the things she knows him to have done but which you, heartless thing that you were, left him for without giving him a chance and now he is old and alone and needs someone, needs the much beloved woman who left him instead of helping him and on and on ad nauseam.
Or maybe, he is playing that he was the one who sacrificed his life for the sake of his children. Maybe, he is preying on her, is destroying you to her, telling her lie after lie. And there he is, alone in the world now, except for he and his daughter, who knows now, the truth of the sacrifice he made for her.
Yuck.
Is your daughter especially caring, especially empathic?
That is the favorite target of the narcissist and of the sociopathic person. Not that your ex-husband is either of those things, but there are people in the world who are like that. If we are being hurt in ways we don't understand, if the pieces just somehow do not ever seem to fit, it can help us to learn a little bit about these personality types. I resisted learning about these kinds of internet diagnostics at first. When I did do some exploring on Family of Origin issues where these kinds of personality types could be involved, I learned much that was useful to me and even, comforting.
Things that had never made sense began to fall into discernable patterns, patterns I could make sense of, and I began to heal.
Something is fueling your daughter's animosity. Something is creating a feeling of disloyalty in her when she sees you or interacts with you. From the clear, non-judgmental tone of your post, I think you are not creating the problem.
That leaves the ex-husband.
And he is using his own child, hurting her, to do it.
Does this pattern fit for your family situation?
How would it be possible to create a relationship with your daughter without addressing or accusing the father? (He would love that too much. He would play hapless victim. The enmity would become an open thing and the father would, says me and no one else, suck the life out of the daughter to get back at you and at her because he can.)
But I am just a person and I could be wrong as can be.
Still, the way I see it, it is the father.
He could be doing it to celebrate the hurt in it for you and to get back at you for escaping him. Here is a horrible but terribly important thing I learned: When our people we love are people who do things like this? None of it, however painful, is personal. People who do this, do it to everyone in their lives. They are different than we are. That is why we don't get it, and have trouble believing it when we finally do see what they do.
I am very sorry he is using your daughter this way.
Ouch.
It may be that the daughter sees only his "unremitting pain". (In quotes for a reason and I think you know why I did that.) If this is the dynamic at the heart of this, the daughter cannot see beyond her father's pain and the father will have done everything in his power to make certain this is so and somewhere at the core of it will be that you betrayed him.
So, how could we unravel the father's game?
I never was able to unravel my mother's game.
The father will be blaming you for what he willfully has done, and for every shortcoming in his parenting. He will, if he is like my mother, tell blatant lies and believe them and repeat them until the daughter has heard them so many times she believes them, too. My mother did that very thing to my father (and upped the virulence of her attack on his mother, my paternal grandmother) immediately after my father's death. Until I could step back enough to gain some perspective, I was certain I could love us all out of it.
I was wrong.
If she were my daughter...I might ask point blank how the father is, and whether he is doing well. If it comes out that the father is doing what I think he is, then I think the thing to do is to say, "I'm sorry, honey. I know you worry about your father. You are such a good daughter." Or, "Oh, that must have been hard, to hear your father in such pain."
And then, drop the conversation about the father. Keep it light and welcoming and love her where she is and love yourself, too.
There is nothing more you can do, I think.
In her heart, the daughter will be protective of the father. He has worked very hard to create this vulnerability in her so that he can use her love for him to hurt you both.
Mostly, to hurt her.
You have escaped.
She cannot.
So, that is how I see what is happening in your family. I do think the way to approach this with the daughter is to demand nothing. To understand where she is probably being groomed toward hatred instead of closure. That is the wound the father is exploiting. That is the pain he is funneling toward hatred for you. The father will have exploited the daughter's confusion about how the divorce could have happened when it did, after so long a time.
Says me, and I am no one in particular, but that is what I see happening here.
You sound like such a nice mother in your post, wakeupcall. If any of this makes sense to you regarding what I think the father is doing, then you will know how to cherish yourself and your child into a healthier place all on your own. We will be right here too though, as you both come through it.
You will know the second you read this whether the father is responsible.
We never think it, because we cannot imagine anyone would comport themselves in these ways, especially where their own children are concerned.
But they do.
***
When my father was going to leave my mother after all of us were grown and on our own and she did a series of unbelievably pointless and rotten things, my mother told me she had threatened my father with never seeing his "kids" again.
We were all in our thirties.
?
Had they divorced, we would finally have been able to cherish our father cleanly.
They did not divorce.
Other bad things have happened.
The common denominator has been my mother.
These people are such clever manipulators. They target the empathic people in every area of their lives because we are sympathetic by nature. That makes us easy marks.
I am sorry this is happening to you and to your child.
Very hurtful, and especially so when we cannot seem to make the pieces fit or understand why.
But I think it is not the divorce. It is the ex-husband, and this is just how he wants it to be.
I keep saying I am sorry. I am, for all the levels of hurt, here. I just don't know how to communicate that. I do know you must have been very courageous to leave him.
You did that.
You recreated your life.
There will be a way to do this too, and I think you will know how to do that once you are more clear about why it is happening.
I think all this because the marriage was a forty year marriage. The ex-husband will be a master at manipulation, for you to have stayed as long as you did, and to have been destroyed enough to have left after forty years.
Well okay. I am repeating and repeating myself here. So, I will just sign off, then.
:O)
Cedar