Divorce Support Forums: CoParenting with a Narcissist

Well, it's getting deeper and deeper around here. Of my 5 children, 2 of them (both girls-10 and 16) do not ever want to see their father again. We have been divorced 6 months now and as soon as it was all in the open, these two felt safe enough to share how they felt about their father. They feel unloved, angry, afraid of him. They really complain about visitation although he only has EOW and Thurs. nights. (about 20% time). I never knew how they felt about him before...they knew I wouldn't have allowed them to talk disrespectfully about their father. Now, I am still not allowing disrespect, but they can tell me how they feel. They never want to see him again.

Friday night my 10 yo hid when it was time to go with him. She had snacks and water. She left me a note about how she "couldn't take it any more", "I couldn't force her to go", etc. Up to this point, I have just told them he is their father, he does love them although it's hard to show for him, and that they need to go with him. I have tried to make their time with him more pleasant by sending things for their room, snacks when they traveled with him ( I asked him first). He and I have extremely minimal contact, bare essentials via email.

Anyway, I did find her after searching 20 minutes, just before I went out to tell him, but one of the other kids had already told him. he blew up at all of them later out of anger.

The issue is that he suffers from narcissism. It's been discussed here in other posts so I won't elaborate, but the bottom line is that it is ALWAYS about him. Rather than realizing his own kid hates him enough to hide so she didn't have to go, and trying to get to the bottom of it, and fix it, he got angry and called her a "spoiled brat". The whole rampage was about HIM and how this is affecting him. All the things that were wrong between he and I is happening with the girls. He tries to make them happy by doing HIS IDEAS, while not really showing love by interacting with them, coming to their performances, asking what they would like to do... If you really dislike a person strongly (as they do), he can do all the outings he wants and they still won't want to be with him. In our worst stage leading up to the divorce, when I not only feared him but hated him, he offered to take me to France, like that would fix it. Now he's offering to take her to the theme park and yelling that she's not being grateful. She doesn't want to go at all if it's with HIM.

Both of these girls just say it's not fair that I can divorce him and avoid him and they can't. I have to agree it doesn't seem fair. If he's not taking them somewhere (where he essentially ignores and sometimes even dumps them), he's ignoring them at the house while he does his own thing.

He doesn't see things as a normal person does. This is all my fault...he is the victim...they are ungrateful children...etc. I admit he seems to be trying pretty hard to please them, but he's trying in HIS OWN way, and they aren't feeling the love :) All I can do is tell them I can't keep them from going, it's the rules...but I do listen to them, because he won't--tells them to Shut Up or Hush if they tell him anything he doesn't want to hear. They just want to be heard.

I'm running out of rope. She promised me she wouldn't hide any more and I told her if I had not found her, I would have had to call the police and when THEY found her, they'd have to make her go with her father since that's his right. I don't know what else I can do. I feel like such an ogre sending her where she is so obviously miserable, but he does not physically abuse them. It's all very subtle, mostly neglect and emotional abuse but nothing that should cause him to lose his visitation.

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Kimberley