Divorce Support Forums: She lies

Read up on high conflict divorces, parental alienation, and personality disorders: Narcissistic, Sociopathic and Borderline.

It's scary stuff but it might prepare you. One thing you need to avoid is sinking to her level. No lying, no hiding assets, no spying. Your kids need you to be the sane one becasue she is being way wrong.

The up side of this is that she's got a dental degree, you supported her through that and she will now be expected to work and support herself. She allowed you to be caretaker of the kids for XX years so she's going to look like a total witch for wnating to take them from you now. And finally, for some people, this malicious behavior is just triggered by litigation and once the case is settled, they seem to settle down. I think in some cases it's because they've gotten advice from some really nasty people who were advising they do the wrong thing (like you'll see maybe some people online have dirty tricks they will advise that you can pull & stuff like that)... I ahd one friend, his ex was influenced by her dad, who hired the nastiest laweyr in town. between her Dad and her laweyr, they really shredded him. You'd think he was evil and should never be allowed to see the kids. Well, after spending a hundred thousand of thier life savings, she got full legal custody... but no alimony, and just 60% parenting time. She also was told that if she didn't go to work, OK, but she was going ot have a full timeincome attributed to her for the purposes of support, and once that was attributed, her support ended up being like $400 a month for 3 kids. She can't live off that so she has to go back to work, which was the one thing she wanted to never have to do... which is apparently WHY she had gotten so evil with the kids. she had even accused him of violence and causing extreme psychological abuse to the kids. Her attorney described it as them having pTSD from living in a war zone... they had ONE fight the day he found her in bed with his friend, but other than that, this house was NOT a war zone by any means!

Once she got full custody and realized that custody did not come with a whole lot of money attached to it, she started calling my friend to have him take the kids... like EVERY weekend on top of many weekdays. She finally told him that it was NEVER about the custody, it was just about feeling that he would be fair with her despite that she had cheated on him (apparently she feels "fair" is a money figure and the kids' needs don't figure into her thoughts at all... which to me is a sign of some personality problem for sure!) ... and so now they're going back to court to stipulate on joint custody.

Now that the case is over, the lawyer is paid, and she's no longer living with her parents, she's back to the normal, wacky, neurotic & self-centered but not EVIL person she always was... If you'd met her during the divroce, you'd think she was the devil, incarnate... well... not if you only heard her story... her STORY sounded plausible, sad, pathetic... but if you were one of the neighbors & kenw the TRUTH, you'd think she was the devil. Now that the litigation is over, she's back to being just ... benignly weird.

So there is hope.

And I hope you don't end up with someone like my husband's ex, who can't let go even after the divorce, who keeps doing wrong things to the kids, with the kids, in the name of alienating them from their father. Who has a severe, diagnoseable personality problem that she's been ordered to therapy for. If our kids weren't so old, we'd be trying to find a way to enforce that order... becasue her issues are just hurting the kids. But at this point it's kind of too late.

You're lucky that you've got a lot of time ahead of you, young kids, etc. You've got the possibility of finding a way to make it all work... but don't expect her to be normal. Whenever there is litigation to be had, expect her to show some kind of malicious stuff. And hope that it's not her whole being that is like this... hope and pray that she only gets this way when going to court.

One trick of getting the malicious ones to show their true colors... make sure they have enough rope to hang themselves with. My husband found that short hearings only resulted in her getting the chance to blurt out crap that was a lie and somehow caused trouble... longer hearings, she'd not be able to control herself, she'd blurt early on, and the judges and lawyers questioning her about the crap she just accused him of would pretty easily find out that her story was inconsistent. This is NOT a cocktail party where she gets to tell her story about how evil you are and move on to the next group she wants to mix & mingle with... leaving everyone with the impression that you're evil. This is litigation, where you wnat to make sure there's plenty of time to have the lawyers in the room ask her to explain herself, define her worse (my husband's ex's definition of "abuse", for example, would result in basically anythign she disagrees with being described as "abuse"... her definition of "deadbeat" means that if he paid her lots of stuff but without a court orde being in place yet, then he did nto pay court ordered "support" nad therefore is a deadbeat by her definition... the fact that no court order existed would just go by the wayside at a cocktail party, but in a courtroom with lawyers and the ability to look up the timing of stuff, it would quickly become clear... a few questions to ask how she came to the conclusion that this man who is current in his paymetns and has proof of $30,000 paid in the first 6 months after separation is a deadbeat... they'd figure it out... she's all full of that type of stuff). It works much better if there's plenty of time to ask her to define her terms... and you'll probably find that she's re-defined the stuff she accuses you of to a point where it's no longer recognizeable. We have older kids, so at this point it's just an exercise in waiting her out and hoping that she does not inject enough poison into thier minds that they'll be estranged from him in adulthood... there's just not enough time left in their childhoods to file for modifications of custody and wait out the court process to make it happen.

Let her do the dirty tricks and be prepared for them....
for you... there is time to make the right thing happen. You need to stick to the high road and not give into the temptation to pull dirty tricks, because eventually, the dirty tricks become obvious and backfire.

Good luck.