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[quote=Anonymous][quote]I am all for respecting everyone's rights and wishes, but it has to go both ways. Based on this, I will be calmly and gently pointing out all the times she spied on me and sent texts, pics, and recordings to her mother, who then handed them to her lawyers (those guys could make Mother Theresa look like a horrible person) to use against me, and posted some of them on FB with some pretty vitriolic text. I don't think D14 is aware that mom posted her pix on FB during the divorce. I will also be reminding her of the time she accused me of being sexually inappropriate (baseless) around her and a friend and ran to mom with that one… you can guess how fast the lawyers were involved in that one. [/quote]

I'm the PP who wrote about resenting my divorced dad's "I'm the parent" rulemaking.

When I read your original post, I noticed you included a lot about your ex-wife and things that happened during the divorce.  You may think they were just minor details to put your anger in context, but that allows you to miss the fact that your feelings about your daughter are in the context of your divorce.  I wondered why you needed to post the pictures on FB, and if that need is also in the context of your divorce.  You may have blocked your ex-wife, but you're still sending very public messages to her and about her.

I could be wrong about all that, and I'm certainly in no position to tell you what you're feeling or what you should feel.  But I just want to point out how easy it is to miss what our actions can convey - right or wrong - about our feelings.  My dad never said a bad word about my mother - ever.  But at 14, I was acutely aware of how he felt about her.  I was aware of it at age 8.  I'll never know for certain because he never talked about it with me, but I felt very often that he was vectoring his feelings about it onto me.  I also felt that he was playing out the things he'd wish done (take control, express what he would and would not have, [i]nip it in the bud[/i]) and trying to mold me into the person he wanted my mother to be - which is to say, making sure I knew he was the boss and that I showed appreciation for the good person he was, or at least that he was trying to be.

This had the opposite effect that he wanted.  Because what I felt was that I couldn't trust him with MY feelings.  It was his feelings that mattered more to him, his feelings that he paid more attention to, his feelings that dictated outcomes in all matters.  It didn't help that he tried so hard to mask his feelings and couch them in "good parenting" because it made me feel he was dishonest and lacked judgment. Yeah, I came to that conclusion about his judgment around age 10.

I don't agree with a previous poster that you and your ex-W are making your daughter into a manipulative person.  No one makes a person do anything.  [i]Feelings drive action.[/i]  Anger,  Fear, Surprise - these are all fast-acting agents designed to suppress thought and spur immediate action.  One of the most important lessons a parent can teach is that it's safer to recognize the feeling and the impulse to act AND THEN figure out how to proceed.  Critical to the lesson is 1) demonstrating that you can do it, and 2) acknowledging their feelings in a situation so they can develop a habit of doing that for themselves before they move on to decision-making.  The hardest part is allowing them to do this [i]without judgment[/i] about them, or their feelings, or their decision-making.  Childhood and young adulthood is the only time in their lives where most mistakes are not high stakes.  And making mistakes is how you learn to avoid them.  Don't tie a mistake they make to how you feel about them as the person they are. (psst. Every teenager's got drama.)

I found a lot of help in the book Parent Effective Training in re-forming how I approach my kid and avoiding the mistakes my dad made.  It works well on relationships with adults, too.[/quote]

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