help! How do I help someone who is being verbally abused... by their own CHILD?
Hi. My partner is being verbally abused by his 19-year-old daughter. She controls him, demands to be the centre of his life, at her permanent beck and call: insults him, "punishes" him for everything and anything (not doing whatever she's ordered quick enough. Chipping in to her monologue at meal-times. Making a joke. Not understanding that a comment - eg., "I'm in Didcot" was in fact an order to come and drive for an hour to pick her up. Giving her a trainfare rather than taxi-ing her to somewhere two hours' drive away - "because you know I hate trains"). He justifies and excuses everything she does "because I wasn't there for her for the first two years of her life before we were able to adopt her and so she's fragile and she needs me."
She breaks everything he gives her, then demands new ones: she's acting stressed at the idea that he's together with me ("and I have to be there for her, because I'm her only point of stability and she needs me") so has gone - in 24 hours - from planning to spend the rest of our lives together to explaining why, since his daughter can't cope with change, we can't be together "just while she's going through this crisis" and "just in case she comes to visit"...
She left home three years ago, and is very unhappy in the hostel where she was placed by social services, and he's desperate to help her, but she finds it very easy to withhold her visits until he's been suitably "punished".
And I don't know what to do or how to help. If it were an abusive parent, or spouse, it's "simple" - but this is an abusive CHILD who has apparently always been that manipulative and utterly self-centred, who IS fragile and DOES need help: and he just takes all the abuse she throws at him and believe that he must somehow have deserved it because she tells him so and because he couldn't protect her before she was adopted! And because *I'm* not her parent, I don't have the right or the authority to intervene... and I don't know how to help him - or his daughter. Well, daughterS - his older daughter is less abusive but just as controlling.
Help!!!