Posted by sid on May 23, 2002, at 20:33:14
In reply to Your niece... » sid, posted by IsoM on May 23, 2002, at 3:02:14
Well, I made an anonymous phone call, asking for info and talking about my niece. She does not meet the criteria for immediate removal or drastic intervention. That's what I thought. She never even mentioned wanting to leave home. Mind you, at some point she'll realize her dad is weird - well, I think she knows already.
So to all of you who cared enough to write in the past few days, I will talk to my niece again soon, and I will suggest to her to go to therapy ASAP to discuss what's appropriate and not wrt sex, how to react to fend off inappropriate behavior, etc. And to talk about anything she might need to talk about. I'll ask her again if anything happened that I am not aware of. I will let her know that I can help and also, that if someone makes her feel bad in relation to her sexuality, it's called sexual harrassment and it needs to be told.
I do think that getting her out of her house would be disruptive and possibly counterproductive. She is good in school, has friends, works, functions well, so the impact of her father's taste for dirty jokes and harrassing/belittling behavior will have impacts in the medium-long run, but the short run her life is fine. She simply needs to know that
1 - men are not all like that (I keep telling myself that, but I don't quite believe it - although rationnally I do);
2 - inappropriate and unacceptable behavior must be identified for oneself and the perpetrator (I'm working on that, instead of fleeing at the speed of light, I should say what's on my mind, if I could even associate words to the feeling in real time instead of 24 hours after the fact);
3 - she is strong and she is worth so much more than crass, dirty, belittling sex. There's more to it than that. I try to convince myself of that too!Well, enough for now. I'm quite tired of all the emotions I've had in the past week about all this. I'm getting a tooth pulled out tomorrow morning too, so I'm off to bed.
Good night y'all.
- sid
poster:sid
thread:81
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20020516/msgs/99.html