"Worried About My Adult Kids Stuck With a Toxic Mom"

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It's not so much just, you know, for like your sex life and romantic life and all the turmoil, but these things have big consequences down the line, like children and a lot of chaos that disrupts the life of a lot of good people, as we will talk about in today's episode of Dear DSO. And you can submit your own story to deardso.com, fill out the form, and if your story is a good one, I will create a video out of it for the whole world to see, or for the podcast listeners to listen to on the Dad Starting Over podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you may listen to your podcasts. If you are watching this on YouTube, do me a favor, down below click on subscribe, click on like, leave a comment, share, all that good stuff, man. I would really appreciate it. That would help me out a great deal as I continue to try and grow my YouTube channel. And today's message comes from Holden, and the subject line is, how does this go long term? He says, hi DSO, that's me by the way, stands for Dad Starting Over, real name is Ralph. Anyway, he says, my story is similar to so many others. A few years ago, and after a tough few years and some serious life-threatening health issues on my part, my wife of 22 years and a college sweetheart came to bed one night and gave me the 'I love you, but I'm not in love with you.' A month later, she said she wanted a divorce. And 2 months after that, I discovered that there was another person that she had met online in a Facebook political meme sharing group. That's a first. I went through the usual lies and gaslighting, and my story is no different. We could all tell each other's stories. The other guy was an unemployed, underemployed person with 3 kids from different women. He had never married, and he was a substance abuse— or a substance user who lived with his mom. Wow, she really hit Home run with this. We were in our mid-40s. It made no sense at the time, but I know now that my story is the common one. Well, I wouldn't say it's common, but it's not unheard of, as you know. I was also that anxious guy from a broken childhood home that came apart because of infidelity. There you go, not uncommon. It's been 7 years since the divorce. I've rebuilt my life. I'm remarried to a wonderful woman who is secure in life. And he says, parentheses, I made all the dating mistakes and lived to tell. My career has taken off again. I'm at the top of my profession and I'm making 5 times what I did the year I divorced my ex. Wow. Life is really good. I am fortunate to be able to spend 6 weeks every year traveling overseas for pleasure, and I'm able to save what seems like an obscene amount of money. Well, All right, good for you, dude. The anxious guy I was rarely shows up due to lots of hard work, including having a really great therapist who helped me find the person that I was always meant to be. Well, that's excellent. My ex, on the other hand, seems to be really struggling, as you'd expect. But more important to me, our kids are still suffering. Two of our three kids didn't graduate high school as the divorce was a bomb in our family. My ex moved her partner in very quickly and things did not go well. I have tried everything I could to help the kids, but the more I try, the more they gravitate to their mom, who, surprise, has no boundaries and lets them live in her place and not work or go to school. My ex at times has trashed me to the kids, and I continue to become more successful. Um, my oldest is 26. And the youngest is 22, and there is a major failure to launch. I have come to realize that our boys need to help themselves before I can help, but they are in a toxic home. If the early part of my story is the common one, where do things go from here? My future is a good one, but I have concern for my boys. They are brilliant young men who are stuck. Do our exes kind of flounder along and the kids continue to struggle until they wake up that their mom has been dragging them down too? I would love some comments and feedback. Well, Mr. Holden, this is a good one. And yeah, relatively common in my world, that is. So we got a gal who just kind of went off the rails. Sounds like mid-40s, maybe a perimenopause thing. I know I'm not allowed to talk about that, but Hormones play a big part in mental health and emotionality and everything else. All you gotta, you know, ask any guy that does the old testosterone therapy, like some guy that's like hypogonadal, which means like he barely creates any testosterone on his own, maybe due to some medical thing or it's just how he is genetically. And then you put him on testosterone and that guy is night and day different human being. He's, you know, he's more outgoing, takes on more risk, He's way less anxious, he's way hornier, he's better with the women, he's better at work, and all because he just injected one substance into his butt. So something like, you know, when I hear a mid-40s, early 40s, and wow, what happened to my wife? She just went off the rails and she's screwing around with this guy and doing this crazy thing and that crazy thing, making some major life career decision. I always, my brain always goes to, mm, could be a hormonal thing, but that's a really, verboten, off-limits thing to say. But hey, it's my channel, what the hell, right? Um, so you never know. But anywho, um, yeah, that's one that I know pretty well. Let's just leave it at that. Uh, and yeah, you worry about the kids. And really, over the past— how many years you say it's been, like 7 years or so? It sounds like those kids have kind of gravitated towards mom to the point where, because of mom's lack of boundaries and probably what we call some enmeshment in there between mom and kids, You know, they see mom as friend, mom sees them as either my best buddies and my little surrogate husbands or whatever it may be. It's really bad stuff. They have in a very unhealthy way attached themselves to mom. And in another way, it's like they kind of feel bad for mom. They're kind of mom's protector. And they may see a hyper-successful ex-husband, their dad, as being the bad guy. Makes no sense to you, but to them and basically what they hear out of mom's mouth, day after day after day. She's painted you as, there's this guy who just thinks he's all that. He thinks he's, you know, so much better than us. Here we are, team mom and two boys against the world. Screw him, screw dad. And here comes dad going, you want to come to my house this weekend, kids? Like, no, I want to stay with mom, damn it. This whole atmosphere of mommy is victim to the world and everything else just kind of colors their whole perception and everything else. And unfortunately, it leads to, as a cascading series of effects, as I often say, the snowball effect just builds and builds. And it all starts with this foundation of real dysfunctional relationship between mom and boys, all, and it results in what you see now, which is a couple of young adults that just not doing a damn thing. Failure to launch. It shows just how much, um, us parents are integral to the development and, um, overall health of our kids mentally and emotionally, physically, even that when they don't have a proper parental figure in their life, man, they just go downhill real fast. And that makes your job as the, quote, healthy parent that much harder. You have to battle a lot of built-in— oh, I guess you could say foundational behaviors which have led the kids to this point. These are not kids that get up every morning and make their bed. These are not kids that go to the gym with mom or dad, you know, 2 or 3 days a week. These aren't kids that are like you know, joining camps and getting out of the house and, and doing all this stuff and hanging out with friends. These are kids that just, what, probably for years and years hung out in the room, played video games, didn't do their homework. Uh, school said you got like a 0.0 whatever grade point average, you're out of school. So the kids just drop out of school, they don't get their GED or anything, they just kind of flounder because they don't have a parental figure to light a fire under their butt and say, go, go, you need to go get it. Go do the thing. Oof, that's tough, man. You're not going to be able to fix this tomorrow, as you know. But really, the only thing you— and this goes out to you and others that are in a similar position— the only thing you can do is be a loving, present parent who is there for them and who is not afraid to say, you know, you got a lot of potential. What you're doing here is not good. How about this? All they can say is, no, fuck you, dude. I'm an adult now. I'm 20-some years old. You go, okay. That's all they can do. Want to come over for a Christmas dinner? Come on over. And all you can do is be a good example for them. Look how Dad is doing well. Look at Dad with his wife. And I don't know if you have new children or whatever, look at Dad with, um, his friends. Look at Dad being successful. Look at this mom and these other kids being successful, and— or stepmom rather— and all these other kids being successful. This is something to strive for. These are role models. Emulate. That's all you can hope for. So be loving, be caring, understand that over the years they have been basically programmed to take their energy and direct it towards, yes, this very unhealthy, dysfunctional mother figure. That's tough, man. And yes, that's going to have effects on their relationships down the line romantically. They're going to marry mom, basically. Be prepared. Sure, there are some things you can do to help mitigate that, you know, informing them, giving my book Real Talk: No Bullshit Life Advice for Young Men, or even The Dead Bedroom Fix or something like that, or let them watch this video. But let them know that Dad loves them, Dad is here to support them, but Dad expects a certain kind of behavior out of them. And don't be bringing that dysfunctional shit into Dad's home. When you walk in, you're polite, you're kind, you help out with the dishes, you help out clean the house. Let's go do this thing, let's go cut down some tree in the backyard. You know, all these real family man things to do. What we don't do is just sit around on our ass and play video games all day and blame the world for our problems. And you don't, be careful, don't badmouth mom. That's not your job, and it will just further push them away from you. Even if they prompt something like, you know, mom had some guy over the house the other day. Oh yeah? Um, how do you feel about that? Like, is that cool with you? Well, he seemed like a real loser, blah blah blah. Sorry to hear that, buddy. I'm sure that must be tough. You know, if there's ever a time where you're uncomfortable at Mom's for whatever reason, you're, you're a man now, you're an adult. You should always feel welcome to pick up the phone, give me a call, bring your stuff on over here. All right, you can stay for a day, week, months, years, whatever it is. But understand, Dad has certain expectations for people that live under this roof, and you lay out those expectations. And fingers crossed, eventually they realize who the healthy, loving, good-intentioned parent is, and who the parent that they love, the parent that they care for, but unfortunately is really dysfunctional, broken parent, who that is. And you will notice if you do things right, they're kind of gravitating and they're moving away from, they will always go back to mom, that's their mommy. They will always love her. They'll always have a place in their heart for Mom. But for life advice, for those holiday moments and those really serious things, they will always come back to Dad. Not guaranteed, but, you know, knock on wood, right? That's all we can do is just hope for the best. Do our best and hope for the best. That's it, dude. Um, but yeah, these things can go— um, your question is, do we ever— how do we see these things go? Often it's not good. And it's gonna be a lot of patience on your part sitting back and watching these young adult men make some pretty big life mistakes. But again, you're the loving father. You're there for them no matter what, but you're not above telling them when they're being a shithead and give them some good old-fashioned dad advice. All right, brother, thank you for reaching out. This is a good one. By the way, you know I'm gonna say it if you watch my videos, and guys, this goes out to all of you. I'm, I'm on a real high right now because I just returned from what we call our Bro Fest, which is our annual gathering that we have for our group that we call the Brotherhood. Uh, we all got to get together in person once a year in the US. We have, you know, informal meetups between our members and stuff, but as a formal organization, we get together once a year and we call it Bro Fest in the United States. And we just returned from Charleston, South Carolina, and it was awesome. And I leave that event saying, man, how do we not have 10 times the number of members that we do? And I understand it's a relatively new organization, So it takes time to build something like this, but, and it's tough to get the word out. But I listen to a story like this and I'm like, this is the kind of guy we need in our group. He's successful, he's got his shit going on, but he's still, he's missing that little something. This is a guy that we could help, and this is a guy by virtue of all of his success that could help us. So Mr., your name again? Holden, check out the Brotherhood at help4men.com and you can jump right to the join page, help4men.com/join. Learn about all there is in the, in the Brotherhood. I won't bore you with the details, but we have a lot of cool benefits, a lot of cool ways in which guys can communicate, talk to each other, meet each other, learn from each other. We have a lot of resources. If you like audio, we got you covered, like 1,000+ hours of audio for you and free courses, all kinds of good stuff. So check it out, the Brotherhood at helpformen.com, or go right to helpformen.com/join to sign up. And again, that goes out for all you guys out there. All right, Mr. Holden, thank you for reaching out. It was a good one. I appreciate it. And guys, we'll see you on the next one.