Where do I get off saying all this when I know so little about your family?
I see the symptoms: That the family members have roles reminiscent of dysfunctional family systems in general; that there is a divorce; that the adults have value judgements about the household runnings of the "others"; that some of the stealing is from the other adults and since the problems are both places you are forced to coordinate by the problems of "problem child"; that you *do* identify her as the patient to the exclusion of seeing any other problems in the system--the role is *working*--it's serving its function.
Could I be wrong because I don't know you?
Sure. But you're showing all the symptoms of an entire dysfunctional family, and *if* you are, trying to "fix" your problem daughter is a doomed effort before it even begins. If you *did* somehow manage to fix her (unlikely), she'd take on the role of the "hero" child and one of the *other* kids would go off the deep end as the "bad" one, or get terribly sick, or some other thing that required the coordinated time and attention of the adults.
And if you are, it won't get better on its own---the kids won't grow up and move out and get functional lives---everybody will stay around being dysfunctional, just switching roles in the drama now and again and the kids will *become* the next generation of dysfunctional adults and marry other dysfunctional adults.
Go to a therapist yourself, pick a very good one that handles family therapy in the context of family systems. Deal with, in therapy, your leftover feelings about your ex, and learn more positive ways of dealing with the other adults.
You don't say if you're remarried, but if you are, you want to get your husband in there, too, because he's part of the dynamic (if he exists).
If you start interacting with the other adults in healthier ways, by not feeding the cycle of resentments among the adults, you will improve the whole cycle somewhat all on your own. But if you're married, getting your husband to not judge and be resentful of or feel negative about the other set of parents is absolutely crucial. And you can't do it by just suppressing however you feel. You have to pull it all out in the open in therapy and get to where you can really believe, down to your bones, that there is more than one right way to do things. Some things your other set of adults are doing may be bad---but you have to get really good at telling the difference between really unequivocally bad and just different.
There is such a thing as good parenting and bad parenting, there is a better and a worse, but *most* of the things we identify that way aren't really good or bad or better or worse---they're just different preferences.
I'm *not* saying there's no right or wrong or good or bad. I'm saying we add a lot of extra stuff to those categories that really doesn't go there.
You need a good therapist's expert second opinion about exactly which stuff if right or wrong or good or bad, and which stuff is just different.
The stuff that really is right or wrong you *have* to decide how to deal with on a case by case basis. The stuff that's just different, you have to learn to let go of.
It's a very complicated question and you're too emotionally close to it to do it on your own---we all are, when a domestic situation gets fubarred like this.
What the therapist is for is to be a neutral, sensible, third party who can help you sort out what's what so you can put it in the right category to deal with it in a healthy way.
The more of that you sort out, the less "bad" your more troubling daughter will be---because when she lets up on being "bad," her family doesn't fall apart and quit communicating.
Once your "right, wrong, different, better, worse" categories of differences with your ex and other adults in your life are sorted out, when you are *only* making an issue of the right and wrong things, very carefully picking your battles on the better and worse things, and leaving the merely different things absolutely alone----the other adults will become, gradually, more likely to listen to you about the right and wrong things and tensions will start to lessen up.
One of the "warnings" therapists always give in training new therapists to deal with dysfunctional family systems and in teaching people how to deal with problems in their families is to look *very* closely at anyone on a pedestal. Usually their hidden flaws play an important part in maintaining the dysfunctions in the system.
So don't make the mistake of marking off your "good" people---whether that's your daughter, or your spouse, or you---as not having problems, or it may come as a shock to find out how much you've got to deal with.
Some of this that I've just said will sound to some of the Program survivors like Program Seminar Babble, because the Programs have borrowed a lot of the language of genuine therapy while neglecting or just totally screwing up the substance.
Fix the adults first, or you've no hope of fixing the kids.
Send *both* twins to a conventional, fun Summer Camp---separate camps---of their choice. Tell the other daughter she gets a camp next year while the other two stay home, and to start looking at camps and figuring out what she wants.
Then while the kids are gone, use the extra time and energy to work in therapy to sort out the right, the wrong, the important, the trivial, and the different. As well as the things from your own childhood that set you up with so many buttons to be pushed.
The childhood thing is another area where the programs borrow the trappings of real therapy but really screw it up.
The real reason to go back and dig up and mull over the crap in your childhood is to better understand your own hot buttons so that when someone or something really pushes your buttons, and your reaction isn't really about that person or what they just did but is about your own baggage, you can take a deep breath, put your baggage aside, and just deal with whatever is really going on with that person instead of compounding it with all that baggage.
And so you can look at it consciously with adult eyes and quit subconsciously blaming yourself for crap that was going on with your parents that wasn't about you at all.
You have to *find* your baggage to be able to put it aside.
That's where the program people are generally packs of incompetent idiots. They're great at stirring up or pulling up loads and loads and loads of angsty baggage. They just don't know what the hell to *do* with it once they've dredged it up. Catharsis my ass. You don't dredge it up for "catharsis." You dredge it up to make it conscious enough that you're no longer letting your baggage pull your strings when you deal with people. And if you just dredge it up but you never figure out how it pulls your strings and how to make it stop, all you've got is those wonderful, transient, completely useless endorphins from your "catharsis."
Don't hand your kid over to a Program, even a summer one. There are so many people out there that are incompetent hacks that your odds of getting any improvement at all are lousy.
Family therapy *for the adults* is likely to have much better results and be cheaper to boot.
Timoclea
