(((Starcat)))
I got goosebumps reading your post.

For all of us - :grouphug:

Chapter 9 was very difficult to read(I need to read it again though, with a highlighter) however it did remind me that I should call the local abuse hotline soon, and get their help in setting up my exit plan.

Cell phones, I mentioned somewhere on here that Walmart sells a Tracfone/Net10 phone for $10, that comes with a car charger. With mine, I had it inactive for awhile, but the E911 symbol did show on it, and I did carry it with me in my car at all times(it also has a very long battery life, which is nice) Shelters also collect old cell phones, for the very purpose of distributing to women so that they can call 911 if need be.

I read it and it made me cry.

Holy crap there's 24 pages to this list! I can't make it past page 5. My parents were a bit freaked out for my safety, and now I see why. As a Mother of daughters, this freaked me out too.

Yeesh...

Thanks Kassie - I have really wrestled with the idea that either AA is not what I thought it was or my RAH is just not hearing the messages. Most days its the latter, but on occasion, I get angry at AA. Its usually when I get the program thrown back at me, or when he makes fun of me being in Al-Anon.

Chapter 10
 

The Abusive Man In The World – Abusive Men as Parents

He’s terrible to me but he’s a really good father.
He took no interest in the children until I left him and then right away he filed for custody.
My children are freaked out and don’t want to go on visitation with him but the court won’t listen to me.
I couldn’t manage without him because the children don’t listen to me.

Life with an abuser at home can be as confusing and as stressful for the children as it is for their mother. They watch the arguments; they feel the tension. When they hear screaming and name calling the worry about their parents’ feelings. They have visions of the family splitting up; if the abuser is their father or a father figure the prospect of separation is a dreaded one. If the abuser is physically scary, sometimes punching walls, knocking over chairs or striking their mother, then a sharper kind of fear grips the children and may pre occupy them even during the calm periods in the home. Following periods of abuse, they may be wracked with guilt, feeling that they either caused their mother to be abused or should have found some way to have prevented it.

Witnessing incidents of abuse is just the beginning of what the children endure, however. Abuse sends out shock waves that touch every aspect of family functioning. Hostility creeps into mothers’ relationships with their children and siblings find themselves pitted against one another.

Why abusiveness so often extends to parenting issues.
There are various reasons why a man’s abusiveness tends to affect his parenting choices, including the following:

Each important decision that parents make has an impact on the family…How is an abuser likely to respond to this complex picture? He is likely to continue his usual tendency to be selfishly focused on how any changes will affect him rather than what works best for the family as a whole.

At the core of the abusive mind-set is the man’s view of his partner as a personal possession…If he is the children’s legal father, he sees them as extensions of himself; otherwise he tends to see them as extensions of her…his mentality of ownership is likely to shape his parental actions.

It is next to impossible for an abuser to keep his treatment of the mother a complete secret from children the way he does with other people because they are almost always around. So he chooses instead to hook them into the patterns and dynamics of the abuse, manipulating their perceptions and trying to win their loyalty.

Children are a tempting weapon to use against the mother….Many abusers sense that they can gain more power by using the children against their partners than by any method other than the most overtly terrorising assaults or threats.

Revisiting the abusive mind-set: parenting implications.
Control
The abuser does not believe…that his level of authority over the children should be in any way connected to his actual level of effort or sacrifice on their behalf, or to how much knowledge he actually has about who they are or what is going non in their lives. …abusers tend to be authoritarian parents. They may not be involved that much of the time but when they do step in, it’s their way or the highway.

Entitlement
Children of abusers often find their father’s attention and approval hard to come by. This scarcity has the effect of increasing his value in their eyes, as any attention from him feels special and exciting. Ironically, their mother can come to seem less important to them because they know they can count on her.

Externalisation of responsibility
Children who are exposed to the abuse of their mother often have trouble paying attention in school, get along poorly with their peers or act out aggressively. In fact, they have been found to exhibit virtually every symptom that appears in children who are being abused directly. The abuser attributes all of these effects to the mother’s poor parenting or to inherent weakness in the children.
When a family affected by partner abuse splits up, some children discover how much more pleasant life is without their father in the home and may choose to distance themselves from him. This can be a sign of emotional health and recovery. The abusers then often claims, predictably, that the mother is turning the children against him; in his mind what else could it be?

Manipulativeness
In certain ways children actually have an easier time living with an abusive parent who is mean all the time – at least they know what they are dealing with and who is at fault. But the typical abuser is constantly changing faces, leaving his children confused and ambivalent and increasing the likelihood that they will identify with him in hopes of staying on his good side.
...Your partner may reward the children for maintaining secrecy or may make them feel that they would bring shame on the family, including themselves, if anyone were to find out.

Superiority, disrespect
Children growing up in this atmosphere can gradually come to look down on their mother as a parent, having absorbed the abuser’s messages that she is immature, irrational, illogical and incompetent. Even those children who take their mother’s side in most conflicts, as many daughters and some sons of abused women do, nonetheless can come to see her as inferior to other people and to themselves.

Possessiveness
Not all abusers perceive their children as owned objects but many do. A man who already considers his partner a possession can find it easy to see his children in the same way. But children are not things and parents who see their children in an objectified way are likely to cause psychological harm because they don’t perceive children as having rights.

Public image
It is confusing for children to see people responding to their abusive father as if he were a charming and entertaining person…They are left to assume that his behaviour at home is normal, which in turn means that they and their mother must be at fault.

The Abusive Man As Child Abuser
Multiple studies have demonstrated that men who abuse their partners are far more likely than other men to abuse children… The increased risks include the following:

Physical Abuse
The abuser who is most likely to hit children is the one who is quite physically assaultive or threatening toward the mother. A bettering partner is 7 times more likely than a non-battering partner to physically abuse children…there are also some abusers who hit the children but not the mother. The man in this category tends to be: (a) a particularly harsh and authoritarian parent (b) controlling and dictatorial partner and (c) a man who was physically abused by his own parents growing up.

Sexual Abuse
Incest perpetrators are similar to partner abusers in both their mentality and tactics. They ten dot be highly entitled, self-centred and manipulative men who use children to meet their own emotional needs.
…multiple research studies have found that men who abuse their partners perpetrate incest at a much higher rate than do non-abusive men….Although the percentage of outright sexual abuse appears to be fairly low….concerns about subtler kinds of boundary violations and other sexually inappropriate behaviours…

Psychological Abuse
Name-calling, belittling, attacking their self-confidence, humiliating them in front of other people, shaming boys with regard to their masculinity and insulting – or inappropriately complimenting – girls on the basis of their physical development and appearance are all common parenting behaviours among…abusive men… They tend to hurt their children’s feelings further by failing to show up for important events, not following through on promises….or by showing no interest.

The abuser as role model
Children exposed to partner abuse learn the following lessons from the dynamics they are caught in the middle of:

• The target of abuse is at fault, not the abuser.
• Satisfaction in life comes through controlling and manipulating others.
• Boys and men should be in control and females should submit to that control
• Women are weak, incompetent and illogical
• Mommies do the hard, constant, responsible daily work of parenting while daddies step in to make the key decisions and share the fun times.
• People that love you get to abuse you

How abusers affect mother-child relationships
Undermining her authority
Children who detect such an imbalance learn to play one parent against the other and try to curry favour with the one who has the ultimate say…Even when a man does not directly undercut the mother’s parenting…his abuse undermines her authority by its very nature. children who see or hear their father belittle their mother, silence her, walk away and ignore her or physically intimidate her learn that such behaviour toward her are both acceptable and effective.
Children may also hope to win their father’s approval by joining him in the abuse of their mother. This effort succeeds in some case but other abusers law down the law quickly to establish that the privilege of disrespecting Mom belongs only to Dad.

Interfering with her parenting
…the most common complaint is that of being prevented from comforting a crying or frightened baby or young child.

Using the children as weapons of abuse
Fuelling this type of cruelty to children is the abuser’s awareness that the mother’s empathy for her children’s emotional pain will hurt her more than anything he could do to her directly.

Shaping the child’s perceptions of the abuse
…skilled spin doctors, able to distract children’s attention from what is before them and get them confused about the obvious…It is therefore not surprising that abusers are sometimes able to reverse their children’s perceptions so that they see Mom as the volatile or unreasonable one despite the abuse they witness.

Placing mother in a double bind
The abuser gets rewarded for his bullying behaviour because the children give up on influencing his side of the equation and pour their energy into getting their mother to fix what’s wrong. Children of abused women thus feel angry or upset with their mother for standing up to the abuser and for not standing up to him… Child protective services sometimes accuse an abused woman of ‘failing to protect’ her children from exposure to an abusive man without understanding the many efforts she may have made to keep them safe and the many tactics the abuser may have used to interfere with her parenting.

How abusive men sow division in families
Abuse is inherently divisive; family members blame each other for the abuser’s behaviour because it is unsafe to blame him….
Why does an abuser sow divisions in these ways? One reason is that his power is decreased if the family remains unified.

Resilience in mother-child and sibling relationships
Several factors play a role in helping family relationships rebound from the effects of the abuser’s behaviour and grown strong:

• Access to good information about abuse
• Access to children’s services
• Safety from the abuser
• Access to supportive community resources
• A mother who works hard at her parenting and gets help with it
• An abuser who is a poor manipulator

How children look at their abusive fathers
In his children’s eyes, the abuser is simultaneously hated and revered. They resent his bullying and selfishness but are attracted to his charm and power. They soak up the delicious moments when he is kind and attentive…They may have an active fantasy life about getting big enough to stand up to him and often dream of hurting him. If he is depressed or alcoholic, they worry about him. They observe that when their father is happy peace reigns in the family and that when he is unhappy he makes everyone else miserable too, so they invest in keeping him content.
Children are also subjected to traumatic bonding with their abuser…

The abuser as parent post-separation
Some abusive men simply vanish from their children’s lives…he thinks of having children as a reversible process…he may pay little or no child support… Children may actually fare better in the long term from having the abuser drop out of their lives rather than have him continue his manipulations and devisiveness for years but these are both poor choices. When the abusive father disappears, children feel rejected and abandoned.
When abusive fathers stay involved, a different set of problems typically arise. They may use children as weapons to retaliate against the mother or as pawns to try to get her back.
Including:

• Pumping them for information about the mother’s life, especially about new partners
• Returning them from visits dirty, unfed or sleep deprived
• Discussing with them the possibility of coming to live with him instead
• Continuing to drive wedges between them and their mother
• Undermining her authority by making his house a place where there are no rules or limits…
• Hurting the children psychologically, physically or sexually in order to upset the mother
• Threatening to take the children away from her
• Seeking custody or visitation through the courts
• Insisting on taking the children for visitation only to leave them most of the time in someone else’s care

Why he uses the children as weapons post-separation

• He wants her to fail
• He is losing most of his other avenues for getting at her
• He considers the children his personal possessions
• His perceptions of his ex-partner are highly distorted

Do all abusers harm their children emotionally post-separation?
Fortunately not. These men tend to be:

1. The ones who behaved the most responsibly toward the children prior to separation
2. The ones who are not intent on settling old scores
3. The ones who did not use the legal system to pursue custody or increased visitation

The abuser in family court
The typical abusive man enters the court with self-assurance, assuming that the court personnel will be malleable in his charming and manipulative hands. He typically tells lies chronically and comfortably. He looks and acts nothing like the social stereotype of an abuser and plays on the prevailing myths and prejudices concerning abuse.

The abuser’s tactics in custody disputes

• Taking advantage of his financial position
• Asking for psychological evaluations
• Playing the role of peacemaker
• Feigning remorse over the abuse
• Confusing the court with cross-accusations
• Accusing her of trying to turn the children against him
• Appealing to popular misconceptions

Mixed social messages to abused mothers
This heading and information about preparing for custody battles will have to wait till tomorrow, I'm going to bed!

Key points to remember

• An abuser in the home affects everybody.
• A good father does not abuse his children’s mother.
• Abusers drive wedges between people, by accident or by design. Abused mothers and their children should seek support to heal as individuals and to heal their relationships with each other
• If you are preparing to leave an abuser with whom you have children, seek out legal advice regarding custody issues as soon as you can.

Children may actually fare better in the long term from having the abuser drop out of their lives rather than have him continue his manipulations and devisiveness for years but these are both poor choices.

This is exactly what my therapist said today.. wow.
Thanks for this thread.

Chapter 10 - part 2
 

Mixed social messages to abused mothers
When couples are together, professionals and other community members are highly critical of a mother who continues to live with an abusive partner....If she believes that the man has the potential to change, they are likely to say she is in denial or unrealistic for harbouring such fantasies. These critics ignore the huge challenges she faces as a parent and how difficult it is to leave an abuser.
But when an abused mother does break up the relationship, society tends to do an abrupt about face. Suddenly she hears from court officials and from other people:
Well, maybe he abused you but that's no reason to keep the children away from him. He is their father after all.
Don't you think your own resentments are clouding your judgement about your children?
Don't you believe that people ever change? Why don't you give him the benefit of the doubt?
In other words, a woman can be punished for exposing children to a man in one situation but then punished for refusing to expose them to the same man in another situation.

Preparing for custody battles just in case
...bear the following points in mind:

1. It is important to keep records of your partner's abusive behaviours toward you or the children. If he writes scary or twisted letters to you, keep them...
2. Seek legal representation if you can possibly afford it. If you have no resources, apply for a legal services attorney. In choosing an attorney, try to find one who is experienced in domestic abuse and who treats women with patience and respect.
3. Move cautiously. Avoid abruptly denying him visitation, for example, even if you have concerns about how your children are being affected. Courts can be quick to accuse women of trying to cut the children's father out of their lives even if she has good reason to be worried.
4. Involve your children with a therapist if you can find a good one in your community. It is important to have professionals involved so that you are not the one reporting the distress that your children's relationship with their father is causing them.
5. If one of your children discloses to you sexual abuse by their father - which is an extraordinarily upsetting experience - it is especially important that you approach the court and your local child protection agency with as calm and appearance as you possibly can. If you get labelled 'hysterical about sexual abuse', no matter how justified your actions, your reports may be discredited.
6. Most abused women do succeed in keeping custody of their children. But the better you plan, the more likely you are to avoid a horrible surprise. For a free packet of information for abused women and their attorneys regarding custody and visitation litigation, call the resource Centre on Domestic Violence: Child Protection and Custody at 1-800-527-3223 [I'm assuming this is a US number and is still valid!]

Make your own healing - as well as your emotional and physical safety - a priority. Children of an abused woman can feel the difference when their mother starts to get help for herself and becomes more able to recognise abuse for what it is, blaming neither herself nor her children for her abusive man's behaviour.
Here are some other actions you can take:

• Insist on complete respect for your children.
• Insist on respect for females in general
• Confront your partner's undermining of your parenting. Unless you are afraid of how your partner will retaliate, name his undermining for what it is and demand that it stop.
• Don't lie on your partner's behalf or cover for his behaviour.
• Be the best parent you can be.
• Consider leaving your relationship, at least for a while, if you can do so safely.

Above all, don't give up. Healing ruptured relationships takes time and perseverance.

Chapter 10 really was a milestone for me. I knew my father was an abuser of my mother - I just didn't reckon on how it affected me!

The stories in this chapter reflect my family dynamics growing up - it was eerie reading about the fighting siblings (me and my brother!), the drive for attention, the shaming and belittling. My mother also adopted some of the abusive tactics employed by my father on her children.

My father was the authoritarian parent. He was physically violent - but only very occasionally. He shouted a lot. Didn't really interact with us kids much. We were to be seen and not heard. We were to take care of our mother, help her out around the house but he himself never lifted a finger. 'Do as I say, not as I do' was his, and my mother's motto. We walked around on eggshells when he was around. I retreated into books, my brother lived outside most of the time, regardless of the weather. Sarcasm and taunting was the language of my family. Secrets were the backdrop.

I can now see where I got my codie ways from. The people pleasing, the need to protect others without protecting myself, taking on blame for things that weren't my fault etc. I was set up for life with XAH by my home life.

I was the self appointed 'protector' in the family. I was the eldest, often having to look after my little brother. I tried to minimise any disturbance in the house, anything that might upset my father. I felt to blame when he exploded - that I did something wrong to set him off, that I should have been that bit faster, that bit better and headed off whatever it was that set him off before it triggered him. At school, I became a bit of a bully - I would beat up other bullies who tried to pick on me and my friends.

My brother began coming into my bedroom and night when I was sleeping and lifting up my nightdress and just look at me. I often woke up, frozen and unable to say or do anything during this. I didn't tell for a long, long time. I couldn't speak about it to anyone. I couldn't even talk to my brother about it. I didn't want to upset the boat. I didn't want him to get hurt. I didn't want my father to know. I thought I would be blamed. I felt shamed. I still feel shamed. Reading the book, I think it was my brother's way of being in control, modelling dad's behaviour. It started when we were fairly young and only ended when I woke up frozen one night and he and his friend who was staying over was there. Feeling sick, I spoke to my mum who asked me a couple of questions, told me she would 'deal' with it and I wasn't to tell anyone. I felt ashamed. I still don't know what happened, what she said etc. I do know that it stopped then. Just typing this out makes me feel sick.

Thank you for giving me this space to get all this ugliness out. Dragging it out into the light and looking at it in a whole new way is helping me more than I can say - though it really does hurt like hell doing it!

(((((((((((((((((bookwyrm))))))))))))))))))
It was very corageous to share what you shared.
Time to hand the shame to the ones it belongs to, because it is not yours, never was.
(((((((hugs))))))))))))

:hug: Bookwyrm :hug:



I don't have as much to share in this chapter as I have in past chapters. (Looking at the size of this post after writing it, I think I was wrong about this sentence.)


Regarding XABF's behavior, we never had any children, although he does have three now-adult children. From what I understand from them (back when I still spoke to them), either he did not try to abuse/manipulate/control them until they were adults, or they blocked it out of their minds. His daughter claims that he never used any of this behavior on her, although she does not doubt that he used it on me, because what I told her is very similar to the reasons her mother gave for divorcing him when they were young.
I suspect part of the reason they do not view his behavior during their childhood as abuse and controlling is because their mother had primary custody - they took turns being with him on Saturdays, then all three were together on Sundays, and they got to pick the type of thing they wanted to do, while XABF made all the arrangements. When you're children, that sort of behavior makes sense, but as they got older, they had less say in choosing what to do, and so spent less time with him.

As far as my life is concerned, it applies more with my relationship with my parents, especially my mother. I am not at the point yet where the chapter feels like it relates to me, part of that is that I am trying to sort through things still, and I believe the other part is since trying to remember things is difficult so I am letting the use of the word "he" and "father" get in the way. At some point I will absolutely re-read the chapter with my mother in mind, but I'm not quite at the point where it's helping yet.

My mother absolutely did play the mind games - we always arrived late to anything that we were interested in attending, because she had to take her time to get ready, taking breaks from preparing to talk on the phone with practically everyone. She's still be wandering around the house wearing only her underwear by the time we had to leave. We started telling her we had to be there an hour before the events actually started, but that only worked for a little while, because one of the other parents at an event told her the real time, so she unraveled that method.
I do remember our bedtime was 7:00pm (that moved to 8:00pm when we got into High School). I remember nights when she'd go to bed extra early, only to wake us up at 11:00pm to vacuum the house because she was mad. I remember her pushing us to be perfect at everything, telling us we had to be modest and not tell anybody anything we accomplished, bragging about us to all the neighbors, screaming about us to the school principal, yelling at teachers for showing us a movie during class because it was rated PG or made by Disney, and basically only listening to what we said long enough for her to come up with something to use against us to ridicule us, or some phrase she could twist out of context.
We had to pretend to be happy all the time, because anything else was ridiculed. We had to take blame for her faults because she didn't remember having any, and all of us would get punished if at least one of us didn't admit to whatever it was she thought one of us did.

The fault isn't all hers.
My father never defended us.
We'd defend him when she'd be screaming at him at the top of her lungs regarding something that we knew he didn't do, and he'd yell at us and say that we were wrong, our mother was right, and everything was his fault.
He'd work long hours after telling my mother he was on his way home, so she'd have a warm supper ready for the time he was supposed to arrive, and by the time he came home two hours later she had already screamed at us and went to bed.

I wonder sometimes what came first, his unreliability and lack of parenting, or her screaming all the time so that he came home as infrequently as possible. At the end of the day, I know it doesn't matter - it was a volatile combination, and we were stuck in the middle.
I am not sure what I need to do to rebuild myself from that. Some of it I know I am doing... But I have to work more on figuring out what exactly went on growing up, so that I know what to do about it. I have much more work to do in this chapter.

First things first. I'm not at this point yet, and if I push myself to skip ahead too much, I'll miss some steps I am ready to do now, that may help me with the later.

AH buys his children's affections. there is a go cart and a snowmobile in the garage, both bought to "win" oldest DS. Awhile back, I found an Imaginext pirate ship at a resale shop, cheap(well, compared to what it goes for on Ebay that is) I was going to save it for youngest ds's birthday. AH instead chose to give it to him, making him "feel" like he won(and that's what he said "I win! I'm the favorite!") Doesn't really spend much time with them, talk with them, etc.


The day it all really hit me, and spiraled me downward for a day or so, was reading on the ACOA board. One of the posters sounded like my oldest, and it scared me.

I think I might drop by the ACOA board at some point - even though alcohol wasn't the issue at home.

(((Starcat)))

One step at a time... I'm just about ready to look at FOO issues. [aside: whenever I see the acronym for Family of Origin I think Foo Fighters (the band) and then I think of black clad ninjas kicking all sorts of crap out of my issues and then I hear 'haiyyyah' in my best Miss Piggy voice. Should I go back to the doctor and tell him the pills aren't working?!] I've been working through things with XAH for a couple of years now - though the abuse thing is fairly new and is linked to my FOO. But it's baby steps all the way for me!

Ok, my turn at this one. Mine is about my mother. Growing up with an abusive parent is "confusing, stressful, full of arguments, tension, worry and fear" Even in calm times, we walked on eggshells for fear of her changing mood. I can still remember the yelling, the belittling, the pain of the physical contact with her hand, her foot or anything she could put her hand upon quickly (which was often the most dangerous of all if you think about it).

Our daily rituals began with watching her face to see if it was ok to enter a room, say good morning, and try to guess whether if give coffee - should you get anything else or not. Cause it was hard to keep up with her changeable moods and dictums. Let alone be sure if the coffee was cooked properly or you put the proper amount of milk in it. (yes it mattered)

She was an authoritarian parent who did not know the meeting of parenting, sacrificing or teaching - let alone comforting. We were always considered a burden that God and my father gave her. She expected us to know how to do everything without showing, to understand her every whim, to always to the right thing ( by her standards that would consist of whatever she thought or felt at the moment) to be able to anticipate her every need for quite, aloneness, or sleep.

The problem only existed when my father was not around ( he had a travelling job so often was not at home) - which made it hard for him to understand the fear I had when he wanted to play with us - fear of moving anything out of place. Or the fear of doing something wrong - when he was quite the opposite - saying, "mistakes are only mistakes if you don't learn from them". Or the lack of spontaneity and laughter in the home whenever she was around.

It was crazy making and confusing. The worse part was when my father died, I didn't know if she could actually take care of us. She actually couldn't - I ended up taking care of me and my brother. I cooked, I shopped, I cleaned, I did the laundry, I made sure my brother did his homework and when to school. I don't know how the bills got paid but I can tell you that I did not have heat until I left home. Most days she popped her pills and vanished under the covers - and the day came when I waited for the time when she took more so she could pass out on the couch and give us peace for awhile.

It sounds awful and it was.

:hug: Kassie :hug:

I am not anywhere near through this whole thread but I am sitting here, heart racing, mind racing, lump in my throat, the whole 9 yards bc I NEVER knew there was a name for what my AH does. He is a water torturer through and through. He smirks and tells me he doesn't abuse me just as this describes... He has convinced our friends I am the one with the problem and on and on...

This is disturbing in an eye opening, I can never go back and think the way I did before about AH kind of way. He's not a victim of his ACOA childhood, he's not misunderstood, he's not giving as much as he is able to right now etc... He is an abuser. Oh my god.

[QUOTE] I just wanted to post and say that the parts Tuffgirl bolded are precisely what I've heard since the day AH walked into AA. It has simply turned into one more place/way to screw with my head. I'm afraid to say anything to him about any of his behavior that IS abusive bc all I get is accusations about "taking his inventory". Glad to finally hear that calling an abuser out on abuse isn't taking his inventory!

:grouphug: I've been where you are. It's a world changing, perspective shifting and painful realisation that the man you love/loved is an abuser. Be kind to yourself. Buy the book and read it. It has really helped me.

I've not posted on this thread for a few weeks now - I've been digesting a lot of what I've been reading. I will get back to it soon - damn this stuff is hard!

Chapter 11
 

The Abusive Man in the World - Abusive Men and Their Allies

I used to feel close to his mom, but now she seems to hate me.
I can’t even call up our friends anymore because they don’t want to get in the middle.
Sometimes I feel like I must be the one who’s messed up because my own family sides with him.
I don’t bother to call the police when he gets scary because he’s got buddies on the force who help him out.
The custody evaluator reported to the court that I’m hysterical and that the children should live with him.

WHY THE ABUSIVE MAN SEEKS ALLIES
Controlling and intimidating a partner is not that easy…very few people willingly consent to having their rights systematically denied… One great way to keep people off her side is to win them over to his side first. Besides, he feels that he deserves allies because he considers himself the victim.

The Abuser’s Relatives
No one wants to believe that his or her own son or brother is an abusive man. Parents don’t want the finger pointed at them…abusive men are three times more likely than non-abusers to come from homes in which their father or stepfather abused their mother. And if the father or stepfather is abusive, he shares the son’s entitled attitudes and victim blaming tendencies.
Family loyalty and collective denial of family problems are powerful binding agents…they oppose abuse in the abstract but they fight fiercely for the abuser when he is their own.

The Abused Woman’s Relatives and Friends
Every family has tensions in it and abusers use their manipulative skills to take advantage of those rifts.
It is uncomfortable for a woman to tell her family the details of her partner’s abuse of her. She feels ashamed …the abuser can take advantage of how much her family doesn’t know. He is careful not to create the impression he’s bad-mouthing her while subtly planting his poisonous seeds.
…he is playing to the societal value, still widely held, that a man’s abuse towards a woman is significantly less serious if she has behaved rudely herself.

There continues to be social pressure on women to ‘make the relationship work’ and ‘find a way to hold the family together’ regardless of abuse. Since many people accept the misconception that abuse comes from bad relationship dynamics, they see the woman as sharing responsibility equally for ‘getting things to go better’. Into this concept steps the abuser, telling his partner’s friends ‘I still really want to work things out but she isn’t willing to try. I guess it isn’t worth the effort to her. And she’s refusing to look at her part in what went wrong; she puts it all on me’.

What her family and friends may not know is that when an abused woman refuses to ‘look at her part’ in the abuse, she has actually taken a powerful step out of self-blame and toward emotional recovery. She doesn’t have any responsibility for his actions. Anyone who tries to get her to share responsibility is adopting the abuser’s perspective.

Therapists and Evaluators
We need to take a step back in time for a moment, to the early part of Freud’s era when modern psychology was born…This construct started a hundred year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for abuse perpetuated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.

Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviours that couldn’t be denied – because they were simply too obvious – should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who ‘seduce’ adults into sexual encounters and of women whose ‘provocative’ behaviour causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive of them.

I wish I could say that these theories have since lost their influence but I can’t.

The influence of the history of psychological thinking remains particularly potent in the field of custody evaluation, where mental health professionals routinely ignore or minimise allegations of partner abuse and child abuse, assume women are hysterical and vindictive and treat problems as mutual in origin.
Similar kinds of errors abound in the work of many individual and couples therapists….Women speak to me with shocked voices of betrayal as they tell me how their couples therapist, or the abuser’s individual therapist, or a therapist for one of their children, has become a vocal advocate for him and the harsh superior critic of her.
Outside the mainstream of psychological thinking there are many, many excellent practitioners and theorists, ones who take the impact of trauma and abuse seriously…But psychologists who are trained in the area of trauma remain exceptional… Before selecting a therapist for yourself or for your child, be sure to interview possible choices carefully, exploring their knowledge of and values concerning trauma and abuse. As for joint counselling for you and your abusive partner, I recommend you strictly avoid it…

An Abuser’s New Partner as His Leading Ally
…Look through her eyes for a moment. The abuser is re-creating the same dynamic he set up with you, beginning with loving, attentive treatment in the early months of dating. He speaks to her with downcast eyes that well up with tears as he recounts how mean and unreasonable you were and how you called him abusive whenever he refused to bow to your control…he cries in front of her about how much he misses them [his children] and says you are keeping them away from him out of pure vindictiveness…
He may remain on good behaviour with the new girlfriend longer than he did with you because he is motivated by his campaign against you. Of course, his other side will slip out sooner or later but by that time he can blame it on how badly you have hurt him. His girlfriend thus gets sucked into breaking her back trying to prove that she’s a good woman – unlike you. She hopes that if she demonstrates her loyalty to him, he’ll become loving and available to her once again, as he was at the beginning. …what tends to happen is that his new partner becomes angrier and angrier at you for the way she is being treated by him, believing that you ‘made him this way’ by hurting him so badly.

Other Abusers of Power as Allies of Abusive Men
Partner abusers have no monopoly on the desire to intimidate or manipulate or on the skills for accumulating power and using it for selfish purposes or emotional gratification. Among professionals…there are some individuals who are motivated not by caring and respect but by hunger for control… People who are attracted to power and tend to abuse it have important common ground with a man who abuses women.

Attorneys
Some attorneys for abusers are in a class by themselves… I have rarely seen anyone become as vicious and unprincipled in the role of co-abuser of a man’s partner as certain lawyers do.

The Myth of Neutrality
In reality, to remain neutral is to collude with the abusive man, whether or not that is your goal. If you are aware of chronic or severe mistreatment and do not speak out against it, your silence communicates implicitly that you see nothing unacceptable taking place. Abusers interpret silence as approval, or at least as forgiveness. To abused women, meanwhile, the silence means that no one will help – just what her partner wants her to believe. Anyone who chooses to quietly look the other way therefore unwittingly becomes the abuser’s ally.

Breaking the silence does not necessarily mean criticising or confronting the abuser regarding his behaviour. It certainly doesn’t mean going to him with anything you have learned from her, because the abuser will retaliate against her for talking about his behaviour to other people. It does mean telling the abused woman privately that you don’t like the way he is treating her and that she doesn’t deserve it, no matter what she has done. And if you see or hear violence or threats it means calling the police.

HOW SOCIETY ADOPTS THE ABUSER’S PERSPECTIVE
Almost anyone can become an ally of an abusive man by inadvertently adopting his perspective.

• The person who says to the abused woman: “You should show him some compassion even if he has done bad things. Don’t forget that he’s a human being too.”
• The person who says to her: “But he’s the father of your children”
• The person who says to her: “You made a commitment, now you need to stick with it through hard times.”
• The person who says to her: “You are claiming to be a helpless victim.”
• The person who says: “These abuse activists are anti-male.”

KEY POINTS TO REMEMBER:

• When people take a neutral stand between you and your abusive partner, they are in effect supporting him and abandoning you, no matter how much they may claim otherwise.
• People cannot claim to be opposed to partner abuse while assisting their own son, brother, friend or partner in his abusiveness towards a woman.
• Everyone should be very, very cautious in accepting a man’s claim that he has been wrongly accused of abuse or violence. The great majority of allegations or abuse – though not all – are substantially accurate. And an abuser almost never “seems like the type”.
• The argument that “he is a human being too and he deserves emotional support” should not be an excuse to support a man’s abusiveness. Our society should not buy into the abusive man’s claim that holding him accountable is an act of cruelty.

A much shorter chapter to break the hiatus with.

Not a lot of this related to me...I don't think anyway. As a couple we lived in an isolated bubble - things were kept very well hidden from the outside world. An us against them type of mentality. No one really came out and said anything to me - but I did change dramatically over the years. My mum would drop subtle hints here and there but I can only see them for what they are now, years later. I still sometimes wonder if I'm just over-reacting to everything in my life - XAH and my dad. I always doubt myself.

I'm a bit late in responding to chapter 10, but again, for some reason, I came to SR to think something through and this is the thread I click on first. Gotta love HP for pointing me in the right direction.

Chapter 10 is a horrible revisiting of my past with XAH and his son, my former DSS. I remember how much DSS adored and admired his father when I first met them. I used to think that it was because they had such a strong bond; reading this chapter makes me realize that it was because XAH abused his son and DSS, in response, sought to make his father happy any way he could. When I tried discussing his father's alcoholism with DSS, he didn't seem aware of it, even at the age of 12. Now I wonder if he wasn't just denying it in the hopes of keeping everything steady and happy. Like me, DSS knew to take the "deer in the headlights" pose whenever XAH got into a rage about something. He was also quite good at placating XAH and taking whatever verbal or psychological abuse he heaped on him, probably because it's the only way he knew of interacting with his dad. In the end, we became quite close in our common suffering of XAH's abuse, and it cuts me to the core to think about how I had to leave him behind when I ran away from XAH.

I clearly remember everything XAH did to undermine DSS' relationship with his mother. I never knew for sure whether or not DSS' biomom actually ran out on him, but he told me the story over and over during our marriage, doing his best to give me a skewed view of her. I always found myself surprised at how nice she was whenever I saw her. About 3 years into the relationship, DSS' mom tried to move away from the city and take her son with her. XAH went on high alert, making crazy threats and harassing her like crazy, so he wouldn't lose his prize possession. He argued for "equal access" to DSS but he didn't hesitate one bit to move DSS with us to another province, thereby effectively cutting DSS off from his mom.

It's clear to me now that his son was his possession, to be paraded around in front of others, but also to be yelled at and demeaned whenever he felt it was "necessary". DSS was gifted but also learning challenged; XAH often mentioned his son's giftedness to others, as if it was a reflection on his own intelligence, but he often omitted the learning challenges. And of course, he included his son in his delusions about the Apocalypse and the rebirth of the human race, putting DSS on this Messiah Pedestal, destined to lead humanity into a new era...When we were separating, he once angrily whispered to me that my DD was to be DSS' "advisor" in this new era, and that I had no idea what I was in for in raising her...so it was only logical that I leave her with him. Knowing what I already did about XAH and how he treated his children, I used this information to remind myself never to let me guard down in the future.

I never found out exactly what happened when I left XAH back in October 2009. I only heard bits and pieces, but in the end, I was so relieved to discover that DSS had managed to get away from his father's influence and move back to his mother's home province. I still do not know the extent to which he has contact with his father, but that's a topic for another thread.

All of this could be straight from my mouth... This thread is kind of like a car wreck that you can't stop looking at even though it is disturbing you! That's what it feels like for me-- I went and bought the book today and am afraid to start reading it.

Reading the synopsis from this chapter that you posted just made my head spin. I've felt I was the crazy one for years. Not only does my H have his family insulting me to my face and to other relatives behind my back, but my own mother for several years sided with my H and told him she was sorry he had to "deal" with me. Now that she's seen him in action she's full of apologies but it hurts to this day that she didn't trust what I was saying.

How my marriage has turned out is a mirror of what my childhood was like. Crazy, covert emotional and psychological abuse that I could feel and sense was wrong but had nothing really tangible to point to (to the outside world at least) to say "see- it IS abuse". I'd tell my mother she was being abusive and she'd laugh and ask who would believe me and then point to my tears and screaming (for her to stop taunting me) and tell me I was crazy. Fast fwd 25 yrs and the same thing is happening in my marriage. And yet it took me until the past year (actually not until this summer) to see that this was happening. And even when I recognized it I told myself it was bc of his alcoholism and his BPD and that it was "curable". I can now admit that I was lying to myself and probably realized that deep down even at that time.

I am finding myself really really emotional as I type this after reading this chapter's synopsis-- this one really really hit home for me.

Chapter 11, when I read this originally, I was mainly gearing up for what would happen in the future. Fortunately, my family never liked him (they never met him, it has nothing to do with alcohol or abuse), so at least there's no problems there. The problem was that I live near his family. (Mine is more than 2 hours away, but I like it that way.)

Perhaps the most important is that the silence surrounding abuse is being broken. ...
In this contect, an abuser has to work harder than ever to keep his partner blaming herself and to fend off helping hands that might reach her. One great way to keep people off of her side is to win them over to his first. Besides, he feels that he deserves allies, because he considers himself the victim.

When I was trying to prepare, I underlined this because we work together, and I was worried that he would get people at work lined up against me. Fortunately, he hasn't been in work often enough to try much, and the few he did try to win over agreed with my side. (This is a case when alcoholism works against the abuser, because when they're drunk, it's hard to be the suave, in control person necessary to gain allies.)

You may wonder why, if abusive men feel so justified in their actions, they distort their stories so much when seeking support. First, an abuser doesn't want to have to explain his worst behaviors - his outright cruelty, for example, or his violence - to people who might find those acts distasteful, and he may not feel confident that his justifications will be accepted. Second, he may carry some guilt or shame about his worst acts, as most abusers do; his desire to escape those feelings is part of why he looks for validation from other people, which relieves any nagging self-doubt. He considers his guilt feelings a weakness to be overcome. And, last, he may lie because he has convinced himself of his own distortions. The narcissistic abuser, for example, considers his fabrications real, which is one of the reasons why lie-detector tests are unreliable in cases of abuse...

XABF always looked so sure of himself when telling me what a rotten person I was, and how everything was my fault. It's one of the reasons I actually started believing him.

No one wants to believe that his or her own son or brother is an abusive man.
It's true! I had a really hard time admitting I was dating an abuser, imagine how much harder it would be if I were related to him!

Since so many people accept the misconception that abuse comes from bad relationship dynamics, they see the woman as sharing responsibility equally for "getting things to go better."
This is so true!
I even read a book about relationships that states repeatedly that excessive drinking and abuse are signs of discontent in the relationship, and that the other partner has to meet all the needs of the drinker/abuser, and they'll stop.
NOT TRUE. But how many people still think it is? How long until they realize that this makes it worse!

As for conjoint counseling for you and your abusive partner, I recommend that you strictly avoid it, for reasons that we will see further ahead.
This bears repeating.
Couples counseling is about both sides meeting in the middle.
The non-abused starts from a reasonable position. The abuser starts from his world of "I get everything I want." Any attempt to "meet in the middle" results in the abused giving up basic human rights and needs, and the abuser will use this to get more. Also, the abused cannot talk freely in cancelling, since the abuser is there listening to every word, and there will be retribution for any "uncomfortable truths" - meaning uncomfortable for him.


There is a kitten sitting on my book, I have removed her three times already and she keeps coming back, so I suppose that's it from me for today.

I grew up with this too. I'm so glad your DSS is away from your XAH!

This gave me chills reading it. Your XAH is really, really scary. You are so strong for breaking free! :hug:

Don't be afraid. A lot of what I read in the book really helped me make sense of what I had lived through. It helped me realise that no, I wasn't nuts, this really happened and it is abuse. You're not alone in this! :hug:

This is classic XAH. My XAH would get really upset too and cry about how I was hurting him, making him feel bad and exactly what I was doing that was wrong and how I was such a terrible person. I felt so guilty!


I feel like I should apologise every time I post a new chapter on this thread. It really helps me get the pain and abuse out there to look at it but I feel guilty that I'm triggering and hurting others here.

I love SR, it's my safe place. Thank you all for making it so great. :grouphug::grouphug:

:hug:
Don't feel this way, bookwyrm.
I believe this thread really helps a lot. It has also helped me work through some things, discover I am not alone in many aspects, and reminded me that I have nothing to be ashamed of, I lived through things that I thought I wouldn't admit to anyone, but little by little I have been putting them in this thread.
This thread is also a part of me healing, and I am sure there are many others who would agree.

Besides, everyone has the option of not clicking the thread, or hitting the "X" to close the window, or hitting the "back" button to return to where they were before. Everyone is reading this thread, and participating in this thread, because they have made that choice. We want to be here, for various and sundry reasons, but we want to be here.

I love SR too. I can be unapologetically myself, and instead of people staring at me like crazy, I discover many people nodding their head and agreeing. "Yeah, me, too."

We are not alone. We are understood.

...How amazing is that?!?

Don't apologize at all! I hope my post saying how emotional I feel reading these chapters isn't making you think I am saying it's awful to read this. I read a book last summer on Borderline Mothers and I had the same feeling reading that as I do now. Seeing that a huge part of my life has been a lie and that I was lead to believe that abuse was love and normal really shocked me.

I went and bought the book last night (Why Does He Do That) and another on Emotionally Abusive Relationships and I know that when I sit and start to read them it will be hard, triggering, sad etc... But the gains I've made bc of the pain from reading the Borderline book last year and what it did for my mental clarity about what I grew up with are all well worth the pain that reading brought on. And I know that reading these chapter synopses from you are doing the same--

If change were easy everyone would do it. It's painful and hard work but oh so worth it! If you hadn't shared these chapters I'd never have realized once and for all that my H is abusive.

I'm not at all upset that you posted all this. I am upset that I've tried to tell myself for so long that abusive behavior could be explained away...

No bookwyrm, please don't apologize. This thread(and the book, which I did purchase) has been a huge eye opener to me. It may be triggering, but it's a good, healing type of triggering, at least for me. I always thought it was "just me", now I know for a fact that it's not just me.

I will say though that I can only read the book in small spurts, otherwise I get too wrapped up in my feelings and then can't function much the rest of the day.

I read the whole book straight through in 24 hours over Christmas, and wore out two pens underlining it. It helped me so much, and came at the time when I needed it most.

Back to the chapter, I just realized something today.
Yesterday, a mutual "friend" (she's more my friend than his, although they've known each other longer) from work approached me to talk. She had spoken with XABF on Friday, and relayed parts of the conversation. He had told her how he's an alcoholic, how he's been to inpatient therapy twice (which explains why he was away from work for a month after his last attempt to speak to me), and how he has a broken heart before I won't talk to him and want nothing to do with him anymore. He told her about how he decorated my apartment "for me," and all these other things that he did "for me," and he just doesn't understand why I'd walk away.

...
He was trying to make an ally!
He was trying to get someone else to buy into this whole charade, that he probably even believes himself. She works in my building, right down the aisle from me, and we see each other frequently, and he knows this.

Fortunately for me, this time it didn't work.
Her ex-husband was an abusive alcoholic, and divorced her, taking half her savings and half the value of the house with him, and leaving her with half of his debt.
She recognizes the signs in XABF, and as she puts it, "He's an interesting person, and I like working together sometimes, but that's only because I make sure not to let him get close to me, because he wouldn't be fun and interesting anymore if he thought I was his friend."
She said she told him the best thing he could do would be to back off, since I already told him the relationship was over. She also apologized for telling him I adopted a kitten, in case I didn't want him to know that - she said she was trying to impress upon him that I had my own life, and my own preferences, and that they're allowed to be different than his, and didn't realize until later that I might not want him to know details. (I don't mind the kitten part, I just don't want him to know what car I drive!)
She also shared some intimate details from her past, that surprised me... I think in part she wanted to make sure that I didn't feel drawn back to him, after her relaying that he said he had a "broken heart," and wanted to remind me of the things people like him are capable of... I didn't need the reminder, I was impressed with myself not wanting to run back and make it all better, but I do appreciate her honesty and openness with me.

Nobody should have to go through this.
I'm just lucky that so far he's been using bad judgment with who he tries to convert to his side!
Just one more reminder. I need to be strong, and be me, because he's trying behind the scenes now.

I can do this.
This forum helps.
Thanks!

The underlying attitude sometimes appears to be: "How dare you continue to attempt to think for yourself when I am here before you with my obviously superior knowledge, status, judgment, and insight?"
I just had to post this quote here, because it sums up how XABF seemed to view me all the time, even though in this case its referring to abusers of power as abuser allies.


Breaking the silence does not necessarily mean criticizing or confronting the abuser regarding his behavior. It certainly doesn't mean going to him with anything you have learned from her, because the abuser will retaliate against her for talking about his behavior to other people. It does mean telling the abused woman privately that you don't like the way he is treating her and that she doesn't deserve it, no matter what she has done. And if you see or hear violence or threats, it means calling the police.

I thought that XABF's daughter was supporting me, when I spoke to her regarding his treatment of me, and she told me that I didn't deserve it and she wouldn't blame me if I moved on and broke up with him.
That was before she bought him a copy of this book to read, and then chewed me out over the phone about how I was ruining his chances of recovery by breaking up with him.
I know she was reacting because she now perceived that looking out for him ("enabling") was now her "job" and she didn't want it, so I can understand, and forgive... That doesn't make it hurt less, though.
I am "No Contact" with his entire family, not just him, because it is not healthy for me to be near them, and I know it.

I have almost never worked with an abused woman who overlooked her partner's humanity. The problem is the reverse: He forgets her humanity. Acknowledging his abusiveness and speaking forcefully and honestly about how he has hurt her is indispensable to her recovery. It is the abuser's perspective that she is being mean to him by speaking bluntly about the damage he has done.

How often did I feel like this?
Trying to talk to him about how I felt always resulted in an explosion, then him drinking and blaming it on me, more verbal abuse, and always twisted around until I ended up literally on my knees begging and apologizing about something that I never did, or shouldn't apologize for. Everything always had to be my fault, and the times when I reached out to others and he discovered this, always resulted in even worse repercussions than if I had tried to talk to him about it. Either way, nothing happened, except that I was even more miserable than I had to begin with.

It often falls to the abused woman herself, unfortunately, to try to educate the people around her whose help and support she needs, so that they will understand the dynamics of abuse and stop supporting the abusive man.
I'll confess, I gave up on this one.
If someone needed me to explain things, I originally explained until my face turned blue.
Now? I just move on, and find someone else to talk to.
Everyone I consider a friend understands what abuse really means.
The few who don't understand, trust me that I wouldn't invent something like this.



As difficult as it is to take on, you will often find yourself having to be your own best advocate...
As frustrating as this was in the beginning...
...now, I think, it's calming and therapeutic, in a way. I know I can stand up for myself now - something I had forgotten. I have the support I need to continue on my path, I know who to talk to when I get stuck, and I can be the strong ally I need for myself.
Wow. What a cool feeling.