"He's a great Dad"...no he isn't.

[CrowSinger]

That line is on so many posts that I sometimes think to myself that they must all have been written by AI. It is always in a post where the "great" dad is manifestly abusive.

"He's beats me, calls me a fat ugly c*nt in front of the children, he punches walls/me, he puts his hands around my throat, the children are terrified of him and have wet themselves when he's got angry, I'm not given any money and all my clothes have holes in, he cheats on me regularly and gives me STIs because he doesn't take no for an answer with sex, he's isolated me from all my family and friends...but he's a great dad".

WHY do women say this??? Has anyone come out of an abusive relationship and seen the light and realised that he was a piece of shit, not a great dad? What would have made you see it sooner?

Respectfully I disagree
Obviously every case is different but when you have pages and pages of support and advice for a poster in a situation and EVERYONE is trying to genuinely help them and give legitimate advice and tell how to help them for their children and then they come back with pathetic responses "oh but I love him and he bought some flowers"
Bar being genuinely in fear for your life of course etc.

Gavin deBecker (who wrote The Gift of Fear and grew up in an abusive household) takes a famously hard line on this: he says the first time you're a victim, but from then on you're a volunteer. I certainly wouldn't be quite that hardline about it. But the fact remains that the children in that situation, having their lives permanently shaped by abuse, have no power to make changes. And the adult does. And if we accept that it is possible to leave an abusive relationship, with the right support - which I think we kind of have to, seeing as people have done it - then we have to accept that an abused partner in this situation does have power to act and power to make changes. They might struggle to access that power, for all kinds of reasons, and they might need support. But they are the only person who can change that situation, and going completely limp-noodle and denying that they have any agency at all doesn't help anyone.

Again, it's not that easy.

Words on a screen aren't going to help you get housed, or get you money, or get you real life support, or make the courts not hand over your kid.

Recognising abuse is very difficult when you're in it.

For me it started with shouting, but that wasn't abuse because he wasn't hitting me, then isolating me, but that wasn't abuse because I did something which made him not allow me to socialise, then I got pregnant and he was telling how crap I would be and I needed him, but I had noone to talk to so I believed him, then he was throwing stuff, but he was frustrated because I was doing things wrong, then it was a shove, but that's not abuse because I didn't have a black eye, then it would be a punch, but he wasn't kicking the shit out of me....

It's not excuses or pathetic, it's the result of years of psychological trauma. Like how kidnap victims fall in love with their kidnappers, or CSA victims believe they love their abusers.

It's easy to write a LTB message, its not so easy to really leave when you have nothing and nobody and you want to protect your kid, but your choices are leave and he has the child unsupervised, or stay and the child witnesses you being abused.

They say it because they are in an abusive relationship and have lost all sense of reality and reasonable thought. Understanding and empathy might be more appropriate than criticism.

A great dad will never treat the mother of their children like crap. End of. You’re absolutely correct

I'm so sorry you experienced that and I do agree that the risk of the abuser having unsupervised contact is a major factor in DV survivors staying put.
Just awful. So sorry.

I've noticed that too.

I remember one in the papers a few years ago now:
"As soon as he saw baby #2 after they were born, he left us because he couldn't cope with baby's (physical) disability. But he's a great dad."

No. He. isn't.

It’s frustrating to read posts like that, but I can relate to those posters because I used to tell myself that and anyone else who would listen the same about my ex- until I wised up.

ETA I really believed what I was saying. One of my biggest ever regrets is believing that my children deserved to have him in their lives day in, day out “because he’s such a good dad”. If I’d accepted he was as terrible to them as he was to me I would have left him sooner.

I agree it's complicated, and every situation is different to an extent. I do think that women who stay with abusive men are choosing to stay and that's okay when it's just them. But kids don't have a choice.

As a pp said, the number of women who will fuck their kids over for a bloke is shocking. It's hard to have a lot of sympathy for those women tbh. You can tell yourself all kinds of lies and justifications but subjecting your kids to abuse is hard to forgive. Your kids will always wonder why you didn't put them first.

Abuse can break a person's spirit, for sure. But everyone I know who was abused or saw their mum abused as a kid has grown up with a fierce sense of protection and support for their own children. I don't know. I get how a woman can feel stuck in an abusive marriage but I really struggle to empathise with her using her kids as collateral, or even simply just not caring enough to get them away.

100% this. Some revert and try and be better dads but sadly most follow on and replicate the shiteness they had.