To not understand how some people allow their dc to be raised in abusive homes?

[laptopscreen]

I really don’t understand it. I can kind of see why some people end up staying in abusive relationships without dc as they just make excuses over and over but with dc I do not understand how the dc aren’t more important than some crappy relationship.
I am genuinely wondering what happens here.Fwiw I was raised in this. And I’m still not understanding how on Earth you don’t put your dc first. Mumsnet seems to highlight this situation over and over again.

Can anyone help me understand? I’m nc Witt my mum now. I’m trying to process everything and tbh I haven’t forgiven my mum for allowing me and siblings to stay in the conditions we were in.

Because leaving a relationship with someone who has controlled your live and eroded your entire self worth is incredibly difficult

And when someone does leave, the coercive control carries on.

My best friend was in this situation. She was a fantastic mum who tried her best to protect her child.

The control and abuse ramped up further if anything after she left and she ended up killing herself.

If abuse is severe, it can cause damage way beyond what is seen.

Go to the bank. Borrow as much as you possibly can on credit. Burn it. Cut up your ID, your cards, your paperwork. Pawn any jewellery and burn that money too. Change your email address and your phone number. Delete all of your social media (you will never be able to use them again). Delete all the phone numbers. Then smash your phone, burn the SIM card. Call a social worker and tell them that you have failed to protect your children, tell them you are suffering from PTSD and they should asses whether you should even be their parent anymore. Put half the clothes your wearing in the bin and rip the rest. Ask a charity shop for something to cover up in. Go live in a multi-occupancy building with a bunch of strangers with drink, drug and mental health problems (some of whom may be abusers in their own right). Give up all personal autonomy, your job, and tell all your worst moments to a support worker. Eat from food banks until you can get universal credit. You also have to give up your car because you can be tracked by it and stop spending time with all your family and friends (forever, possibly). You will also need to give up your car, and absolutely everything you own. If you're "lucky" you may be able to have some things collected or put into storage. You cannot have your pets. This will take a while, so you will be hand washing your underwear every night. You may or may not get things like bedding or toiletries, you might get sanitary towels or tampons, you might not. You will need a new GP who assumes that you are a drug addict because of where you live, if you're lucky they might be kind, more likely they will pack you off with some antidepressants and just a little bit of patronising paternalistic sympathy. When you are eventually re-integrated into normal society (if you get that far) you will be a struggling single parent. Not all single parents struggle, but they don't have traumatised kids ripped away from their support networks and a massive career gap and no credit rating. You will be treated as though it is your fault you have no support and it will be assumed you do not know how to cook a healthy meal or set appropriate bed times. Every time you take your kids to the doctors, they will assume you have caused any injuries. You will live in fear that your ex will find you, will use the courts against you etc. Or worst of all (and most likely) be given unsupervised contact with your kids. They may even get residency if they have a better financial situation than you. You probably now have a mental health diagnosis which will work against you, if that wasn't what he had threatened to use against you in the first place. You will either be in hiding forever, or at risk of very violent repercussions if your ex is dangerous enough, if not you will be expected to co-parent productively with them and they will manipulate professionals into believing you were the problem in the first place. That's if he doesn't murder you on the way out the door first. I left, but I understand why many others don't. There is no easy road, either you stay in a burning house or you run away burning and hope you get out alive. And some people run back into a burning building and drag their kids out with them, others collapse outside and just can't get back up for them because they do not have it in themselves. I don't judge those people, I know what it is to live in a burning house and I know what it is to run away burning. Trauma doesn't effect everybody the same way. I think leaving is like chemotherapy, it will cure the cancer but it might kill you first, whereas staying is like living with a tumour that's going to kill you eventually but not today. Pick your hell. Either way, it will be your fault as the victim and not his. It is never his fault, not really.

You cannot have your pets

Certainly the Dogs' Trust runs a foster home scheme for people escaping DV and who cannot have their dog/s with them; they are fostered until their family is in a situation to have them back with them. It needs more publicity.

My father was emotionally abusive but I loved him deeply even though he completely warped my mental health and personality. He was totally Jekyll and Hyde and Hyde was only 10% of him. My mother had a 90% loving marriage and worked out a way to 'manage' him; I'm not able to do that and argued back. Oddly enough, I've been diagnosed as BPD, despite being completely unable to manipulate etc, and only having emotional instability due to the abuse. My self-esteem was completely demolished but so was my mother's due to her own father.

❤️ Chloe

What @Chloe9 said!

My ex still tries and to some extent manages to control me 4.5 years later. I am still reliant on UC and am only half way to rebuilding my ability to earn a proper living and support myself, and I had family help, if I hadn't I would probably still be in the eating from food banks category. Even in 2 more years it will still be a struggle to house us in anything remotely as comfortable as we used to live in, with a bedroom each for my children of the opposite sex, one who will be over the age they should be sharing a room. I suspect in 5 years I may have just about "broken even", that is 10 years to get to a point of recovery to the same point I was at when I left.
And I have had it easy compared to some.

Some extremely narrow minded and judgemental persons on this thread.

I wish I knew. My mum and stepdad became violent with each other from about age 13, physically fighting although she would end up worse off. She refused to leave and go to a refuge (it was a council house originally in his name)
she would blame me and my sister for causing problems between them. She would leave in the evening/ night and say she was going to crash her car into the wall and kill herself (this was before mobile phones) and would come home hours later and apologise
She would smash up furniture. I remember my sister standing in between them once when she had a knife. My own dad was hopeless, he knew what was going on but never took me away. My sister went to uni at 19 and I was on my own. In the end my mum stabbed him and we had to leave. I was in my last year of uni and my best friend died the week after. We were living in private rented accommodation and after my mums court case he moved back in. There hasn't been any violence since but they aren't happy. They've been married for years. She never acknowledged how bad it was and we've never spoken about it really. She actually makes jokes about it! If I'd known you could self refer to social services I would have. The police came to our house loads of times but no one ever took me away from it.
Sorry for the long post but I just needed to point out that not all women in abusive relationships are scared of leaving, and my mum just stayed because she didn't want to be on her own.

This isn't gender typical as male v female, in my experience it was mam. I suffered horrendous abuse, both physical and emotional, from age 7 right up until leaving home age 24. The control, coercion etc was shocking. Dad didn't know about the physical, at least not when I was small. He knew about the emotional though. Later on he contributed to it as well.

Mams moods always ruled the household. She's vile to dad as well as me, and treats him shockingly. I have very little sympathy for him. In fact I'm angrier at him for failing to protect me, than at my mother. She was always a bit funny and has MH issues I suspect, so she has a 'reason'. Dad has no such excuse or reason..yet her always kept out of things!

Ok, I'm an adult now and have been for a long time. Maybe it's not his place to step in now. But I wasn't an adult 17 years ago when it started. I couldn't protect myself. And the one person who had the resources and could - should!- have protected me, didn't. I don't really care about his reasons for not acting. I don't care how bad he felt or whatever. The fact remains is that his fear or unwillingness to rock the boat or both, meant that he stayed silent and watched as u grew up in hell.

I'm still dealing with the effects today. My self confidence is on the floor. I put everyone before me, I take responsibility for everyone's actions, I people please, I second guess myself, I struggle to be assertive. I'll never forgive my mother. But nor will I forgive my dad. And the anger towards him is greater. Because he was the nice parent, at least at first. Yet he was too much of a fucking wimp to step in

@madein1995 - toxic mothers are more common than many think.

Because if you leave a court more often than not will still make the kids see their dad without mum there to protect them.

The man often used the threat of hurting or taking away the children to prevent the woman from leaving.

Because society increasingly hates and stigmatises anyone on benefits. Government help has been reduced and there is long cues for social housing. Refuges turn women away.

The alternative to abuse is often homelessness, poverty, hunger, isolation.

From the frying pan into the fire.

I agree with Rose. Often we focus on battered women as victims but fail to spot that they can be responsible for abuse as well. Eg hamzah khan who starved to death and whose body law in his mothers house for years while social services focused on his mother being a victim and failed to protect her children.

The only person to blame for DC being raised in an abusive home is the person committing the abuse.

Partners are victims too. It's not easy to leave an abusive relationship, in fact women & their children are most at risk of being killed whilst trying to leave or shortly after leaving. Women need to be supported to leave and safety plan with help from police and domestic abuse specialists.

Telling women 'just to leave' is to put their lives at risk and the lives of their children.

I'm very sorry you grew up in this situation, I did too, but point the finger of blame at the abuser, that's the only place it belongs.

@raspberryk I think it's going to be my life's work to get back to where I was now (or at least the whole time my kids are growing up). I fall between these states really, anger at my ex and at the holes in the system that we seem to have repeatedly fallen through, empathy for people who have been through or are still going through similar hell, and overwhelming gratitude to just be alive (even when it feels like everything is working against us). It's unnecessarily stressful and punitive leaving, and then moving on. It's like you have to put everything positive on pause for such a long time, and just concentrate on dealing with all the little battles you didn't have to fight before. I used to think "why don't they just leave?" But I know now. Now that I have lived through it, I know. There are moments of joy and hard won triumphs against adversity but it just does not need to be so adverse. And to know the majority of these men are just walking around, maybe a slap on the wrist by the police or in a courtroom, but for the most part still in the same job, on the same kind of trajectory, mostly with a new partner, repeating the damned pattern and still finding ways to degrade, insult, intimidate or just generally inconvenience the mothers of their children. For what? For fun, for the sake of it, to just check that the system is still working for them. And it is, it's such a well oiled machine that instead of ostracising the perpetrator (as we should) we ostracise the victim instead and the victims by proxy, the children. We question why SHE stays not why HE is not made to pay the full consequences of his actions. Men should be put in prison, not women and children sent to refuges. It's back to front.

Chloe9

I think people don’t leave because there is little guarantee that life on the other side will be any better , and out of the frying pan etc

Don’t get me wrong I have every sympathy with adults that were
Raised in extremely abusive environments

But I also hear so many of you on here . As I am one of you.

@Chloe9 that’s pretty much what I went through to get out. I got out because my dm wouldn’t so I had to go alone. I ended up with men who would take me in who did all sorts because that was better than being beaten. I was a teenager, I had nothing, I got a job paying £3.50 an hour and saved saved saved whilst living in other people’s homes then went to college and soon after met my dh who got me out for the long term.
I don’t think I should have been left in that circumstance by my parents. I do blame my dad of course but I don’t know where my dm stands in all of this because where does it end. If I had been killed would everyone have sat around saying my mums a victim? My dad threatened to kill me my dm went to the hospital as my dad hurt himself running after me whilst telling me he will kill me. I left and didn’t go back. My dm never said anything.
I’m sorry you went through that. I hope things are better for you now.

Nods sadly at Chloe's post.

I don’t think every case is the same , and yes there are some cases when the women are bad . Of course . You only need to read some of the most horrific child abuse cases ( baby P , Daniel Pelka) to see that their mothers were extremely lacking.

But it still baffles me why people continue to rage against and blame the women here

Rage against centuries of conditioning that mean that (in the majority) men are conditioned to treat women like fucking shit on their shoe . That makes me far angrier . And yes the sons are learning it
At their fathers knee . As we type

My friend stayed because she was scared that he would have the children on his own if she didn't and it was safer for her to stay and be abused then the kids be alone with him.

She left when he hit the child across her face because she interrupted his computer game and he beat the dog for making a mess.

She lived in complete fear until that child turned 16 of every door knock and every message.
He used every method he could to still control her.

Well if you are only casually dating Mr abuser you probably have no idea he is an abuser . But I get the question. Who would a woman who has a home , kids and settled life allow a new man into her life who then settles himself in and starts causing chaos

I don’t know . I have a few ideas as to why
But (a) you understand I just cannot judge them
How can I !
And (b) I still think the fucker that twats his step kids is worse

But admittedly if I ever split I think I will stay single forever more . I don’t trust my own judgement . It’s shit

@laptopscreen

It's not just my story, it's story I hear a lot. And you know,you are so right that it repeats. I am glad you found somebody loving and supportive eventually in your DH who could support you and help you get over your past, but I have also met so many people who just keep repeating the pattern. They escape their abusive homes only to end up in abusing relationships themselves. My first relationship was dreadful, I was abusive and he was abusive and it was just in horrible in every way, and yet even though I tried to change that pattern, did all the courses and stuff, had therapy, etc. I still ended up in an abusive relationship again (with kids this time, not just an angry teenager) and even though I had worked on all my own stuff it didn't stop me getting suckered in. I didn't fight back or retaliate anymore, which I thought would mean it didn't escalate. But it escalated anyway. Because they create reasons to hurt you even when you give them none. I would love to say that my kids will not repeat that pattern. I hope it's broken now, the chain. But I don't think they'll be planning single parenthood and honestly that's the biggest issue. That staying in a shitty relationship often seems a much better choice than leaving and shouldering everything alone. I don't know if being a single parent means that I'll be spread too thin working two jobs or whatever to pay the right amount of attention to them as teenagers to make sure they're not getting abused or becoming abusers in their own relationships. I don't know my ex won't take them one night and kill them like he's threatened to in the past. I do everything in my power to make sure he won't even get that opportunity, but in the same breath I could be setting my kids up to think that women (like mum) are just bitches who stop men (like dad) seeing their kids, because al they know is Dads gone and in most ways life is worse for them. It shouldn't be like that. But I hope that they will believe that even when I got it wrong I was always trying to do what was best for them, when I stayed, when I left, and all the time after.

@PleaseHelpM3 this!!!

Why do people blame the victim for staying yet forget to put the blame on the actual perpetrator?!

My stepfather was abusive, which my mother aided and abetted. I absolutely hold her responsible for not removing me from
the situation, and actively putting me in harm’s way. We are NC now, and truthfully I do not know whether she is alive or dead, nor do I care.

I’ve actually come to terms with my past and I’m very happy with my life now, so this isn’t coming from a place of bitterness (rather indifference). Abusers are responsible for their own actions, but equally we all are. If you fail to protect your children then don’t feel entitled to their forgiveness, or love. Don’t expect them to want to have anything to do with you when they’re old enough to make that choice.

raspberry just as narrow minded on the other side too. Not every experience involves a mother doing everything she can to protect her dc, and suffering the consequences after leaving.

Without wanting to minimise your experience chloe it isn't the only one. Not all parents are victims, some are just cunts.

Stand by and watch your wife abuse your dc. If it gets too much, stay out as much as possible because out of sight, out of mind. When dc gets to toddler age and is capable of trying to follow you out, shove them back inside. When they get to school age and can grip desperately on to you, peel their fingers off, slap them and throw them off if needed, just get yourself away for a bit of peace. When you hear them screaming and begging in the night because your wife has woken them again up to tell them she wishes they were dead and all the reasons why, turn the tv on loudly.

When they are 8/9, and even your wealth isn't keeping suspicions away, let your wife scare them from saying anything. If listening to the graphic descriptions of the gang rape and torture your child is told happens in care is a bit traumatic, go out.

When your teen starts avoiding the house, and appears to have moved into friends/ the farm buildings, encourage them back because it makes life easier for you if she vents at them. At this point pets, and having always had them for comfort is the only reason your dc isn't either dead or completely insane. Listen to your wife threaten on a daily basis to get rid of them before dc comes home from school. Make your own vague comments about how it would be better all round if dc didn't have ponies getting in the way of supporting their mothers mh issues. When she covers dcs bed with disturbing images of animal cruelty and you realise from the hysterical violent self harming it might have gone a bit far, tell them it's ok because you'll make sure they are given to other children, not the meat man or a third world country. Cite this forever more as how you protected them. (Genuinely sad thing is he must have intervened and she listened because afterwards the threat was always about giving pets to nice dc that deserve them)

At no point do anything else to intervene, don't throw your wife out of your home, don't report her, don't be open about what's going on, don't use your considerable wealth for divorce and custody. Why bother with that shit when it's easier to do nothing.

And if dc ever try and discuss it, silence them and say 'they don't understand'.

I'm with op, in my case 99% unsupervised contact would have been an improvement on living it 100%.