Hello
I've been thinking about family dynamics and the 'enabling' parent ever since teacup posted on here about her father beating his son to follow his wife's wishes. I was in hospital with a minor op but have read with interest the discussion about enabling, and have been meaning to post when I had the energy.
What struck me teacup how you seemed to accept as read (at first!) that your father didn't have a choice but to beat his son against his own wishes. Your mother may have kicked up a fuss, but of course your father had a choice! All adults have choices. But in an abusive family, the less obviously dominant parent can make out that they don't have a choice but to do what the other wants, or that they are put upon, because it suits them to be seen like that. It absolves them from responsibility. It allows them to deflect the question that otherwise people may ask of them - why were you not parenting your child properly? It is very easy to hide behind the other parent, the alleged bully parent. But the fact of the matter is that both parents are adults, and they both have power, and they both have control over the atmosphere and ethos of the home in which they raise their children.
I was especially struck by your post, teacup, because, if you don't mind me saying so, I realised how sad it is that as children in dysfunctional homes, we look for one 'good' parent to cling on to. We want to have a strong relationship with one of our parents, so we often see them through rose-tinted glasses, purely because they are - on the surface - the lesser of two evils. It is easy to blame everything on one baddy, to have a scapegoat. It is a less scary notion for one thing. And children need a parent to believe in - it's what every child deserves.
But often this means that we don't see the 'better' parent for what they really are, which is often abusive or enabling or deeply flawed. Because it does take two to tango, and for every abusive parent, there is often someone there behind them, ignoring the abuse or condoning it or adding to it.
I used to hate my mother when I was younger. She was physically, verbally and emotionally abusive towards me. I couldn't stand her. I am much more like my father. Intellectually we are much more on a level, and we have a lot more to talk about. My father really promoted the idea of me and my mother fighting over him.
But the fact is that now, as a grown adult with my own children, it is my father I don't see. Because I realised how emotionally abusive and manipulative he was, and yes, he was also physically abusive, hitting me twice, but that was minor compared to my mother so I didn't count it.
It is a very complicated relationship they have - my father is outwardly the bully. But I knew that my mother wasn't meek and mild as she made out. I thought she was fake and hated her. But know I can see she probably was manipulated by my father. And that she enabled him and he enabled her. What matters to me though is that she has heard me out when I confronted her and I was able to set some ground rules with her, whereas there is no reasoning with my father, who would never hear me out. He prefers to believe that I am psychotic instead.
This whole complicated dynamic of co-parents enabling each other, and there never being a 'good' and a 'bad', was something I really learnt about when I was in group therapy. There were a few people there who had supposedly 'innocent' parents who condoned appalling behaviour from their spouses towards their children, and who had not protected or removed their child from homes that were psychologically or physically incredibly damaging.
The sad truth is, I believe, that we can only really move on when we realise that there was no 'innocent' parent in an abusive household, and that while they may want us to believe that it was all fault of 'the other' and they themselves were an innocent victim, the fact is it is always much more complicated, twisted, and darker than that.