Abusive husband can also be kind and caring. Have others found this confusing?

[Sebantha]

In your experience, can abusive men also have good bits? Can they be kind and considerate to some people, including to their partner, but also be abusive at other times?

My husband can be abusive and very unreasonable. For example, he shouts and says mean things about my family and friends. He is very critical of me and I am sometimes shocked by his selfishness.

But he can show kindness too. He gives to charity. He cares about a friend who's lost a brother and wrote him a long letter. He can be caring towards me.

I feel like I can't work him out. I know that people are complicated and are neither wholly good nor wholly bad.

My mum knows a little bit of how controlling he can be. But she tells me 'there's good in him'. Which I think is true.

I wondered if anyone else has had this experience with an abusive person. And if you have found it confusing.

Its part of the package. They have to be nice so you think they are.

Is there any need for you to comment on what I've put? 🤔

@ThatSoddingCat I'm not saying this is what happened in the case you refer to, but "Reactive Abuse" is a very real thing, and many people who have been abused have suffered this. The abused party literally can take no more and loses it, and their reaction may be filmed (often by the real abuser) and shared as "evidence"...

By definition, it is impossible (or almost impossible) to be in a relationship with someone who is abusive who doesn't also display nice/normal/caring traits. Because no one goes into a relationship with someone who doesn't give them SOMETHING positive. The red flags are drowned out by the "but I do so love it when he does X" or "we have such a good time at Y".

If he shouted at you on the first date, was cruel etc, you wouldn't get emotionally invested in the first place.

I think a lot of abusers are very damaged people who have little or no empathy. I can feel sorry for some of them, but I have no time for any of them. They need to sort their shit out somewhere else.

Yes, my father was like this, with my mum and also with us children. It was in some ways I think even more destructive, because in my 50s I have belatedly realised I developed some unhelpful beliefs such as:

(a) the more charming a man seems, the more dangerous he may be
(b) I should not trust my own judgement of a person
(c) I'm never safe

Ignore the good moments for now and simply ask yourself: can you put up with the negative behaviour? If not, leave. It's not really about balancing good and bad, there has to be a point when you say that the bad is too bad for you to put up with.

OP, imagine a man whose only facial expressions are scowling or sneering, whose only words are insults and threats, whose only actions are violent.

He may be looking for a woman to abuse, but he won’t find one. You wouldn’t go near him. Nor would anyone else.

That’s why all abusers have a seemingly nice side. They use it to reel in their victims.

Yes, definitely, in fact I’ve been married 33 years and still don’t know if my DH is ‘abusive’ or not! But as @AttilaTheMeerkat says Abuse “is not a relationship issue, it’s about power and control and he wants absolute over you here.”

We married in 1990 when I was 25 and he was 38 – he had a very high-powered, high-income job in the City and worked long hours and I became a SAHM with an allowance (and also a credit card!) Also he had a degree and an MBA whereas I came from an ordinary family and had left school at 16 with few qualifications. We had four children, all private school educated and wanted for nothing so for generosity he gets a massive tick. He also bought me lots of gifts particularly at Christmas and birthdays, lingerie, jewellery, perfume, even cars! Another tick. When we went out together socially he was complimentary about my appearance and full praise for me (I’m quite chatty and he is stern, quiet and serious) and he was always grateful to come home to a nice home and have a nice meal on the table and would be complimentary of my cooking (not when we first married perhaps!) so yet more ticks and as @DolphinDreamer says “ I’d get a huge ‘high’ from the kindness.” Yes, that's me!

BUT on the other side he’s never liked me disagreeing or arguing with him and he always expected me to fit into his plans. If I argued with him he always remained calm and accused me of throwing tantrums so I felt I could never “win” and I guess I became a bit of a “yes, dear/no dear” wife and just went along with things for the sake of the children. He’d also remind me that he put food on the table.

His family was very well off, his father owned a lot of business and his mother was a SAHM, he went to a boarding school which he hated and he finds it difficult to show hi emotions so I kind of of cut him some slack ‘knowing’ he loved me. Also, my parents who babysat frequently were completely in awe of him and thought I was extremely lucky.

I guess it all bubbled up in 2018 when he retired (to be honest when he was working I didn’t see him that much of him during the week and he played golf every Saturday.) I was hoping he would mellow (my dad did – he was a different person when he retired) but he didn’t or hasn’t. Things were OK at first but then with Covid and the lockdown hit and it was a bit of a nightmare and we also had some family issues. Things have improved but I definitely see things in him now which I think I always knew were there but which I brushed under the carpet and ‘balanced’ against the nice stuff. Even now I flip-flop about how I feel about him and our marriage. For example Christmas and New year were great – he showered with presents and not a cross word – the week before we’d had a big row which I put on MN – DH so, so annoying! AHH! So I just don’t know!

Like a pp my dad is like this.

As everyone says abusive people have to be nice some of the time or else how could they get people to stay.

I also think it's to do with narcissistic tendencies... if they give to charities/help friends etc then they see themselves as good people. Like Jimmy Saville. Also these things are "public" so they maintain their facade.

Is there any need for you to comment on what I've put? 🤔

Yes. I think it's important to point out whataboutery, especially when it attempts to minimise male violence against women. Everyone knows that there are some abusive women. Pointing that out on a thread where a woman is being abused by a man is not helpful and is irrelevant to the OP's situation. So I wonder why you did it 🤔

I agree.

Dear OP all the amazing MN people have listed most of everything I could have said, but still I want to chime in with my experience. My father was the sweetest man on earth, everyone who knew him thought so. He would get up from the dinner table to go help a neighbor fix his car, he would get up in the middle of the night to drive a friends wife to the hospital, everyone loved him.

But when he would walk into our house we would be on high alert, never knowing what to expect from him. Some days he would be ok but other days, he would walk in and start yelling at my mom, cursing her. He loved to "forbid" her things that he knew meant to her, like going to her brother's wedding and stuff. He once broke all of the windows on our veranda after he just put them on. We found him strangling her on two different occasions and when we threatened to call police his reaction was, " You would call police on your own father?!", with blood shot eyes. We never new what triggered him, but we were most definitely scared of him and always walked on eggshells around him. I am sure that there are millions of other things he did or said but my mom tried her best to hide it from us.

My mom stayed with him till the end. She kept saying that he is a good man, good provider and insisted we "respect" him as he is our father. I loved my mom more then anything in the world, and I never blamed her for anything as I knew leaving would have been almost impossible for her, but I am telling you, this messed me up, big time.

No one is amazing all the time, we all loose our cool, but there are lines that good, nice people do not cross no matter how angry or upset they are. If your partner does it once or is doing it all the time, makes no difference. He is not a good man and you should leave him.

Serial killers spend the vast, vast majority of their lives not killing people.

They do neutral and maybe sometimes even quite good/kind things most of the time.

Doesn't make them mainly nice people in anybody's book.

Evil people often pretend to be good in order to get whatever they want and keep us in the dark.
As pp said though, there are some things that good people would just never do.

Most people are pleasant enough when things are going their way, the problem with abusers is the way they react when things aren't going their way.

That’s how the abuse works. They are horrible to you and then they will reel you back in by being nice and kind it makes you question whether they really aren’t that bad after all….

If he was horrible all the time no one would stay with him would they?

Thanks so much everyone for the posts and for sharing your experiences.

I agree with you @CeciledeVolangesdeNouveau that having two sides to his personality is probably not deliberate. I don't feel he is some kind of monster who is bad all over, but puts on a facade of being nice so that people like him.

I think there is a part of him that can be kind. But there's another part which is selfish and mean. And the PPs are correct who say this happens when things aren't going exactly his way.

To give two examples from the past two days:

• On a car journey, we were arguing because he had criticised me for something minor. He started being unkind about my dad (who is gentle and elderly and has only ever been nice to my H), and he knows this hurts me. He also said 'your family are not my family'.

• This morning he popped over to our elderly neighbour and got her some food shopping. That was kind. He said he wanted to look out for her.

These behaviours seem totally opposite to each other.

@iamenough2023 thanks for this point, which is interesting: there are lines that good, nice people do not cross no matter how angry or upset they are.

I hope you're ok @DolphinDreamer and I'm glad life is more peaceful now. Life is not peaceful for me. I can imagine I'd find it very hard to forget all the loving times so I can identify with what you said there.

Thanks for sharing @Char65 . My husband does something similar - in that he often reminds me that he's paying the greater share the the mortgage (he shortens this to 'i'm paying the mortgage'). I would be interested to see your post about your argument as there may be other similarities.

Narcissistic and controlling behaviour! Sounds awful

My Ex seemed kind
On an early date had a hanky to lend me,seemed a kind thing...brought soup when I was ill brought orchid plant too.
Seemed to know how to be kind balloons for my birthday.
All of this was before we lived together.

Very coercive in between times.
Very pushy.
Extremely selfish.
Laid blame to me for relationship problems.
Told me he'd need to go to the gym to deal with my moods.
(He's still a gym fanatic even though we are years separated)
Boasted all the time about himself and his achievements but put me down in a passive aggressive way.
Took control of EVERYTHING money related. Extremely mean until Christmas or birthday when he'd tell everyone what he had brought me.

Extremely calculating and abusive. Hides it from some people and it's so infuriating , but what's more infuriating is I was addicted to him. Helpless without him.
It's a long recovery. I'm not helpless anymore,I'm Free.

I don't understand the question. Did your partner abuse you right from the beginning? Probably not.

The way he sounds like and behaves though may well be abuse, and it doesn't matter if it's once a week or once a month, no one should be subjected to that.

F

I can relate to so much of this. Your DH sounds very like mine.

I’ve never reactively abused, but I’ve snapped in response occasionally and said some things my mother has done to me - given that they’re normally done in private she is free to deny them and in the last couple of days she called me a “wicked liar” three separate times. My boyfriend was staying the other day and we were folding up the sofa bed after sleeping on it and came across a printed file of her evidence against me, including a seventeen-page letter to a GP and some pictures of me naked (I was lying on the bed sweating with low blood sugar after crushing a rib and puncturing a lung). She has her good sides but her bad sides are literally unbearable to anyone with any kind of sensitivity - even my grandad, her father, a domineering patriarch in general, is scared of her. I refuse to take evidence against her, it’s traumatic and I just won’t be a part of that sort of behaviour.
Re the man/woman debate the gender doesn’t matter. It’s much, much more common in men and the fact that men kill their partners twice a week consistently can’t be ignored. But in the end we’re just looking at and trying to escape abusive people. Man or woman. It’s scarier when it’s a man (my mother outweighs me by several stone and could kill me easily and I lived for months in a house with my dad’s blood still spattered on it, but a man is even worse, my lovely gentle boyfriend can prevent me breathing by hugging me from on top).
tl:dr inhale that Lundy Bancroft and keep those memories of the time he was abusive firmly in your head. LB speaks a LOT of sense. Nobody can promise there’s a good man or woman out there for you and tbh I find being alone a bit miserable but look up trauma bonding. You can love him with every bone in your body and he can still just view you as a sex doll/house slave. You are worth more even if you end up just being single with a pet who adores you, because adoration is what you deserve. If you had a dog who mauled you every other day and adored you the rest of the time, would it be a good dog? No.

Its very hard to work abusive people out. It’s not black and white. My ex was caring and giving sometimes. The whole basis of his reality was that I needed to behave in a certain way and his contribution to the relationship was dependent on this. So if I behaved the correct way then all was great. But that’s the problem we lived in different realities. I just had a similar conversation with my 8 year old daughter who has said but daddy always says he was kind to you. It doesn’t really matter what the other person thinks it’s how you feel about the situation. Is the acts of kindness enough. Do you feel safe in the relationship. I always tell her me and daddy think differently about relationships and how we like to be treated.