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Poll Are You More Angry At Your Perpetrating Parent Or Your Parent That Did Not Protect You?

Are You More Angry At Your Perpetrating Parent Or Your Parent That Did Not Protect You?

  • Perpetrating parent

    Votes: 94 43.9%
  • Parent that did not protect

    Votes: 133 62.1%
  • Does not apply to me

    Votes: 21 9.8%

  • Total voters
    214
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I voted the perpetrating parent. I was mad at my dad for a long time because he was absent from chunks of my childhood. But I get it. I remember my mom dodging him. I remember him having to move away just so he could find work to pay her child support for two kids. Which she spent on drugs. We ate ramen, had grown out of our clothes, etc.

So yeah, I resented him for a long time for being absent, but it was my mother who did all these horrible things to me. Or the ones that caused my PTSD as opposed to just exacerbating it, anyway.

The things she did to me and her inability to admit them or even apologize for them ruined our ability to have any kind of relationship. I tried for a long time to love her. I felt bad that I didn't for a long time. A girl should love her mother, you know? But I didn't. And now she's dead and I still don't. She damaged my brain in a way that makes my life difficult on a daily basis, so yeah I definitely have a lot more anger for her than for my dad.

I know that he did everything he could for me and my brother and as soon as he got the opportunity, he took her abusive ass to court and fought tooth an nail to protect me. So my resentments for him have all been forgiven. It took him 11 years to get there, but I at least got to finish growing up in a place where I was taken care of and looked after and I didn't have to worry about being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to be beaten.
 
I feel deeply sad about the parent who didn't protect me, and I think it was very wrong. There were reasons, but no excuses. They failed me, and that can never be undone.

My anger is for the one who abused me.

I don't love either of my parents. I can't understand when people say they love an abusive or otherwise defective parent - I realise we must be on very different journeys. I long ago got over any guilt about not loving them. Why on earth would I? Their hopes, their intentions or their love for me are of no interest to me. I owe them nothing.
 
I answered this thread a year ago, shortly after cutting both of my parents from my life totally and permanently.

I still have more anger at my father for allowing my stepmother to perpetrate the things she has done to me. And I would argue that if the loss of reason associated with alcohol use buys a bit of foregiveness, than she should get a bit of that for her inability to think caused by her total devotion to the most convoluted religion on the face of the earth.

A year of total separation from them and living my life is like the week following seeing a good movie. I am constantly figuring out why something that made no sense at the time was done, why the plot twisted the way it did, why that character reacted the way they did etc.

I see my early life more for what it was and the methods behind the madness all the time now. And it is uglier than I knew when I was still reeling from the last punch, the farther removed from the fight I get the more dirty punches and cheap shots I remember and see for what they really were for the first time.
 
Just me here, I agree with you. I had mostly cut my biological mother out of my life before she died. I had good reasons but I had a lot of guilt about it too. Now that I'm older and I can sift through the perceptions of my situation I had as a child, I've let that guilt go. My dad helped with that a bit, too. When I pressed him to fill in the gaps and not worry about trashing my mom he just let it all out. She messed him up, too, I found out.
 
I flip-flop.

My dad's an alcoholic and I think we've seen it all with him- strange behaviour, rants, getting sick, passing out, rambling lectures... thankfully the abuse (and I am still having a difficult time with that word) was emotional/verbal only. He's hurt me more than anyone else in my life, we have no relationship with each other, and I have no respect for him. My siblings and I used to wish my mom would divorce him, now I understand that my mom just isn't strong enough for whatever reasons or does not want to, or loves him. I spent a lot of my teenage years hating him. I don't feel like I have a dad really, and I am angry that I don't get that and that I won't ever experience that relationship.

Since becoming a mother myself, I have been angry with my mom. For letting him carry on like this, denying his problems, acting like everything was okay, for not sticking up for us, etc. She has been a great mother in most ways but I do carry quite a bit of resentment towards her for the times my dad sat us down to lecture us and she'd announce she was going to bed (rather than sitting there to listen to it with us, that was the most support we ever got from her). He was (and is) a horrible example for us, he wounded us emotionally, he embarrassed us in front of friends (and because of his issues we couldn't really have friends over much anyway).. I would never let my daughter grow up in a house like that!
 
As a mother in an abusive relationship,I was told that if I didn't take if it he would. And that I wasn't mean enough.And when he would take care of it I would try to soften the blows. I tried to leave 3 times but I thought I would die.Now outside of the situation I have told my children that would be angry with me someday and that was ok but I loved them and I was so sorry. I hope I speak for some of your parents when I say please forgive me.I didn't see a way out but a stronger woman would have and its time heal now.
 
I don't feel anger easily but substituted "hurt" for "angry" and voted for the enabling parent.

I think the reason why is that I can see that my father was emotionally very damaged. He was too severely affected to have any ability to have insight or introspection. He had no real ability to look at other people as individuals.

My mother on the other hand is perfectly capable of insight and introspection but was emotionally abusive and enabled my father. Probably as she needed something to take her anger out on. I feel she is emotionally healthy enough to have known better. I used to see her as perfect but after much therapy this is where I am with it.
 
It's more a feeling of abandoned. My mother refused to do anything and in fact talked me into not doing anything about it myself. So for me I feel as if she didn't love me and still doesn't. I know in her own messed up way she does but as much as I'd like it to help it doesn't.
 
I am so sick and twisted that I actually felt sorry for my mom who did not protect me. I do not know why I felt sorry for her. Mabe because she was a matyr. We finally had a falling out and then began to really talk to each other. Then she was killed in a plane crash so what might have been was stolen from me. When I finally tapped into my anger at her it was a whole different story. Now I just feel nothing when I think of her. She needed help and never got it. My dad I had to cut off contact with many years ago. I do not feel anything about him anymore either.
 
For some reason I've only ever felt a little anger at my mom for not protecting me from my father more than she did. She could have left him, maybe, but she was also holding out hope I think of 'saving him' - from his demons, from his alcoholism, etc. Because he was mostly just emotionally abusive and only became physically abusive on one or two instances, I think it was easy for her to rationalize. She also stayed with him for seven years after I moved out. That's seven years she put up with him without the excuse of "for the children."

Dad, on the other hand, just seemed like a bully and a coward, for not being able to face his own demons and be a proper protector to his children. He fancied himself a real head of the family, liked to talk a good game about how he was only as far away as the phone* and that he would do anything to keep me safe. But he couldn't protect me from himself, and past a certain point, for all his bluster and John Wayne kind of bravado, I think he was too chickenshit to do the work that was needed for him to really liberate himself form his past. He vastly preferred to pretend emotions didn't exist and weren't a reasonable factor for much of anything. Mom at least has helped me sort out my issues, has apologized for not doing more to help at the time, has never blamed me for any of it the way my dad did, and has been very supportive of me as an adult.

* I found this out to be a lie when I called once as a very young adult (maybe 20, 21) and I really needed support from him. I was in a live-in relationship with a dude who was very charming at first but I had finally discovered to be very toxic, a sociopath to be precise, and I needed to get out - he basically told me to f*ck off, read me the riot act about how I should learn to be responsible and learn to live with my mistakes, etc. etc. He never even mentioned the call to my mom. I went on to suffer domestic and emotional and psychic abuse from my sociopath boyfriend, because I didn't have anywhere else to turn so I had to stay with him until I could get out some other way.
 
My father was the abusive alcoholic at home, but my mother didn't protect me to the point of putting me in harms' way. (Both in regards to my father and otherwise, throughout my life.) Frankly, her actions were more harmful to me than my father's.

Eventually I was able to confront my father (as an adult) and was therefore able to develop a healthIER relationship with him. But my mother could never admit to her actions, and no resolution was possible; she died last spring, which dramatically intensified my PTSD symptoms. You'd think I'd feel better with my boogeyman gone for good...
 
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