This Excerpt: Staying “For the Kids”
© 2006 Richard, 21CP Author and Publisher

_http://tearsandhealing.com/_ (http://tearsandhealing.com/)


[This section comes from the chapter on Obligation. And in the years I've
listened and helped people in difficult situation, obligation has to be the
most crushing of all the forces that we feel. The hardest part of dealing with
obligation is that it comes from within, and often from a foundation level of
belief. We often accept these ideas as absolute givens. We then act as if we
have no freedom. Changing this means looking deep within, and examining
beliefs in a new sometimes frightening way.

Staying in an abusive marriage "for the kids" is the cut and dried reason I
most often hear from others. I think it reflects the fact that many of us have
a very strong preconception about what is good for our kids, and what is
responsible for us to do as parents.

There is a problem with that reasoning - one shared with other issues that
come up in abusive situations: abusers distort our reality to try to make it
match theirs. They use blame-shifting, denial, intimidation, repetition, and
the whole spectrum of brainwashing techniques to get us to accept what they
want to believe. Unfortunately, they're not ok, and they're also not ok for us
or our kids. Their distortion of our reality makes it very hard for us to
judge this. In Meaning from Madness I explore abusive behavior and the
motivation
for it in much more detail.

The problem, then, is that we end up using a concept - the belief that an
intact family is best for kids - that makes sense in the context of a healthy
relationship, but our situation is far from healthy. Without the foundation
of a healthy relationship, that belief loses validity. The balance is now
different, and our responsibility as a parent is not to just blindly stay the
course, but rather to overcome the distortions and truly assess the situation
and the options for our children.

Tears & Healing explores the emotional issues in being in, and getting out
of, an abusive relationship. In Love and Loving It - Or Not! explains how and
why we fall in love, what real love is, and how to make changes so love works
for us and not against us. Meaning from Madness explains what motivates the
disordered, how they distort reality and what the prospects for improvement
are. There are packages; one with all three relationship books, and one that
adds The Way of Respect.]

Staying “For the Kids”

Feelings of parental obligation seem to me to be the strongest force that
keeps people in hurtful relationships.

We tend to believe that to be a good parent, we must provide our children
with an intact family above all else. To this end, we tolerate abuse, isolation,
and even allow our relationship with the children - the same children we
seek to protect and nurture - to be limited and damaged.

Here again, there are problems with this “must”:

Options - We assume that an intact family is always better. We don’t think
about what it means to that family when one parent is ill and out of control.
We don’t consider how a healthy parent’s interaction with the children is
dominated, restricted, and limited by the dysfunction in the home. And we
don’t
consider what the potential is for the children to have relationships in a
different family structure - one where one healthy parent is truly free to have
a full, healthy relationship with the children.

Modeling - We don’t consider the impact on the children of the modeling we
give in an unhealthy family. Children learn to do what they live with. In a
dysfunctional home, children learn dysfunction. It’s not realistic to think
that
a family with one parent who becomes dysphoric, acts out, rages, and puts
their emotions before all others – even if it is only some of the time - can
model for children a healthy relationship. We ignore the damage that the
dysfunctional modeling does, and we ignore the potential to model a healthy
relationship for them with a healthy partner.

Safety - We become so used to abuse, so accustomed to using our adult skills
to cope with abuse and dysphoria, that we don’t realize the home may not be
emotionally safe for the children. Really, in our obligations as a parent,
the safety of the children must be among the first –certainly more urgent and
important than providing an intact family model. Yet our own psychological
defenses – denial and even dissociation – prevent us from understanding how
potentially unsafe the home may be.

Nons are usually devoted to their children. But understanding the whole
picture, with all the trade-offs in providing what our children need, is
essential if we are to free ourselves from blind obligation to keep them in an
intact
but dysfunctional family.

© 2006 Richard, 21CP Author and Publisher

_http://tearsandhealing.com/_ (http://tearsandhealing.com/)


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