I Must Have Done Something Wrong

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-26-2004
I Must Have Done Something Wrong
16
Fri, 03-11-2005 - 10:12am

I must be doing something wrong, as a mother. Do kids ever tend to side with an abuser? I'm wondering with my 7 yr old. She and her dad are very close. Even as a baby she prefered him, I first noticed it when she was about 18 months old, she wouldn't let me get her dressed if daddy was there, she wanted daddy to do everything.

She has seen him hit me, throw things at me, treat me like dirt. Why does she side with him. We are divorced now, and she doesn't want to ever come back to me after a weekend with daddy. It is always daddy. She calls daddy to pick her up early, she calls him again after she comes home from the visit.

She would do this kind of stuff when we were married. She would cling to him and wouldn't want him to leave for work. She still clings to him after visits with him, she has crying fits that can last for hours about wanting to be at daddy's.

I have a 5 yr old that doesn't really care which house she is at. She transitions fine.

I am reading these posts and it seems like most of the time the kid doesn't want to go with the abuser. Mine sides with him. She doesn't want to be with me. I really must be doing something wrong.

Do kids ever side with an abuser?

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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-12-2005
Mon, 03-14-2005 - 10:41am

Hi Jodyann,

I'm so sorry to hear about your situation. Like everyone else, I reassure you that you're not doing anything wrong. Also, my daughter sided with her father, who was abusing me and was (without my knowledge until my daughter told me 2 years later) also abusing her at the time (sexually fondling her, dressing her up, treating her like a grown-up woman, etc), and she was siding with him the whole time. I didn't know the half of it back then (only that he was abusing me and she sided with him a lot anyway), but I was hurt, like you. Here is what I think now: a kid siding with a parent, either abuser, abused, or whatever, is not a reflection of the parents as much as a coping mechanism to deal with the situation. A child might side with the abused mom out of sympathy/empathy, but in my daughter's case (and it seems in yours as well), she sided with the abuser--I think because it was safer for her: he is powerful, I was powerless. He could reward her, I couldn't. And of course, deep down is her huge fear that if she turns against her abuser he might hurt her more. she knows you're safe and he's dangerous. You will never hurt her, he wouldn't hesitate to hurt her.

Also, there are a lot of abusive dads who respond to their kids who react to abuse by turning away from the abuser claiming "parental alienation syndrome." This leads to a terrible legal situation in which women can actually lose custody when their kids side with them and against the abuser, if the judge believes the abuser's claim that mom coached the kid into making "false allegations" against dad.

When my daughter realized she was being abused and started talking about it, I thought things were going to get better (in spite of the fact that it was so painful for me to find out that his abuse had extended to her in such a horrible way), but they didn't. They got worse. He punished her for telling the truth about what he did to her and convinced the social worker that I had made my daughter make the whole thing up to make him look bad. He portrayed himself as an innocent victim and portrayed me as a manipulative, abusive mother, using my own child as a tool to hurt him. I can't tell you how destructive this was to me. It turned into a big he said/she said thing, with my daughter's experience having no place in the decision-making process. I was able to hold on to 50% custody in spite of his attempt to convince the courts he should get full custody due to my "false allegations." Luckily the judge was not convinced of his "innocence," but I had no evidence of the abuse either, so we have 50% custody and a horrible level of conflict, and my daughter isn't being protected. She said last year he stopped fondling her after she confronted him, and I hope he hasn't started again. He has threatened to kill me if any new allegations are made, and he made this threat with my daughter standing in full view and hearing range. I believe if anything new were to happen, she might just stay silent for fear that he'll kill me if she says anything. I live in fear of him killing me, knowing that if I'm dead nobody will be left to give my kids a decent life, even half the time. That's what I have to settle for. It hurts like hell to have to settle for that. I hope there is some justice in this world for our children and for us.

Hugs to you and your children.

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-26-2004
Mon, 03-14-2005 - 11:23am

Oh my God, your story is so similar to mine! In June of last year a suspicious incident occurred at his home, and I could not prove it. Then in August my daughter confided in a friend "she sucks her daddy's pee pee." Again I could not prove abuse was happening when I reported it. My daughter did tell a detective she had touched her daddy's pee pee, but he was asleep. (She is 7). They questioned the ex and he said it did happen, but he had been asleep, and she touched him out of curiosity. The whole thing was dropped, just blamed on child curiosity, and that the ex didn't instigate it. I had absolutely no credibility being the ex wife, and I had the feeling investigators thought I was coaching her.

But then I figured if she was really being sexually abused, she would not want to go over there. She would not want to be around him. It is totally the opposite. She does things like hide in the closest when it is time to come back to my house. Or when she comes back she will cling to him. I will never really know what really happened. I always suspected something being wrong with him that way though, and my daughter had been acting out sexual things even when she was 3. I never could prove beyond a doubt it was daddy. It was always suggested maybe she saw one of the neighbor kids do that. She has acted out something recently with her 5 yr old sister and it was also blamed on just "child curiosity".

My ex has about 30% of the time with them, court ordered, and I have never been able to reduce his time legally. It always ended up with me looking like I was trying to keep the kids away from him just out of spite.

I know the level of conflict you are having. It takes someone very strong to deal with that on a regular basis. There have been times I regretted divorcing him and made a mistake. I don't like the fact that 30% of the time I have absolutely no control about what happens at his house when the kids are there. There are many times when I think I should have stayed in the marriage to have my kids full time with me so I can see what goes on.

How do you stay strong? I have been having overwhelming depression the last three yrs dealing with this man.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-12-2005
Wed, 03-16-2005 - 6:49pm

I know exactly what you mean about sometimes thinking you should have stayed so that you could at least be there for your girls and be more able to protect them. I used to feel that way a lot too. A year after I divorced him, he actually told me that bad things would happen to my youngest if I didn't agree to marry him again. I think in some ways he thinks by abusing the kids he's punishing me and possibly even sending me the message that he would stop abusing the kids if I went back to the marriage.

Sometimes I feel strong, sometimes I don't. I feel depressed a lot too. But what keeps me going are thoughts like these:
my kids need me, and the happier I am, the better for us.
If I succumb to depression, that's a way of letting him have the best of me. I try to look at the awful stuff in the face, feel my anger, and somehow manage to feel some happiness about the good things too. I can't numb out the bad stuff, but I can allow myself to feel the goodness in our lives too.

It's rough going, and I feel it's like one step forward, one step back a lot of the time. But I've also come a long way since I was his prisoner and slave while I was married to him. At least my kids are in a healthy environment half the time.

What keeps you going? Maybe we can give each other advice and ideas, since there are so many similarities in our situations.

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-26-2004
Wed, 03-16-2005 - 9:02pm

How old is your daughter? How does she do with the transitions?

I couldn't believe my ex did anything to her since she wants to be with him. I still don't know what to believe. I think he's not so innocent but I can't understand why my 7 yr old is so attached to him. She clings to him when it is time to come back to my house. He has them every Fri through Sun.

I don't like being away from my kids. That is the hardest part about being divorced. I want to be around them full time. My youngest sometimes cries for me when she is over there. That is hard for me.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-12-2005
Thu, 03-17-2005 - 11:42am

My daughter is ten. She does OK with transitions, hugs me a lot when it's time to go over there and tells me she's going to miss me a whole bunch. She used to (esp. 2-3 years ago) live for the moment when he would come pick her up. She'd write him all these notes about how she loved him so much and missed him so much and couldn't wait to be with him, I think because in the process of getting sexual with her, he also gave her a whole lot of attention and affection of the kind nobody else had ever given her--something which was, even then, interfering with her sleep and causing her depression and anxiety, but which only a year and a half ago got to the point that she started talking to other people about it and expressing actual discomfort about it. She covered for him and when she saw the dr. for a broken hymen, the dr. asked her (both parents in room with her and doc) if anyone had touched her in a bad way and she said no.

I think in a way all the run-ins with the department of children's services also scared him a little, even though he muddled things to the point they didn't know who or what to believe. So my hope is that he's behaving better. She has been more quiet lately, but I think it's a growing up thing. She trusts her teachers and therapist, so I hope if something is going on she will talk to them about it. She told me after things really blew up a year and a half ago that she thought the reason she didn't feel the social worker believed her was because she told me instead of telling her teacher or a therapist (she wasn't in therapy when she told me initially about the abuse, and I was the one who took action). She said back then that if things get bad again she will tell her teacher or her therapist so my ex can't play the "my ex wife is out to get me" game again.

She and her dad are much less close since she told about the abuse, he punished her, called her a liar, and even accused HER of being sexual with him (I thought that was a dumb move, since it made the judge wonder where, if not from him, she learned to be sexual with him in the first place). He went on a mean revenge streak against her but at the same time was going for full custody, and telling her that he would have total control over her when he got full custody, and I think he made her feel like he would try to take me away from her as a punishment for speaking about the abuse, a fear which may still be hanging over her head, as it's hanging over mine.

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-26-2004
Fri, 03-18-2005 - 11:30am

I went through a yr and a half custody battle with my ex and there were times when I thought I wouldn't live through it. There were some real low points when I was fixated on ending it all to take the pain away.

I made it through the custody battle, everything was quiet for about 6 months. I had always been a little suspicous of him, even when we were married. He confided in me that he had been raped by his brother when he was 11, and after that I always wondered if he could be capable of abusing our kids. Then one day I came home and found a picture of a young child in a sexual act. I confronted him and he got real angry. He was able to twist my mind back then, and said a friend had sent that to him as a joke. Things like that continued to raise my suspicions over the years. I put it in the back of my mind and thought he couldn't be capable of doing that to our kids, he was always so warm and loving to them.

I divorced him 3 yrs ago because he was physically abusive to me. I didn't know that the suspicions I had about him were probably true. I didn't know that until after the legal proceedings and custody battle of the divorce were all over. It wasn't until my youngest daughter came home and described witnessing what sounded like a sexual act between him and my oldest.

I still don't know what to believe, his wife heard about the same incident and didn't think he instigated it. No one else seems to either. He was extremely physically abusive to me in the marriage but seems to treat this new woman pretty good. I don't know if I'm just blowing this sexual abuse stuff up in my mind, or if it really did happen the way I think it did. My daughter was acting out sexually for a few months after the incident though, and that's what leads me to believe it. Counselors told me it might be due to neighbor kids or kids at school. I'm still confused about the whole thing.

Everything has been real quiet with that now. I haven't heard of anything suspicious lately. This new woman moved in his home the end of August, and I haven't heard about anything weird since then.

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