Something important to realise - nobody is ever bad, inside to themselves. They can always justifty their actions, they can always find a way to 'explain' it all. People don't choose to be evil, the actual outcome is a combined effect from their actions and their response to teir own actions (or inactions).
People aren't black andwhite. Inside this woman, there is a reason for all this.
I'm not saying this to encourage you to think kindly of her, or any other stuff like that. ONly that when you can really get inside someone's head and work out what makes them tick, you have a better idea of the bigger prciutre as well as some sense of what they are likely to do next.
From what you say - what she did was horrible. To be able to let ONe child get away with it all, at the expense of ALL the others - there must have been a BIG reason for this, in her mind. Again, it could come down to the abuser being able to wrap her around his little finger. He certainly sounds manipulative enough, cunning enough. She had to sacrifice a great deal indeed, to protect him. So either there is a HUGE investment in him (which would be fascinating to know what, and why) or he had some hold over her, some level of personal blackmail.
To understand this, is to have a better understanding of the breadth of damage this man can create. And to know THAT, is to have even more protection for yourself and your rapidly increasing family.
Abused people don't always become abusers, but often in other ways they find temselves in an abusive relationship and turning a blind eye to more abuse going on. I've seen it happen - they either over-react, or under-react. A good friend of mine (not the one I talked about before) grew up with an emotionally abusive father. While he wasn't directly sexually abusive, he did 'perv' on his daughters in the nude and encourage visitors to the house to do the same. My friend went on to marry an abuser and rapist who probably molested their kids. Her husband was also violent, in front of the kids. As she said, "he would use his fists as foreplay."
One day we were on the veranda of the church waiting for the kids to arrive for youth group. A drunk walked up to shelter from the rain. My friend was afraid of him and took herself inside, but not before she began giving the man an earful for being verbally abusive. I stayed and talked to the man, I recognised that he was harmless, just full of loud talk. But inside, my friend was shaking in fear and afraid for me.
My friend's reaction was the result of her own experience and her resultant extreme sensitivity, to the point where she risked causingthe very problems she feared. Instead, I talked the man down, let him shelter outside on the veranda until the storm passed, then waved him goodbye. I was not afraid, although I was relieved when he left.
My friend thought me foolhardy. I said I knew what I was doing, I could read the man and he was responding wqell to quiet words, but responding badly to fear and aggression.
If you show fear, you can sometimes trigger the very thing you are afraid of. But my friend, who is in all other ways a strong woman, a brave woman - this is her weak spot, her Achilles heel. And all because of her experiences - not only her violent ex-husband, but her father's insistence on subservience and acceptance of his bullying/abuse.
I knew her parents and liked them, although her mother was an enabler who MUST have seen the abuse (she lived with it) but to her dying day denied all knowledge of the things her daughters reminded her of. She was there, she was part of it, she allowed him to treat his girls that way - and yet she insisted she couldn't remember any of it. And she probably couldnt', because for her, she had too great an emotional investment in the success of her marriage. To admit it was less than perfect, or that he was a very imperfect father, would have been to admit that the marriage she had forced her parents to agree to, was a mistake. And she could never allow herself to admit that her parents had been rihgt, after all.
Cherchez le motive...
Marg
