[OffRoad]

It's still a broken home. It might even be worse because the child has not only lost the parent who left but also lost is the hope the parent might ever stop being abusive and start loving them. 40 years later you end up with someone who is living with an alienator who is a lot like the abusive parent was while trying to get the alienator to show them the love they never got from the abusive parent.

Honest question: Do you believe it's better to live in abuse with hope the abuse will stop and the abuser will start to love you when they did not before, or better to live no longer abused, possibly believing that the abuser will never love you?  Or is there no better, just different?

[OffRoad]

I guess to me it matters what age they are.  Is it really bad to have young kids think their dad/mom is a hero?
Am I missing something?

I personally feel all soldiers, who serve our country, are heroes, but that's just me.   

I also believe that who serve our countries are hero's for that.

That was not my point. My point comparing a hero who has every intention of coming home, but can't be there to a person who chose to leave does not give an accurate depiction of one being a broken home and one not. Attitude has nothing to do with the intentions of the missing parent.

Howver, attitude is everything if you have two identical situations, and the person left to be the care giver has a positive outlook (Daddy will be home as soon as his deployment is over) and positives from the person who needed to leave. (Phone calls and letters and whatever can be done) or a negative outlook (Once Daddy gets back, he'll just leave again) or no positives from the person who left (no phone calls,letters,etc)

In the cases above, no divorce. Parent who left intends on coming back, but is one family broken, or not?

[MyBrainIsBroken]

Thanks OR. I've been sitting here staring at my computer because your question is almost impossible to answer. The question really is which choice sucks less? I'd have to say it's better for the abuser to leave because abuse is never justifiable. Still sucks though for the child who has now lost a parent or perhaps never really had a chance to have one and now never will. And maybe sometimes it's better to be abused than ignored? At least then you know that they know that you exist. This is very confusing.

I was 16 when I learned my father was moving out and my parents were divorcing. My first thought was what will people think? It was 1974 and divorce was practically unheard of, especially since we were good Catholics. My father was a member of the St. Vincent De Paul Society.

My second thought was good, maybe the fighting will finally stop.

Maybe the answer to your question is in there some where.

Problem is, I haven't figured out yet whether my father was the abuser or my mother was the abuser. Or maybe it was both? Or maybe they weren't really abusing me. Maybe I was just a PITA.

[Couragedearheart]

MBIB,
Kids love their parents, they need to be wanted by their parents wether it’s a good or bad parent.
That being said if one house has a emotionally healthy environment and the other doesn’t kids know what feels good and bad to them....they have a better chance of learning and adopting the healthy behaviors.

As to the abuse, well you know how healthy behaviors make you feel. If you look at healthy boundaries, codependency vs interdependence  and lists of behaviors that constitute abuse you will be able to start identifying who was healthy and unhealthy in your life.

For me the book Codependent NO More has been earth shattering in terms of looking at all the ways in which I was forced to repress  myself, dissolve my healthy innate boundaries and carry the emotional load for others. It is making me able to easily identify abuse, abusers, victims, healthy behaviors, healthy boundaries and where my responsibility begins and ends. I can’t recommend it enough for anyone who has doubts.

If you have DID...you have pretty strong symptoms of abuse, since DID is a survival mechanism that your brain uses to protect you emotionally.

Pain is pain. Pain is never measured against other people’s pain. Each one of us experiences pain differently and on different levels. If something hurt, then it hurt...we don’t compare it to others we address the hurt.

I think the biggest flag I see you flying that would tell me you may have experience abuse....yes even bigger than the DID....is that you think there is a possibility that it’s your fault or not real.
It is the thing that we ALL say....until we have a comparison....then we wrestle with convincing ourselves that everything we knew about ourselves and the rules of the world is wrong.
Come on in....join me...the water is fine...you guys are certainly not alone in those feelings... they are normal, they are your feelings and your allowed to feel them, you are safe to feel them. 😊

[Treasur]

I agree with CH, Brain.
The self-doubt is a flag, a common one but still a flag.
I have never once even contemplated that I was abused in any way as a child bc I wasn't. I KNOW I wasn't. That was my normal. My first experience of abuse came with/from my xh when I was 52 and it took me a long time actually to accept that I felt abused bc I WAS being abused. It didn't sit easily with my own sense of self or how my world worked at all....hence PTSD probably lol.

In my then h's perception and stories of his childhood, I remember two things distinctly. One is that he has/had virtually no memories of it at all until he was sent away to school at about 7. And that this seemed normal to him. Secondly was that he would sometimes tell me a snippet of memory from being about five or six and his stories screamed 'not good or a normal way to treat a small child' but he would just shrug because it didn't feel that way to him. He had no outrage really, no emotional reaction to it at all whereas I did.  I think I remember him saying that he didn't realise that other parents and families were different until he was a teenager and would visit friends houses for weekend exeats from school. But he also knew some equally f'ed up families, just with a lot of money...I remember him telling me about one teenage schoolmate whose parents divorced and he turned up at the family home to find out it had been sold. He had no idea where either of his parents were living; their old housekeeper took him in  ...and these kids told it as a funny story....And even in his 20s with my parents, he would occasionally say that he liked something about how our family worked but that it was odd. He never really understood for instance that I would spend time with my parents bc I honestly enjoyed it, that I liked them, not as a duty until probably he started to enjoy spending time with them too, particularly my father.

As an unwounded child, it is as difficult for me to understand his normal as it probably was for him to understand mine. I had parents who, in their different ways, would have walked through fire to support or protect me; my xh's parents probably would not have walked across the street even if they had noticed he needed something. In fact they probably would have found his needs very irritating and an implied criticism of them as parents  ...broken folks sadly, gosh how niave was I about how broken my xh was likely to be...but my own life didn't give me the language.

With hindsight, how stupid and arrogant was I to marry him really? Not to love him, but to marry him. Smh now. What an unexploded bomb he was and how silly of me to think that love was enough to heal those kind of wounds. It is doubtless a blessing as well as a regret that we did not have children. Of course just as unlikely that his current marriage or love will do the job either unless he chooses to intentionally get the right kind of help. And you know from personal experience Brain just hoe much courage and effort that takes.

I do believe that broken families may create dented kids, but not necessarily broken ones if they have a strong, stable, sane parent. But broken people do seem to create more broken people....but I think most LBS know that and do backflips to be a strong sane stable loving parent often in pretty difficult circumstances but with much success. Perhaps our own recovery as LBS helps those parents know in their guts what their kids need to recover and live well too?