[The Duluth paradigm] blinds assessors to another source of threat to children; their mother. As we will see below, severe physical child abuse is more likely to be perpetrated by mothers than fathers.
JudgyBitch shares her story of paternal alienation in First I feared him, then I loathed him, then I forgave him and now I take care of him: the story of my Father and me.
Both of her parents were violent when she was a young child, but her mother was the worse of the two:
My mother was ecstatically violent, and my father less so, but they were both culpable.
Eventually her mother discovered feminism and drove her father out of the home. This greatly increased the violence she and her brothers suffered:
And then….my mother discovered feminism. She exchanged one violent, irrational, dehumanizing ideology for another, and she soon decided that she needed a man like a fish needed a bicycle. After countless physically violent arguments with my father, including one episode where she hit him in the head with a cast iron frying pan and left him for dead on the front porch, he turned his back and walked away from us, just like his first family.
One day we woke up and he was gone. My mother was quick to inform us that he simply walked away, and left us to starve in the streets, and that she alone would be the sole reason we survived and prospered. She never missed an opportunity to curse him…
Being a child, I believed it. So did my brothers.
And we loathed him for it. How could he leave us with such an evil woman? My mother once held a knife to my throat and made me beg for my life. When I was eleven. And I remember going to bed, thinking not how much I hated her, but how much I hated HIM for leaving us to her devices.
Years later she learned the truth:
And then the truth came to light. He hadn’t walked away. He certainly had not left us to starve. My mother had filed for an annulment and requested a restraining order, which she was granted. When I finally saw my father again, he had two boxes with him. One was filled with income tax returns showing that he had never missed a child support payment, and court orders preventing him from seeing us based on his violence towards my mother, along with supervised visitations that were all scheduled for when he was overseas, working to meet his child support payments.
The other box contained cards and letters. Birthday cards and so many letters. All returned. By my mother. He never stopped sending them, hoping one of us would one day get the key and fetch the mail, but my mother was always adamant that the mail was her business. It was one of those community mailboxes, where you had to go and fetch your mail, and since I never got any mail, it never occurred to me that there was anything untoward about my mother’s insistence that only she would have access to it.
As an adult, it makes so much sense. How did we continue to live in our house? How was my mother able to afford food and clothing and YMCA memberships for four children without my father’s support? Of course she had his support. But she hid it from us, and poisoned our minds against our father. It’s called parental alienation, and she is not the first, nor the last woman to destroy her children in this way.
Related: The Duluth model is working as designed; you won’t smart mouth her again.
H/T Heartiste
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