What people don’t understand about abusive parents

thecheshirecass:

tofu-penguin:

What people don’t understand about abusive parents is that we can’t always hate them. We can’t just constantly hate them because a lot of them are quite nice half the time.
It makes it hard to hate them because it’s like “they’ve been horrible to me but they treated me to a present yesterday or a cute little chocolate bar so I’d me rude to hate them because of what they’ve done for me” and it’s destroys your mind because then people questions if they actually are abusive when you seen to like them at that time.

This is something I have struggled with my whole life. My father was abusive and did terrible things. There were times I hated him and cut him from my life. But I also loved him deeply and still miss him now that he’s gone. For me he was a man who had so much potential and was in many ways a loving and supportive father. But he was shaped by his own abuse, never broke that cycle, and abused others.

I think one of the hardest things as the child of an abusive patent is when they’re good to you and you see and inkling of what it would be like if they were their better self all the time. You long for them to be that and over and over you hope, but they never change.

My father has been dead for four years and I’m still struggling reconcile the two parts of him I dealt with. Truly it exemplified a love/hate relationship. I don’t know if I ever will.