Once I realised my husband was a serial abuser I told both his family and mine. Perhaps I shouldn’t but I genuinely thought they would and could help us sort it out. I thought his father would say something helpful like “oh yeah, he gets abusive sometimes when he’s under pressure/stressed/tired/if you say so-and-so….” If I’d known what the trigger was I could have stopped it or eased it, talked to him about it or something. What actually happened was that they completely sided with him, against me. My relationship with them became increasingly frosty until even they were mean to me. At first I could not understand it. My father-in-law (whenever my husband was not around) treated me like a second-class citizen and yet in front of his son he was charm personified. I pointed this out to my husband but he refused to believe it. Initially I dismissed it as a one-off but it kept happening.
My husband and I run businesses together and we have employed a number of people over the short time we have been together, which has always ended in disaster. On two occasions my husband has done to them what he has to me. Both times I have unwittingly done to them what my in-laws have done to me. I have found myself siding with my husband and acting aloof and distant with these people, both of whom have been wonderful human beings, capable, likeable and competent. I have hated myself for doing it but at the time, whilst wanting to stay in the marriage, I couldn’t see what choice I had. On the occasion when I did stick up for them it made the abuse from my husband and his family for them and I even worse.
The only way to side with or support an abusive person is to become one yourself. I have heard that counselling does not work in these cases because the only way the counsellor can validate the abuser is to agree with them and if they don’t they end up being abused themselves. It’s an impossible dynamic. If I’d have been brave enough at the time I should have stood up to my husband and not let him get away with his appalling behaviour towards these people but it would have meant the end of my relationship with him too and at the time I was not ready for that. I didn’t have such as understanding of it as I do now.
So, I see that this is what his family is doing. They are sticking up for him because they are scared of being abused themselves (which they have in the past. I know my husband has hit his mother and I have actually witnessed him swear at her and being rude to her in front of me and other members of his family). I truly believe they are scared of him. But that is the crux. By doing this, by letting him get away with it, his family are supporting, feeding his psychosis and perpetuating it so that he will never get the chance to recognise it and change and that makes me really sad. If they would just stand up to him at the same time as me, that might, just might, give him the opportunity to change.
I was married to my ex-husband for almost 22 years, and dated him for two years before that. I stayed at his family’s house countless times, I am their only daughter-in-law, I brought their first grandchild into this world, and yet, when the marriage ended I never heard from them. While they don’t know the degree to which his behavior degraded, they knew what kind of person he is–and the kind of person I am. But they never called, they never consoled. They abandoned me. Good riddance is all I have to say, if that’s how they want to treat me. After all, they were the ones who “nurtured” him.
The best thing to do is to keep looking at the situation with a sharp eye, being aware is probably the best thing for you.
The exact same thing happened to me. I spent a long time trying to “Work things out” with my ex, and once it came out to his family that we were having problems and I was thinking of leaving, they stopped speaking to me entirely. And I was living in their house at the time, but they literally ignored me whenever I spoke.
They had been incredibly supportive, wonderful people up until then, and I was devastated. I called my mother in tears and asked her what was happening, if I was a bad daughter, wrong for being unhappy, sick for wanting a divorce. She explained it very plainly. My in-laws had spent their whole lives coping with this creepy, infantile, manipulative, worthless human being, and had finally managed to foist him off on me by pushing us to get married young. Now, I was leaving, and there would be a Harriet-shaped hole where there used to be a nanny, just a big open space between them and their walking, talking, sneering failure-to-parent.
I hear, from people who know my ex’s brother, that their family is still in wicked turmoil about it. One minute they are all degrading me, what a terrible and selfish person I am, and as soon as my ex is out of the room, they are telling a different story, about how much they miss me. Of course, I know it’s not me they miss. They miss that brief and wonderful time where they did not have to buy their son his groceries, pay for his drug habit, or listen to his vile attempts at conversation. I get so angry at them sometimes, and I want them to know what it was like, I want them to understand how horrible their son was to me. And then I remember, they do. They already know, and that’s why they abandoned me. I’m still angry, but I understand that they’re already getting what they deserve for pretending to be blind; they get him.