Read on Twitter
I know the internet loves to immediately destroy people and declare them irredeemable, and now people who have zero fucking reading comprehension think I don't think what dad did wasn't abusive, so allow me to share a story before you go calling child protective services
1/ https://twitter.com/rabiasquared/status/1345764888413671425
1/ https://twitter.com/rabiasquared/status/1345764888413671425
This thread is about my husband. Anyone who knows him or has met him will tell you he is a gentle giant of a creampuff, the softest, kindest person you'll ever meet. I mean, he is Canadian so there's that. When we met I learned that he spent years in religious boarding schools
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and that his parents desperately wanted him to become an imam and Islamic scholar so much of his childhood was spent with these religious teachers who were raised back overseas and taught one way - by getting the crap beat out of them
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My husband and his friends also got the crap beat out of them. They would laugh about it as they told me when we first met, and I was horrified and told them it was criminal and abusive but they didn't see it like that because they had INTERNALIZED THE ABUSE.
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Fast forward and hubby and I got married and had our first kid, a daughter. When he would laugh about getting beat as a kid,and tell me he actually deserved the beatings, I made it clear if anyone raised a hand on one of my kids they would be going to prison.
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I didn't have to worry about that though bc it's not in his nature to be violent, he really is very gentle. BUT the craziest thing would happen when he would sit down to teach our daughter scripture after she turned 7 or so.
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He would go from being the sweetest dad into this angry, serious, mean spirited Quran teacher. He would insist she sit and read scripture as long as it took to memorize. If he was forced to do it for 6 hours a day, she could do it for 2 hours.
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I was like "absofuckinglutely not" and always intervened after like thirty minutes. Then he'd go back to being himself. For years I pointed out how he changed the minute he got into that zone, but he didn't see it.
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Then a series of truly awful things happened and he realized how much damage had been done to him as a kid, about how those years had broken him in ways that still traumatized him. He started therapy.
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Now he's able to connect the dots. The corporal punishment he thought he deserved, thought was no big deal, he now sees the lasting effects of it. And he sees how what he was doing to our daughter when he would turn into his own teacher when they sat down together to study
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But when you've internalized mistreatment that you received yourself, it's hard to see it as abuse. Hubby would not have seen it thru an internet pile on, did not see it when I tried to point it out. I can guarantee that can opener dad
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saw absolutely nothing with what he did, which is why he posted about it in such detail. He doesn't see the abuse in it. I'm no therapist but I have learned enough to know it's worth stopping a second to consider why he doesn't see it.
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My husband is a wonderful father, who is still unlearning the things he was taught. But it's taken a lot of soul searching, professional help, and support. I just wish people would give it a beat, give ppl some grace. Unless this guy has a history of utterly awful
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behavior, maybe there's something else going on here. The best parents eff up. I've struggled not to repeat some of the thing my parents did, but it took a while before I recognized I was doing it. I'm not defending this dad's actions. They're indefensible.
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If he keeps it up, that kid will need a lot of therapy to undo. But I am willing to bet he has had a rough upbringing himself, and I'll posit that thoroughly massacring him online won't be what helps him see the abuse in his actions.
Fin/
Fin/
