Safety plans won’t always work, and if someone gets hurt, it isn’t the child’s fault.

Children can help if they want to, but it isn’t their job.

Adults are responsible for their own safety.

When you sit with your children, individually or as a group, to talk about safety strategies, be sure to emphasize the following points: They also want to know how they might be able to protect you. And they aren’t just afraid for themselves they are worried about you, and they need to be able to express that concern and feel that you hear them. In fact, children feel safer if they can talk to their mothers about how frightened their father’s behavior makes them, and discuss actions they might take next time he erupts. If your partner sometimes gets scary or violent, your children are almost certainly aware of the fact, as I discussed early in this book you cannot avoid that fear by not talking about it. Now that I have finished asking you to walk a delicate line between approaching your children as wounded and responding to them as courageous and persevering, I am going to introduce another tricky balancing act:Īs much as possible keeping your children from being burdened with adult responsibility, while simultaneously equipping them with strategies for keeping themselves – and you – safe. Excerpted from When Dad Hurts Mom: Helping Your Children Heal the Wounds of Witnessing Abuse by Lundy Bancroft, 2004, G.P.

When dad hurts mom by lundy bancroft