It bothers me that he does not have the courage to live his true self. That he sacrificed his life for a monster. That he was never brave enough to leave her.
It could be that he stays because he believes he is strong enough to do so.
He may have a distorted view of himself, but it's possible that's how he perceives himself (I can handle this, I'm strong) due to an outdated survival or coping mechanism.
I grew up in a home with a disordered sibling and parents who were checked out and emotionally immature. One of the coping mechanisms I developed (that I'm able to see now with therapy) was to view myself as stronger than people around me. In adulthood I put myself in unsafe situations and became friends with difficult people and worked in toxic workplaces and married a man with BPD. I viewed myself as strong enough to endure these things.
When I went to therapy for the first time, I almost didn't return because the therapist implied I was being abused and that was so opposite of the duct taped false view holding my sense of self together.
In retrospect, I can see how a child might build a story like that to survive. Then the story continues into adulthood until it more or less collapses under the weight of fresh abuse.
My son is now 21. Several years ago he said, "I wish you protected me sooner." It's makes me emotional whenever I think of this comment because it points to both realities: I didn't protect him, and I did.
I wish I protected him sooner too.
When I wasn't protecting him, I thought I was. People like me do this by being the best parents we can with the emotional capacity we have. For me, I was able to handle my ex husband's abuse because it fit with the identity I created: I'm strong enough to take this. But I didn't have a way to process my husband's abuse of our son. That truth was harder to square. It made no sense.
I couldn't see our reality clearly because I had constructed this specific identity and knew nothing else. Admitting I was being abused meant dissolving that identity and building one from scratch, a genuinely terrifying and very painful experience. That's a very fragile place to be in when launching an exit plan, or even trying to provide genuine emotional protections in the home. Standing up to a bully is very hard when you can't just up and go.
When your FIL says he couldn't leave because of this or that reason, he's not wrong. If you spend time on the divorcing/custody board here, you'll see nightmare after nightmare about what can happen divorcing a pwBPD. The parental alienation alone is enough to break your heart. The court system is a terrible instrument when it comes to protecting kids and in many cases, especially with men trying to get custody, there are centuries of bias working against them, including the bias they may carry themselves unwittingly (e.g. children need their mother).
He is also probably crushed by shame for staying.
When I finally began to open up about my marriage, contemplating whether to stay or leave, a friend told me she would not judge me whether I stayed or left. She was just glad I trusted her enough to share. I think that's unusual. Many of us have been carrying a tremendous amount of shame around, often for decades. I have cut off relationships with friends because the shame was too crushing and it was the only way I knew how to manage those feelings.
I find myself feeling negative emotions toward FIL. It means he stood idly by while his children were the victims of emotional abuse from his wife. He stepped up as a good father, often acting like a mother too. But I don't think he protected them as he should have. He claims to have his reasons, including that MIL's brothers have some power in the local community. And would be able to hire better lawyers etc
That makes sense. One of his primary roles was to protect your wife, and he didn't.
I also wonder and what age I tell my children never to put themselves in a situation like their grandfather is in. In any relationship, friendship, work, etc.
One of the silver linings of going through a harrowing divorce from a pwBPD is learning what happens in healthy relationships. I cannot say enough about learning to properly emotionally validate your kids. You can tell them all day not to end up like their grandfather, but if they don't know how they feel, or trust those feelings, if they can't properly identify what feeling bad is like, they'll lack the real compass needed to keep themselves safe.
Knowing what genuinely feels good or safe or healthy is probably the most important foundation for making healthy decisions about who to love or trust.
There are lots of good books out there that break this type of parenting down in meaningful ways.
