My dad went through a phase of shitting on me and my siblings. We overheard him telling my uncle that we were to blame for his latest relationship failing, and as like all shitty uncles, he believed my dad and became pretty nasty towards us, and to be honest, he still is even to this day, although he is a pretty nasty bully to most people at the best of times.

I know there are always two sides to a story, but in our case, none of us live with our dad and none of us had met any of these girlfriends who he was meeting all around Europe, and was never with them for more than a couple of months. We were visiting him at Christmas when we heard him saying these things to my uncle. I suspect that he had been feeding bullshit about us to his girlfriends as his sob stories, and he had probably been feeding this stuff to his siblings for some time.

Funnily enough, it didn't take long for our family to realise that dad did have the problem. He got married to an absolutely crazy person within a few months of that Christmas, and 2 days after the wedding, he begun writing emails sending emails to family members explaining how they had almost ruined his wedding. Apparently his fiance had threatened to call the whole thing off the night before the wedding. This list of offences was hilarious, eventually we were all sharing these fantastic long rants between ourselves.

Over the following few years, we received dozens of these absolutely crazy emails from them, in which they blamed us for all of their relationship problems. Their divorce finally went through recently, about 6 years after the wedding. It has cost them both a fortune.

I think that shitty parents will often steamroll their children if they feel it will help their personal relationships.