The Unspoken Abuse: When the Adult Child Abuses the Parent

In therapy, people often talk about the impact of the negative events of their childhood. Indeed, it is essential for many people to heal the wounds of childhood, and often those wounds have to do with the mistakes their parents made. Therapists hear about a range of adverse childhood experiences.

There are broadly four types of parents people describe when they discuss their childhood experiences in therapy:

1. The consistently neglectful and abusive parents. The abuse can range from emotional, physical, and/or sexual.
2. The "not good enough parents" who did not have any parenting skills tried their best but could not connect with their children most of the time, leaving them feeling unloved and uncared for.
3. The "good enough" who parents made some significant mistakes that left their children wounded but were loving and caring most of the time.
4. The "good enough" parents who only made minor mistakes and showed consistent love and care to their children.

These adverse childhood experiences may be repaired when the child becomes an adult if the parents are courageous enough to face the harm they caused their children, take responsibility for it, and apologise in a meaningful way.

Of course, the parents of the first category might never be able to repair the relationship with their adult children depending on how bad their abuse was. But for the parents of the three other categories, it is possible to repair the relationship and start something new – maybe not a great, trusting connection – but one that is good enough.

I occasionally hear people who are reluctant to go to therapy criticising it as a place to blame parents, but it is not so. The reality is that therapy is about recognising the impact of our childhood and taking ownership of our wounds in order to heal them.

In this post, I want to discuss the other side of adverse experiences, which is very much a taboo and not often talked about: when parents are abused by their adult children. Indeed, some adult children’s anger towards their parents can be congruent with the harm they received from their parents as a child, but even in extreme childhood circumstances, the best thing to do for some of these adult children is to step away from the dynamics with their parents and stop contacts – or limit it significantly.

But it is not ok to abuse their parents, no matter how awful they are. As adults, we have to take responsibility, and one of them is to behave with integrity – responding to not good enough parents with abusive behaviours is not good for anybody, not even the angry adult child.

There are many parents in the second, third, and fourth categories who apologised meaningfully to their adult children and want to create a better relationship, but their adult children are stuck in the victim position and keep blaming their parents for the difficulties of their adult lives. There are many ways, from covert to overt, that an adult child can abuse their parents:

1. By coercing them into giving them money (financial abuse).
2. By threatening to harm themselves if the parents don’t do as they please (psychological abuse).
3. By gaslighting them and convincing them that they did or said something they never actually did or said, making them feel crazy.
4. By playing a victim role to coerce parents into doing what they wish (inviting the parents to become rescuers).
5. Shouting at them or threatening to tell others around them how bad they were as parents (humiliation, intimidation, and emotional abuse).
6. Hitting them (physical abuse).
7. Manipulating them by engaging or withdrawing contact or the contact with their children (grandchildren) in order to control the parents.
8. Denying them access to healthcare or minimising their health situations so that they can keep control of them.

Some adult children do not have such extreme abusive behaviours towards their parents, but they look for any opportunity to have a dig at them or stonewall them as they please to manipulate them.

These are usually signs that the adult child lives with unhealed wounds and hasn’t taken their adult responsibility to take care of them.

These behaviours can have a detrimental effect on both the mental health of the adult child and the parents, and both can be stuck in a toxic dynamic.

The unspoken part of this is when the parent has to assert stronger boundaries to stop their adult child from hurting them. Indeed it is unspoken because it is very taboo. The ‘victim’ language of the adult child may sound like: "they messed me up as a child, and now they want to distance themselves from me. How dare they?"

But, of course, if the adult child is not behaving with respect and integrity as the adult that they are today, the parents do need to protect themselves against their attacks.

Parents who have to face the harsh reality that their adult child is not good for them and need to protect themselves are usually deeply heartbroken, and they tend to feel tremendous shame and guilt for being "not good enough" when their children are young and also for needing to limit their exposure to their adult children now.

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Our society instructs us that parents should never give up on their adult children. It is possible for some people to be the victim of abuse from their adult children, and staying close to them might be not only painful but dangerous.

When the children are adults, they have a part to play in maintaining an adult relationship with their parents. If there is no cooperation, there may not be a viable relationship.

In some extreme cases, if the parent’s attempt to assert boundaries and request respect from their adult child does not work, they may resort to stopping contact with them.

Depending on their past, adult children and their parents may never have a loving, caring, supportive and meaningful connection. The best some people can hope for is to be civilised and tolerate each other’s company with kindness and compassion. But it is not a good idea to maintain a toxic, destructive, and abusive relationship – the blood relation does not matter if there isn’t the bare minimum of respect.

The parents their adult children abuse often live in isolation because they don’t know who to turn to. They keep their abuse a secret for fear of being blamed (it was your fault for being a bad parent to them), fear of not being believed (surely your child can’t be an abuser), or fear of being criticised and rejected (how dare you think of moving away from your child?). Those parents are often reluctant to go to therapy because they think therapy is about blaming parents.

If you are a parent who your adult child abuses, it may be helpful to think about the following:

1. If you have meaningfully apologised for your mistakes and your adult child is unable to let go of their hurt, it is their responsibility to heal, not yours.
2. If your adult child behaves in unacceptable ways toward you, you have the right to assert boundaries and request a behaviour change.
3. If your adult child abuses you and makes you feel unsafe, you have the right to protect yourself, move away from them, and decide to stop contact, either temporarily or permanently.
4. Go to therapy. Therapists should not blame you. Therapy is a supportive space, and it can help you make sense of the past and the here-and-now, and, crucially, it can help you find strategies to protect yourself from your abusive adult child.
5. Don’t be alone: talk to a trusted friend.

Family relationships can be rocky at the best of times. When children become adults, both have a choice to be or not to be in each other’s space. If they choose to be in the same space, both are responsible for behaving appropriately as adults.

To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.