The Insanity of Calling a Child an Abuser
The Power Imbalance: Why a Parent Can’t Be the Victim of Their Own Child
Six years ago, after 22 years of abuse, I cut contact with my father. To this day, he tells anyone who will listen that I, my mother, and my three younger siblings (aged 16, 18, and 20 at the time) were the abusers. He insists we made his life unbearable and spread smear campaigns against him.
For some, believing him is easier than asking why a man in his 60s has four children and an ex-wife who refuse all contact monetary or otherwise with him. The truth is way simpler: instead of wasting another second of our time and energy with his entitlement and abuse, we walked away.
The “Abused” Parent
As the concept of “no contact” gains mainstream attention, more estranged parents are turning to the internet to air their grievances. They claim their underage or adult children mistreated them and cut them off. The narrative often echoes the rhetoric of self-evidently abusive parents whose teenagers later commit heinous acts like school shootings: “We did our best. We’ve been scared of our child since they were born. We couldn’t control them. One day, they just turned on us.”
It’s a socially acceptable story that leans on cultural assumptions: parents are naturally nurturing, family love is unconditional, and any child who severs ties must be cruel, vindictive, or ungrateful. In reality, cutting contact is often a desperate act of self-preservation.
The Myth of “No-Parent Island”
Are adult children truly abandoning their parents en masse to flee to some imaginary paradise brimming with perks and free money? While some kids may indeed create difficulties for their parents, let’s examine how far-fetched it is to believe that an entirely blameless parent would be cut off by an otherwise thriving and well-adjusted adult child.
The Power Dynamic
The parent–child bond is one of the most unequal relationships we experience. For the first 18 years, parents hold near-total control: over food, safety, identity, social connections, even access to extended family. This power imbalance imprints a child’s baseline expectations of love.
Like an octopus shifting color to match its surroundings, children in abusive homes constantly adapt. Beatings, verbal assaults, and humiliation teach them to suppress needs, hyper-monitor their behavior, and internalize blame for the dysfunction around them.
Confronting the idea that a parent may not love them (or may actively hate them) is unbearable for a child. Instead, they idolize the parent and conclude: I must be the problem. To preserve attachment, they accept responsibility for harm they did not cause.
The developing brain cannot fully grasp the truth—that the adult responsible for their survival does not have their best interests at heart. Realizing this too soon could trigger suicidal despair or psychological collapse. So the child adapts.
But as adults, those same children begin testing boundaries. And when parents accustomed to unchecked control encounter resistance, they perceive it as sabotage, not basic agency and survival of a sovereign being.
When Victimhood Becomes a Tactic
Manipulative individuals often co-opt the language of harm to obscure their role in it. DARVO—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender—is a common pattern. Boundaries become “betrayal,” rejection becomes “abuse.”
The narrative of the “abused parent” is easier for society to stomach than the reality of parental harm. And for children who walk away, this public inversion of victimhood compounds the difficulty of healing.
True abuse requires the power to dominate, manipulate, and control. A dependent child rarely holds that kind of power. Harmful behavior from children is usually reactive—born from long-term neglect or trauma.
Insights from Survivors
In an archived thread on r/raisedbynarcissists, a user asked: Can children abuse their parents? The replies reflected nuance often absent in mainstream conversations. One commenter noted that if a child ever has enough power to abuse a parent, it’s usually the result of long-term neglect or a total failure of boundaries. Others described being branded “abusive” simply for expressing needs, showing emotion, or choosing distance.
Many shared that these accusations intensified once they began therapy or pulled away from family control. What was once “loyalty” quickly became “cruelty.” The pattern was clear: parents weaponizing victimhood to preserve control over a narrative that no longer matched reality.
In Conclusion
If you’re exploring the possibility of no-contact, you’re brave and you’re on the right path. It’s not an easy decision, but it’s extremely effective. The best part of no-contact is that you don’t actually need to be permanent about it, but the longer you experience silence and no more abuse from that person, the longer you’ll establish a sense of presence and peace and sovereingty in your body you will come to fall in love with.