Dear Therapist,
I was abused by my parents as a child and have limited contact with them now. I did try in my early 20s to have a relationship with them, but I saw no change in their behavior. In addition, they both flat-out deny the things they did, including dragging me by my hair from a dead sleep in the middle of the night down three flights of stairs, throwing me in the basement and locking the door, telling me repeatedly to do them a favor and kill myself, and beating me.
I try to maintain a relationship with my aunts, uncles, and cousins—who themselves have some problematic behaviors—but I find doing so difficult because they, too, tell me that my childhood wasn’t that bad and that I should love my parents unconditionally. They will invite my parents to events I will be at without telling me. If I find out and say I will not attend because I do not want to see my parents, they will tell me I’m being difficult. They will also bring up my younger sister, who has always been and continues to be my parents’ favorite. While her childhood was by no means easy, she did not experience as much abuse as I did and was shown much more loving behavior. For example, my father would spend one-on-one time with her as a child, something I never got. Meanwhile I was sent to live with an aunt and uncle because my parents “needed space.” My relatives will claim that my childhood couldn’t have been that bad if my sister is able to have such a good relationship with my parents.
I realize my parents will not change, and because I cannot accept their behavior, I have chosen to have limited contact with them. I would prefer to have no contact, but that is difficult while trying to maintain contact with my extended family. How do I maintain a relationship with my extended family without feeling so hurt or unheard?
Dear Reader,
I’m sorry for all you had to endure growing up, and for the repercussions you’re left to struggle with as a result of your parents’ behavior. I’m also sorry—but not surprised—that your family is minimizing, if not outright denying, your abuse. That must feel absolutely maddening to you.
Unfortunately, your situation is all too common, for reasons inherent in the nature of child abuse. Although the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says that more than 3 million cases of child abuse are reported each year, that is surely an undercount. If the abusers are family members, as tends to be the case, other adults in the picture aren’t likely to report their relatives to authorities; children, for obvious reasons, can be afraid to speak up. Complicating the situation further, perpetrators of child abuse might not even recognize their behavior as abuse. Because society is so poorly educated about what constitutes child abuse, physical and verbal abuse can, in some people’s minds, be mistaken for “discipline.”
Because of all this, many children suffer alone, with nobody to turn to for help. Some children blame themselves (“If I were a better child, they would treat me well”) while others realize that their parents are damaged and hold out hope that once they reach adulthood, they will be free. Except, as you’ve seen, abuse leaves trauma behind, and the effects ripple throughout the family system for years—which explains the bind you’re in now.
You say that you want to maintain a relationship with your extended family while also feeling seen and heard, but the truth is you might not be able to have both. More likely, you have a difficult choice to make. As we explore each option, let’s bear in mind that your goal is to hurt less. What actions might get you closer to a less painful situation?
Your first option would be to try one last time to have a conversation with a relative who you think might be most receptive—perhaps a cousin your age, or the aunt or uncle who took you in when your parents “needed space,” considering they must have known something was amiss in your household. Given that you shared with your relatives the reasons for your parental estrangement and they’ve dismissed your experience as being “not that bad,” I don’t know how much hope there is that they’ll really hear you this time. They seem to have repeatedly ignored you and denied reality, which makes me think that—for their own reasons—they’re emotionally invested in believing the narrative that your childhood was different from what you experienced. Taking that into account, let’s think through how to talk with them in a way that validates that relative’s experience as well. You might say something like:
There’s something I’d like to talk about with you, and I know this is delicate, but I really value our relationship and I feel that having an open discussion about this will bring us closer. I know that you want to maintain a relationship with my parents, and I don’t want to interfere with that in any way. But I also feel dismissed when I share the truth of what happened in my childhood. I believe that if you really imagine what it was like for a child to be dragged by her hair, locked in the basement, beaten, or told to kill herself, you would have empathy for that child’s experience. But because the people who did this are people you love, I understand that you might feel as if you’re stuck in a challenging position—that if you acknowledge my experience, you are somehow betraying them, or that believing me might even make you feel differently about them.
Please know that I genuinely want you to have whatever relationship you’d like with my parents, and I’m not here to disrupt that at all. But for me to have a relationship with you, it’s important that you acknowledge what I experienced and respect my request to let me know in advance if my parents will be at an event so that I can make an informed choice about attending. You might believe that love is unconditional, but I believe that love is a verb—we act lovingly toward those we value. In that spirit, I hope that you hear my request with the loving intentions behind it, because I think having this understanding will make our relationship more meaningful and enjoyable for both of us.
Acknowledging the awkward position your relatives might find themselves in as they try to navigate simultaneous relationships with your parents and you could help make them feel less defensive and also more heard and seen in the way you want to be. It can’t be easy for them to reconcile the people they want to believe your parents are with the reality of what you’re telling them. Giving their predicament some validation might make it easier for them to receive your request with more openness and understanding, and instigate a shift in their behavior.
If, however, they remain unreceptive, a very difficult choice awaits you. I appreciate that you might get some good things from being in a relationship with your extended family, and that you’d be reluctant to give those things up. Sometimes people make the calculation that having hurtful relatives is better than having none at all. You can, if that’s how you feel, accept that they won’t change but gain some benefit from maintaining these relationships in more successful ways—perhaps best done one-on-one instead of at family occasions where your parents might be, or by not engaging in conversations about what did or didn’t happen growing up and keeping things on a more superficial level. But a second option is available to you, and, given the depth of your ongoing pain, maybe it’s worth considering.
Let me frame that choice this way: Your relatives are at best enablers and at worst accomplices to your parents’ abuse. By denying what actually happened and saying that you’re the difficult one, they are gaslighting you, and gaslighting is itself a form of abuse. They have made you seem like the problem instead of your abusive parents. You might have transferred your desires for support and validation from your parents onto your other relatives, but they have shown that they, too, refuse to acknowledge your parents’ actions. In fact, they insist that you love your parents unconditionally despite what they did to you and then disregard your wishes to keep yourself safe from their presence.
Unless you can drastically alter your expectations of them, you will continue to feel hurt and unheard, which could be the compromise you settle on—but it might also be too much of an emotional price to pay. You distanced yourself from your parents after realizing that they wouldn’t change and you could no longer endure their behavior. Similarly, you may decide that the only way to take care of yourself is to apply the same standard to those relatives who are causing you ongoing pain.
This won’t be easy. Breaking with your parents maybe seemed more warranted, because your parents’ abuse was more pronounced. But just because your relatives’ behavior is subtler doesn’t mean it’s less insidious or harmful in the long run. Most people who were abused carry a deep wish that someone in the family will “get it”—see them and acknowledge their experience. Yet sometimes that validation and support won’t ever come from the family and has to come from another source that you have the agency to create, often referred to as a surrogate family or family of choice—a family that understands that love does come with conditions, which makes it all the more precious.
Of course, sometimes people who cut off ties with their parents can retain or even strengthen ties with extended family. But many also find they have to break up with the whole dysfunctional crew to save themselves. If you make that choice, you’ll have to grieve a series of tremendous losses: of the childhood you deserved, of the validation and support from other relatives who should be there for you, of the sense of safety and emotional security that comes from being part of a healthy family system. But you might ultimately gain an emotional freedom from the kind of pain the current situation repeatedly exposes you to—the benefits of which you may not even be able to imagine.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.