Having Empathy For a Parent Who Emotionally Abused You As a Child

Stockholm Syndrome is a fascinating phenomenon. If your life is in the hands of your violent captor, and you acknowledge their power to inflict unspeakable suffering onto you, then the terror will eat you alive. You will go mental. Luckily, the brain has a cutoff. It floods you with positive emotions, and gets you to attach to your hostage taker, and to use that to persuade them not to hurt you. By morphing yourself into an ally, into the opposite of a threat, you regain a sense of power in a helpless situation.

Precisely the same thing happens to a child with an abusive parent. Even in a loving family, a child understands subliminally that their life is in the parent’s hands. The child’s chances of survival increase if they can be submissive, cooperative and loving. To top it all off, the child idealises the parent and convinces themselves that the parent can do no wrong, and commit no harm. The parent is...