🦚Am I raising the next abuser?

Last week, I received a message that was all too familiar:

If you've ever had this gut-wrenching thought, you're not alone. It's one of the most terrifying fears protective parents face. It makes your blood run cold when you see your child show the same cruel, controlling behaviors that made you flee your abusive relationship in the first place.

But here's what I want you to know: your child is not predestined to turn into their abusive parent.

The difference between trauma response and character formation

When your 5 to 13-year-old starts acting like a mini version of your ex, they're not revealing their “true nature.” They're showing you something that child development research has consistently demonstrated. Children's brains literally shut down under stress, and they default to whatever survival strategies they've learned work.

Think of it this way: if your child spent time in a house where yelling, manipulation, and control got results, their developing brain filed that information under “how to survive when things get scary.” When they feel unsafe, confused, or powerless (which happens a lot in a situation where one or both parents are high conflict), they pull out those survival tools.

That’s not their character. They’re too young for that. It’s their coping mechanism.

What's really happening in your child's brain

Picture your child's brain as a house with two rooms. One room houses their emotional brain. It’s quick, reactive, and focused entirely on survival. The other room contains their thinking brain. That part is rational, empathetic, and capable of following rules.

Under normal circumstances, these two rooms work together through a connecting door. But when your child experiences the stress of moving between two completely different homes, processing conflicting messages from parents, or trying to make sense of why one parent treats people cruelly, that connecting door slams shut.

Their emotional brain takes over completely while their thinking brain goes on vacation. During these times, they're literally incapable of:

• Processing contradictory messages from parents

• Using empathy to understand how their behavior affects others

• Following rules that don't make sense in their other environment

• Explaining how they’re feeling or why they‘re acting out

Even more important: the part of their brain that controls impulses and understands other people’s perspectives won't be fully developed until their mid-twenties. This means they’re physically incapable of processing the emotional complexity of having one parent who's safe and another who’s dangerous.

Why your child isn’t becoming an abuser

Here's the crucial difference that child development research tells us: abusive adults have fully developed brains and established patterns of behavior. Whether their abuse stems from personality disorders, their own childhood trauma, or deliberate choices, they’re operating from years of entrenched neural pathways and coping mechanisms.

Your child, on the other hand, is:

• Operating with an underdeveloped brain under extreme stress

• Using survival behaviors they learned in a dangerous environment

• Trying to make sense of contradictory rules and expectations

• Processing trauma from witnessing or experiencing abuse

• Desperately seeking safety and predictability

When your 8-year-old calls their sibling “stupid” after a weekend at dad’s house, they’re not exhibiting inherent cruelty. They’re showing you that their stress response system is activated and they're using the tools they’ve learned to try to get back some sense of control.

The power of the secure relationship

Child development research teaches us something profound: children ultimately align with the parent who provides genuine emotional safety. Not the parent who’s permissive, not the parent who buys them things, and definitely not the parent who uses fear to control them.

Dr. Christine Cocchiola, an expert on what she refers to as “malicious fracturing of attachment,” puts it bluntly:

But here's the hope in that harsh truth: you get to influence how your child perceives you.

What you can do when your child acts like your ex

Create emotional safety without emotional permissiveness

Your home needs to be the place where your child doesn’t have to walk on eggshells, but that doesn't mean accepting abusive behavior. When your child uses cruel language or tries to manipulate you, respond with empathetic boundaries:

Instead of: “Don't you dare talk to me like your father does!”
Try: “I can see you’re really upset right now. In our family, we don’t use words that hurt people. Let’s take a break and try again when you’re feeling calmer.”

Understand the behavior without excusing it

When your child acts in a controlling or cruel way, remember that understanding the why doesn't mean accepting the what. Research on child development shows us that you can simultaneously:

• Recognize that their behavior comes from trauma and stress

• Hold firm boundaries about how family members treat each other

• Provide support to help them develop better coping strategies

Don't take the bait

Your ex has spent years learning your triggers, and unfortunately, they’ve taught your child exactly which buttons to push. When your child uses manipulative tactics or cruel language, remember: this is your ex’s playbook, not your child’s personality.

Stay calm, set the boundary, and don't engage with the manipulation itself.

Focus on connection over correction

Child development research emphasizes that children need co-regulation before they can develop self-regulation. When your child is exhibiting concerning behaviors, they need your calm, stable presence more than they need consequences.

This might look like sitting with them during a meltdown, offering comfort even when they’ve been unkind, or simply being a consistent, safe presence in their chaotic world.

Children who have these challenges can be supported by clearly defined expectations within a nurturing and structured environment. You can help them out by providing prompts to stay on track and using pre-arranged strategies to let them know when a transition is coming up. For example, you can create advanced warnings, use timers, and include visual cues like paper chain links or a timer that counts down to the end of an activity.

The long game

Here’s what I want you to remember when you're lying awake at 3 AM wondering if you're raising a future abuser: your consistent modeling of empathy, respect, and genuine care is more powerful than any manipulation tactics your ex can teach.

Children learn values not just from what we tell them, but from what they experience. Every time you:

• respond to their big emotions with compassion instead of anger,

• set boundaries without shaming or humiliating them,

• show them what healthy conflict resolution looks like,

• demonstrate that they’re worthy of love even when they make mistakes,

you’re literally rewiring their brain to understand what healthy relationships look like.

Signs of hope to watch for

As you provide this consistent emotional safety, you’ll start to see signs that your approach is working:

• Your child begins to show remorse after acting out.

• They start using your language and conflict resolution skills.

• They demonstrate empathy toward siblings or friends.

• They seem more relaxed and less hypervigilant at your home.

• They begin to open up about their experiences at the other parent’s house.

These moments might be small and infrequent at first, but they're evidence that your child's true nature—the one that’s there underneath all that trauma and stress—is still intact.

What about teenagers?

Now, if your child is in their teens, the dynamics shift significantly. Teenagers don't experience the same “brain shutdown” that younger children do. Instead, their stress response creates what researchers call “executive function breakdown.” Their emotional brain (which matures early) overpowers their still-developing prefrontal cortex (which won't be fully mature until their mid-twenties).

This creates a particularly challenging situation. Your teenager has the cognitive sophistication to understand that their abusive parent’s behavior is wrong, but they don’t have the executive control to consistently resist modeling it. They might intellectually know that screaming at you is hurtful, but still find themselves doing exactly that when they’re overwhelmed.

The survival strategies they learned as younger children also evolve during adolescence. Instead of pure mimicking, teenagers start to engage in what trauma experts call “traumatic reenactment.” This is where they incorporate elements of their trauma into daily behaviors as a way of trying to process and get control over their experiences.

The difference with teens is that they have access to relationships and perspectives outside the family system. This means their abusive behaviors are also influenced by peer relationships, identity formation, and their desperate attempt to make sense of their contradictory experiences.

There’s good news here. The same neuroplasticity that makes teenagers vulnerable also creates unprecedented opportunities for healing. Research shows that trauma-focused interventions work more effectively during adolescence than in adulthood, precisely because their brains are still so adaptable.

You’re not too late

The most important thing I can tell you is this: it’s not too late. Children are incredibly resilient, and the human brain keeps developing and forming new neural pathways well into adulthood.

Every day you choose patience over punishment, connection over control, and empathy over anger, you’re giving your child's brain new information about how relationships work. You’re showing them that safety is possible, that love doesn’t have to be earned through perfect behavior, and that adults can be trusted to remain calm even when children are struggling.

Your child is not destined to become their abusive parent. They’re a young person doing their best to survive an impossible situation with an underdeveloped brain and a toolkit full of survival strategies that don’t serve them well.

Your job isn’t to fix them. It’s to love them consistently while their brain catches up to their experiences.

Stop carrying this fear alone.

If you're lying awake wondering whether your child is destined to repeat their other parent's harmful patterns, you need more than reassurance. You need clarity about what you're really facing and where to go from here. Feel free to contact me for a 30-minute consultation, free of charge, where you can get it all off your chest.

In our conversation, you'll have space to share what's really happening without judgment. Together, we'll help you see your situation more clearly, separating your valid concerns from fear-driven worst-case scenarios.

You'll walk away with a clearer understanding of your challenges and what's truly standing in your way, whether or not we decide to work together.

Want to know more about what I do?

Resources

Normally, I reserve this spot for external resources that I think can help enrich your journey. This time, I linked them in the section about teenagers because I want to address something unrelated to today’s newsletter topic.

Recently, there have been some eruptions about an interview between the podcaster Theo Von and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in which Altman said “Right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor... there's legal privilege for it. We haven’t figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT.”

The issue which brought this up is that OpenAI and Microsoft are being sued by the New York Times, which is asking the court to force them to retain all output data indefinitely as part of the suit. This demand would violate the laws I describe below, so I’d be surprised if it’s allowed by the court. But here’s the thing. The New York Times is not suing the owners of other chatbots like Claude.ai or Aimee Says, both of which I recommend over ChatGPT. I find Claude way superior to ChatGPT for a number of reasons, one being that it’s not as “pandering” as ChatGPT, and Aimee Says is specifically designed for domestic abuse survivors and victims of post-separation abuse. The information below currently applies to them.

However, I’ve seen videos and posts on various social media from high-conflict divorce influencers slamming the use of AI. They don’t show a hint of nuance, but do contain plenty of scaremongering. They also demonstrate a supreme lack of knowledge about the actual facts. So, below are some facts, taken directly from the pages of my upcoming book AI ARMOR: Your Digital Defense Solution For Coparenting With A Narcissist.