Many people who were raised under harsh treatment from a parent carry, well into adulthood, a particular “curse.”
“My parent did those things because I was a bad child.”
“It was because I had no value worth being loved that I made my parent angry.”
There are people who continue to believe this without question, all the way into adulthood.
From parents and from those around them, lines like these are often added on top:
“You’ll understand when you become a parent yourself!”
“Just be grateful you were raised at all.”
“Every household has its issues, you know.”
“You’re family — eventually you’ll work things out.”
After hearing such words, many people have closed their mouths and stopped speaking up.
But once a person grows up, learns about the wider world, or perhaps becomes a parent themselves, an “unshakable sense that something was wrong” begins to surface, no matter how hard they try to push it down.
“No matter how exhausted a parent might be, can a person really become that cruel toward their own child?”
“How could they stay calm while their child was bleeding and screaming?”
In response to questions like these, mainstream counseling and parenting books tend to reply with emotional language:
“Your parent was probably immature.”
“Maybe their love just got channeled the wrong way.”
“Your mother was doing her best — she had no room left in her heart.”
“By now, she must surely regret it.”
Have you, even once, felt rescued by these phrases?
More likely, what stayed behind was not relief, but the hollow sense of having been pushed away.
But your question is the right one.
A person does not cross the line into abuse on the basis of “no room to spare” alone, and the word “immature” is far too vague.
Let us set aside the kind reassurances and the moral platitudes for now.
Today, we will dissect this question with the scalpel of “function” and “mechanism.”
After reading, you should be able to understand that the true nature of your parent’s incomprehensible behavior was not a “problem of love” but a “functional cause” — and you should gain a real foothold for setting down the heavy weight of self-blame you have carried for so long.
Now, let us begin to dissect that mechanism together.
To do this, we first need to understand the comparison: why a “normal parent” does not abuse their child — or, more precisely, cannot.
Chapter 1 — The “Normal Parent” as a System
First, let us be clear about what we mean by “normal parent.”
What we mean here is by no means a saintly, fully formed parent in some moral sense. It is not a parent who happens to be “morally elevated,” nor a parent who has “a particularly generous capacity for parenting.”
Coming home tired from work, getting irritated, scolding their child over something unreasonable, behaving in ways that are, at times, less mature than a parent should be.
That sort of perfectly average parent. The kind found anywhere.
No time for themselves. Sleep cut short. Days spent chasing after a child whose moods do not bend to plan.
Even a “normal parent,” in the daily life of raising a child, runs into countless moments of being furious with the child — moments when the impulse “I would honestly love to slap that face right now” rises up. (And in fact, it is not unusual for a “normal parent” to lose their temper and let their hand fly out.)
But in the case of a “normal parent,” this never continues as a daily pattern, and it does not escalate into “abuse” that destroys the child’s mind or body.
A brake always engages somewhere along the line, and the line is not crossed.
This is not because their morality is high.
It is because something far more primitive is built into the brain — a “physiological mechanism that makes abuse impossible to carry out.”
Chapter 2 — The Primitive Brake: “Pain Synchronization”
This may sound like a strange question, but bear with us.
Could you press a lit cigarette against your own arm?
Unless you happen to have an impulse to self-harm, the answer is, of course, no.
The reason is obvious. “Because it’s hot.” “Because it hurts.”
Human beings have a survival instinct. When the body is about to be damaged, the brain fires off an intense pain signal that forces the action to stop.
This is not a matter of willpower. It is a reflex.
The same circuit, in fact, exists between a “normal parent” and “their child.”
Inside a normal parent’s brain, over the course of roughly the first two years of caregiving, a powerful link with the child’s mind — a synchronization function — is formed.
Daily breastfeeding, responding to nighttime cries, soothing, laughing together. The accumulation of tens of thousands of these “responses to the child’s sensations” is what physically wires this circuit into the parent’s brain.
So what is happening in an abusive parent regarding this “pain synchronization” mechanism? And when this brake is broken, what is lost between parent and child? That is where the real subject begins.
How do support workers tell whether this “brake” is working in a given parent? The concrete method is laid out in the related article below.
This synchronization is not built out of “the amount of love.” If the brain’s “synchronization function” is working normally, it forms on its own, without any special effort.
It is invisible, like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but its effects are unmistakable.
“The sensations the child is feeling at this moment are transmitted directly to the parent’s brain as well.”
This is the standard built-in capacity of a normal parent.
Now imagine a normal parent trying to press a cigarette against their child’s arm.
The instant the child cries out and the skin begins to burn, the parent is “linked” with the child.
Through their five senses, the parent receives the child’s anguished face, the sound of the cry, the bracing of a body locked in fear. In the same instant, an intense pain replays inside the parent’s brain — “as if the parent’s own arm were being burned.”
The parent’s arm is, physically, untouched.
Yet, strangely, simply seeing the child in pain causes the parent’s chest to clench, the stomach to tighten, and a cold sweat to break out — a “simulated suffering” so vivid the parent cannot stand it.
Joy and sorrow are also shared. But this link works most powerfully with the primitive emotions: pain and fear.
In other words, when a parent tries to abuse their child, the act immediately rebounds onto the parent themselves — a kind of “self-attack.”
A normal parent — like the moment a hand touches a hot pan and recoils…
A normal parent cannot abuse — not because of morality, not because of reason. Pressing a cigarette against the child’s arm sets off the same sensation as pressing it against their own. That is the brain mechanism that has come online.
…reflexively and instinctively, that powerful stopper called “pain synchronization” engages and prevents the abuse.
For that parent, pressing a lit cigarette against the child’s arm is every bit as painful, as unpleasant, as unbearable as pressing it against their own arm — if not more so.
Long before any high-minded reasoning along the lines of “the child is suffering, so I should stop,” the truer description is, “I find it too painful to do, too painful to watch — so my hand stops on its own.”
And the normal parent does not even need to actually carry out the act of “pressing a lit cigarette against the child’s arm” — they instinctively know how deeply such an act would cut into both the child and themselves.
Chapter 3 — The Sudden Outburst, and the “Repair” That Follows
That said, even a normal parent is human.
Under intense fatigue or stress, this sensor can temporarily dull.
These are the moments commonly described as “snapping.”
Let us look at a specific scene.
[Case Study]
A mother (forty), with an unmissable meeting today, and a child (seven) who is running around without getting ready for the morning.
Mother: “I keep telling you to get dressed!”
Child: (running around playfully, bumps into the table)
Splat! The milk on the table tips over, spreading across the floor in a wide white pool.
A moment of silence.
Mother: “That’s enough! When I’m this busy!!”
In the surge of anger, the mother shoves the child’s shoulder hard.
The child lands hard on the floor and, startled, begins to cry.
Father: “Hey, hey — he’s still little. You don’t have to…”
Mother: “You stay out of this! It’s because you spoil him that this happens! I have no time, I’m leaving!”
Still flushed with anger, the mother walks out of the house, leaving the crying child behind.
On the way to the station, she walks fast, fueled by rage.
“If I’m late to work, it’s that kid’s fault! I cannot fail this meeting today!”
The flames of anger are still burning.
This is what a “sudden outburst” looks like in a normal parent.
Up to this point, it may look exactly like the entry point of abuse.
But from here, the difference becomes decisive.
Chapter 4 — The Function of Looking Back (Guilt)
Somehow, she catches the train. She arrives at work, takes a breath.
As the adrenaline drains away and a quieter mind returns, a “replay” begins inside her head.
The earlier scene flashes back, unbidden.
The child’s startled face when he was shoved.
The frightened eyes. The milk scattered across the floor.
In that instant, the “link of the heart” — late, but it has come — engages.
“I hit him, didn’t I? When you really think about it, he’s still only seven. To shove him over something like that — I was so immature as a parent. What is he doing right now, after that?”
Regret and self-reproach grip the mother’s chest.
“I overdid it.” “I went too far.” An intense, unpleasant feeling — what we usually call guilt — washes over her.
This guilt eats at the parent’s peace of mind. It makes her unable to sit still.
To restore her own emotional stability, the parent has no choice but to take a particular kind of action.
That action is “repair” — the apology.
When she comes home from work and meets her child returning from school, she says:
“I’m sorry about this morning. Mama was in such a rush, I got irritated. That hurt, didn’t it. I’m sorry.”
Saying this, she pulls the child in, and the two of them work together to heal the wounds in each of their hearts.
The parent’s sudden outburst (snapping)
↓
The child’s heart is hurt
↓
Through the link (pain synchronization), the parent’s own heart is hurt
↓
The parent cannot bear it; she takes an apology or some equivalent action, and the two of them repair the wounds together
This is the full sequence inside a normal parent when an outburst happens.
As you can see, it is not that a normal parent never makes mistakes. The point is that, when they do, they feel the pain themselves — and the function for trying to heal it works the way it should.
This cycle of “outburst → pain → repair” is the reason an ordinary parent-child relationship, even when it is wounded, does not break apart. The child learns: “Mom does get angry sometimes, but she also apologizes properly.” The parent learns: “Next time, I’ll be careful.” Imperfect though they are, parent and child slowly build trust together. That is what an ordinary parent-child looks like.
Now — what about the parent in your own memory?
When you were crying out in pain, did your parent’s face also look “as if it were in pain”?
Or did your parent look blank, or even seem to enjoy it?
After the storm passed, did your parent give you a heartfelt apology — “I went too far. I’m sorry” — and an embrace?
Or did they say, “It’s your fault for making me angry,” and walk past your wounded self as if nothing had happened?
The next day, did your parent act as if nothing had occurred, while you alone were still carrying the fear of yesterday? Inside the parent it was already “over,” but inside you it had not yet ended. As a small child, didn’t that gap in temperature confuse you, again and again?
If your parent fits the latter — it is not because you were a “bad child.”
Inside that parent, for some reason, the “sensor that picks up the child’s pain as one’s own pain” did not engage. Or, possibly, it had never been built.
No matter how good you were, no matter how hard you cried, no matter how many ways you tried to communicate it — as long as the other person did not feel “pain,” there was no reason for the behavior to stop.
A person who feels “no heat” pressing a cigarette to their own arm has no reason to stop, either. The same logic applies.
If you have been told, “you must have been doing something wrong,” that is not the truth.
What is true is this: you had been placed, defenseless, in the path of “a person in whom the function for linking with a child’s pain had never developed.”
That, we want you to know, is what was actually happening.
Knowing this fact does not change the past. It does not erase your pain on the spot.
But when the fact, “the way that parent was, was not because of me,” has quietly taken root inside you — one of the voices you used to attack yourself with falls silent.
The next article goes deeper into this same territory.
For now, one quieter voice is enough.
To Those Raised “Normally,” the World of Abuse Sounds Like “The Sun Rising in the West”
The control system we have looked at so far — the regulation through “pain link” and “guilt” — only functions inside parent-child relationships that are emotionally connected. And what “being emotionally connected” actually feels like is something that, in the end, only people who grew up inside such a relationship can grasp as a felt sense.
Many people who grew up with abuse have had the experience of trying to describe their family situation to someone, and not being believed. “Aren’t you exaggerating?” “Every parent is like that.” “Don’t speak ill of your parents.” Behind reactions like these, there is no malice. For someone who grew up taking emotionally connected parent-child relationships as a given, a world entirely without that is as far outside the imagination as “the sun rising in the west.”
Conversely, for the person who grew up without that connection, the daily life of an emotionally connected parent and child is also outside the imagination. Neither side is “wrong.” It is, instead, that the worlds they inhabited were that different. For survivors who keep thinking, “no matter how I tell my story, it never seems to land,” this gap between worlds may be part of the reason.
The Invisible Layer That Sits Beneath Every Form of Abuse
Physical abuse, neglect, psychological abuse, sexual abuse — there is something that exists, in advance of all four. It is the parent’s failure to respond to the child’s feelings: “psychological neglect.”
A normal parent calls out naturally when their child notices something. Receives the feeling when their child is angry. Notices whether their child is cold when they have a runny nose. These “empathic responses to the state of the child’s heart” happen on a daily basis, as something simply ordinary. And this, in itself, is the thickest layer of the wall that prevents abuse.
In an environment where this kind of response does not unfold day to day, the child’s feelings get ignored, again and again. It is not “how the child felt” but “the parent’s mood” that decides the day. The repetition of this is the root of what survivors describe as: “the ordinary thing that should have been there had been turned upside down before I could understand it.”
A certain counselor describes it this way: “A parent in whom the heart-to-heart connection with their child has not formed is a parent who cannot offer the child a ‘place to come home to.’ Tension every time the child returns. Having to watch the parent’s face. Never knowing what kind of expression will greet them. A child who grows up in such a household accumulates the experience that ‘my home was not safe.’ What a normal parent does day to day — that ’empathic response to the state of the child’s heart’ — is exactly what builds that secure base. When that has never been experienced, the child’s inner map of the world ends up wrong at its very root.”
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