When You Feel Like You're Being Abused by Your Child

**You can also listen to this in audio format only on The Regulated Mother Podcast on Apple or Spotify.

**Below is the blog article for easy reading.

When Parenting Feels Unbearable

I screamed louder than I ever had before. My son had just slammed a kettle of boiling water, and it splashed onto my neck. I ran, shaking and whimpering. And all I could think was— “I can’t do this anymore.”

If you’ve ever felt scared of your own child… if you’ve wondered if it’s okay to feel that way… if you’ve whispered to yourself, “this feels like abuse, but I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that,” you are not alone.

Parenting a child whose violence or controlling behavior can leave you traumatized, exhausted, and ashamed is one of the hardest experiences a parent can face. In this article, I want to share what this reality looks like and feels like, and how to begin finding safety—body, mind, and soul.

We’ll explore what’s happening in your nervous system, why this is trauma, and how to start reclaiming your sense of agency. I’ll share tools, research, and something I believe deep down: there’s meaning in all of this, even if you can’t see it yet.

The Day I Called 911

I screamed the loudest scream I had ever screamed as I turned around in disbelief, looking at my son, while feeling the burning on my neck.

My son was in one of his multi-hour rages and had already punched holes in the walls and head-banged against the glass French doors, cutting his head. He was beyond gone… I didn’t recognize my son. Where was he?

Then suddenly, he came into the kitchen where I was standing, grabbed the tea kettle—which still had boiling water in it—and slammed it against the counter. Hot water splashed onto my neck as I turned to shield my face.

I screamed. Loud. I was in shock. And I dropped to a whimper, running upstairs, frantic and trembling.
“I can’t go on like this anymore, God… please help me… I don’t know what to do.”

Without even realizing it, my body moved to grab my phone and I heard the words in my head: “It’s time. He needs to go to the hospital. We need help. We can’t do this anymore.” Within seconds, I was calling 911, my hands and body shaking with fear.

This is the reality for many parents of children who become extremely violent. You try everything possible to help your child calm down, but they just can’t. Panic takes them over, and they lash out on you.

There were many times my son lashed out on my husband and me—hitting, punching, biting, spitting, throwing hard objects. Our only saving grace was that he had low muscle tone and wasn’t very strong, so we could withstand the blows, even when they hurt. The act of throwing things felt more dangerous to me, and being consumed with trying to protect the house from destruction was exhausting.

I constantly teetered between “I can’t take anymore” and “This is my child—I can’t call the police on him.”

This is the cold, harsh reality for many parents with hypersensitive, high-needs kids—especially PDA autistic children whose threat systems get triggered so easily. We go between feeling like “I’m being abused by my own child” to feeling shame for thinking that, and wondering, “I must be doing something wrong for it to be this bad.”

The fear and even terror are so real. The shame is so real. And it’s hard to reach out for help because you know the systems won’t be able to help your child anyway. All they can do is take your child and give you some reprieve—only to add more trauma to your child’s system and send them home in worse shape than before.

It’s the hardest position to be in.
And I’m here to tell you—you’re not alone. This is the hardest part of parenting a high-needs child. The violence is real, and the threat against your emotional and physical safety feels very real.

And this is your child. That is the most challenging, confusing, and mind-F’ing part of all of this. As a mother, it is so hard to even take in that you could fear your own child… it’s so fundamentally against how we are wired to feel toward our children.

It creates this feeling of a split in the brain because there cannot be integration between both of these feelings when it comes to your child.

So today, I want to help name this experience—so you can make sense of what’s happening in your nervous system, feel deeply understood, and help yourself feel safer with your child.

Why It Feels Like Abuse—Even If It’s Not Intentional

Let’s start by naming the thing no one wants to say: sometimes it feels like your child is abusing you.

But here’s the truth: they’re not an abuser in the way we typically understand that word. Their intent is not to harm you. Their nervous system is in a panic state—and they’re trying to survive.

But just because it’s not intentional doesn’t mean it’s not traumatic. When someone screams at you, hits you, throws things, or tries to control every move you make—it doesn’t matter if they’re your child. Your body still registers danger, even life threat.

Your brain doesn’t rationalize, “It’s just my 9-year-old.” It goes into a fight-flight-freeze response. And when this happens repeatedly, it accumulates. This is what trauma is: too much, too fast, too often—with no way to fully recover.

If this feels like abuse to you, that’s not because you’re weak. It’s because your nervous system reads it that way automatically. This is not under your conscious control. This is a survival system doing what it is designed to do.

And when your body registers danger from the person you love most—your own child—the dissonance can feel unbearable. Let’s talk about why this is especially hard for mothers.

Why It’s So Hard to Make Sense of This as a Mother

Here’s the conundrum: how do you process fear when the source of your fear is your child—the one you love most?

As a mother, your brain is biologically wired to nurture, protect, and bond with your child. So when your child becomes the source of threat, it creates a kind of neural dissonance. Your brain can’t compute both truths at the same time.

One part of you is in fight/flight/freeze—wanting to run, hide, or dissociate. Another part of you is in caregiving—wanting to move toward your child to help them calm down.

This split creates deep internal conflict, confusion, and shame. It’s no wonder you might dissociate, shut down, or feel frozen. It’s not just the behavior—it’s the betrayal of your most primal instincts.

You’re not crazy for struggling with this. Your brain is trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. And that’s where nervous system education becomes so important.

What’s Actually Happening in the Nervous System

When your child is in a rage, their nervous system is hijacked by threat. They’re in a sympathetic fight state of attacking, screaming, using aggression or control because they don’t feel safe and feel threatened at a subconscious level.

When this happens repeatedly, your own nervous system gets conditioned into chronic stress responses. You may find yourself bracing all day, constantly on edge, scanning for danger—even when things seem calm.

Over time, this can lead to complex PTSD: where your system is always anticipating harm, even in moments of peace. Your body doesn’t trust safety anymore. It lives in hypervigilance.

Unlike other trauma survivors, you don’t get to leave the source of the trauma. And here’s what’s so hard: you can’t fully rest, because the danger lives in your home.

This is what makes trauma from a child’s violence different from other traumas. It’s ongoing, unpredictable, and deeply confusing—because love and fear live side by side.

So let’s talk about how this mirrors other high-stress environments—like war zones.

Why This Is Like Living in a War Zone or Abusive Home

The parallels between parenting a violent, high-needs child and living in a war zone or abusive household are real—and now validated by research.

In war zones, people live in constant threat. They learn to predict patterns, minimize damage, and shift their behaviors and reactions so they can survive.

The same is true for parents like us.

A parent I read about said she would “walk on eggshells all day” just to keep her child from exploding. This was my experience too.

Another said she would text her partner to hide certain objects before her child came home, just in case. This was also my experience… always going around the house to see what he could grab and throw that could harm us, and locking things up daily.

These are survival strategies—just like in a war zone.

And the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between threats from outside the home or inside the home. When the threat comes from someone you love—and someone who depends on you—it’s even more disorganizing for the brain.

That’s why so many of us feel shame. We think: “This shouldn’t feel like abuse.” But what your body knows is—it does.

And until we name that, we can’t begin to heal it.

Why You Feel So Stuck and Like It Will Never End

One of the hardest parts of this experience is the feeling that it’s inescapable.

You can’t walk away. You’re their parent.
You can’t force change. Your child’s nervous system is fragile and often developmentally delayed.
And support systems often don’t help—or even retraumatize—especially when neurodiversity or PDA is misunderstood.

When your nervous system feels like it can’t fight or flee the situation, then it drops to a felt sense that “this is inescapable, and my only option is to freeze and give up.” Remember—this is all happening automatically and unconsciously.

This can lead to what trauma experts call “learned helplessness”—where the nervous system stops looking for escape and drops into collapse.

This is the dorsal vagal state: freeze, numbness, hopelessness.

When this state becomes chronic, it starts to shape your beliefs.

You may start thinking:
“Nothing will ever change.”
“I’m broken.”
“My child will never be okay.”
“I’m a failure.”
“What’s the point?”

These are not truths. These are trauma-induced thoughts.

And they form when your body hasn’t had the chance to discharge, regulate, or feel any sense of safety or agency.

That’s why one of the first steps in healing is to give your system back some sense of safety and choice—even if the safety is not there externally or the choices are limited.

And we will explore how to feel some safety and agency in this very hard situation you’re in, but first, let’s look at the research that validates our experiences and helps you understand more deeply that you are not alone in this.

What the Research Shows — You’re Not Alone

Research shows that what you’re going through is real and valid—even if it’s not widely talked about.

A 2023 Frontiers in Psychology study found that mothers exposed to repeated trauma—such as interpersonal violence or caregiving in extreme behavioral situations—often develop PTSD-like symptoms, including emotional numbing, chronic fear responses, and the inability to rest.

A UK-based CAPVA study (Child-to-Parent Violence and Abuse) documented firsthand accounts of mothers hiding in closets or locking themselves in bedrooms while their children raged. One mother reported her 13-year-old son destroyed the entire kitchen while she waited, terrified, for it to end.

In Psychiatric Times, researchers emphasized how caregivers of children with aggressive behaviors are at increased risk for immune dysregulation, chronic fatigue, and heightened trauma responses due to the unrelenting nature of their caregiving stress.

Another study on children with OCD and ASD showed that parents often reported symptoms of trauma themselves, especially when rituals turned aggressive or controlling behavior escalated to violence.

These findings affirm what you may be experiencing: living in chronic fear, overwhelm, and the inability to relax is not just parenting stress—it’s trauma.

And it deserves to be treated with the same compassion and seriousness.

So what do people do when they live under threat for the long haul? Let’s look at what helps.

What Helps People Survive Prolonged Trauma

When we look to research on war zones, natural disasters, and long-term abuse, we find key protective factors that help people survive chronic trauma.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, wrote:
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

His core message was that the human spirit can survive the unthinkable when it finds meaning, choice, and inner freedom.

Other studies support this. Survivors in war zones often survive by:

• Finding structure and predictability in their environment
  
  
• Practicing moment-to-moment regulation, including grounding exercises and breathwork
  
  
• Staying connected to support systems and avoiding isolation
  
  
• Using meaning-making practices, whether spiritual or purpose-driven
  
  

These same practices can help you survive—and eventually, heal.

Trauma isn’t just about what happens. It’s about what gets stuck. And these practices help you metabolize what you’ve been through so it doesn’t become who you are.

So now, let’s talk about what you can actually do in your day-to-day life to feel safer and reclaim a sense of agency.

How to Make the Situation Safer and Prevent Further Trauma

To make the situation better, three core concepts can help you feel less helpless: Context, Choice, and Connection. These three things help the nervous system to feel safe, so it’s important to build them into these challenging situations and into daily life.

Context means understanding what’s really happening—the who, what, when, where, why, and how of a situation. Instead of thinking “My child is violent and abusive,” you reframe it to: “My child is having a panic attack and is completely dysregulated.”

Knowing the why—their neurological, emotional, and developmental triggers—helps you shift out of fear and into clarity. Also knowing what you are going to do and how you will do it when the violent situation arises is key. The nervous system likes to know you have a plan in order to feel more safe.

We made a safety plan for our home when my son started to get dysregulated. Everyone knew what to do: where to go, how to stay safe, and when to call for help. Sometimes it meant staying quiet but close by. Other times, it meant protecting fragile things or removing items he could harm himself with. When your child is in a rage, you don’t want to scramble. This helps you move from chaos to structure, which supports your nervous system.

Choice means you feel like you have options and some autonomy and control. Staying in a place of agency and in your power to handle the situation requires feeling like you have some choice in what you can do. The key here is to focus your attention on what choices you have to keep everyone safe—and not focus on trying to get your child to stop the behavior, because oftentimes if we approach them during these violent episodes, they just get worse.

So have some choices ready to keep your child, their sibling, and yourself safe. Focus your choices mostly on what you can do for yourself to help yourself feel safer in this situation.

Connection means staying connected to yourself and your regulation tools. Whether it’s noticing your internal state, whispering calming words, doing tense-and-release, shaking it off, or putting an ice pack on your face to bring down a panic or rage response—these are the cues of safety your body needs to survive.

Then… aftercare is also vital. After a violent episode, let yourself fully come down. Shake, cry, rest. Orient to the room. Remind your nervous system: “It’s over now.”

And then, when your child is ready, repair with love.
Remind them: “What you did doesn’t change how I feel about you. I love you. We’re okay.”

Outside of intense moments, create small moments of joy and shared control—letting them lead a game, explore with you, or cuddle. These help their system feel safe over time, which is how true behavioral change can take root.

Most importantly, remember the two ingredients that encode trauma:

• Feeling like you have no choice
  
  
• Feeling like the danger is inescapable
  
  

Even if your choices are limited or feel awful—name them.
Tell yourself: “I could leave, but I’m choosing to stay.” That reclaims agency, which is what your nervous system needs to feel safe again.

When Past Trauma Gets Activated

Much of the time, the feeling of being abused or helpless isn’t just about now—it’s also about past traumas getting activated in the present, and this compounds the present-day reaction.

In my case, my parents never hit me or abused me. But I discovered, through deep healing work, that I had experienced preverbal trauma at age one. I nearly died—and that experience left me with a deep, unconscious belief that I was a victim and that my life wasn’t safe.

When my son raged and controlled my every move, it felt like my life was being threatened again. I couldn’t understand why I would go into a full-blown rage or collapse in a ball until I saw the link.

My child wasn’t just triggering me—he was awakening a much younger part of me that had once felt helpless and alone.

For many parents, this is why it feels like your child is the perpetrator—even when you know logically they’re just dysregulated.

Our trauma parts don’t know time. If you’re finding yourself flooded and raging or shutting down, it’s not just about the moment. It’s your nervous system remembering something your mind may not.

As Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s leading trauma experts, says and wrote a book about: “The Body Keeps the Score.” Your body is remembering what your mind may not.

That’s why deep healing can often require trauma reprocessing work at the body level so that you can separate past from present. I know in my case, the biggest difference in how I reacted to my son’s violence came from me reprocessing my preverbal trauma and finally feeling a felt sense of safety in my body at a level I had never felt before.

And sometimes, for deeper peace, we need to zoom out even further.

From a Soul Perspective

As we pan out to the bigger picture, I want to offer a perspective that’s deeply meaningful to me—one that helped me make sense of everything.

I remember asking and arguing with the Universe, “Why is this happening? It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

That question led me to start reading books on past life regression, which explore the idea that our souls choose certain life circumstances before we come to this earth—to help us learn and evolve.

I came to believe that my son and I chose to experience this together so that we could grow, heal, and remember who we truly are beyond our bodies and brains—our True Selves—our souls.

Eventually, I had a past life regression session myself. I saw lifetimes where I had been with my son before. And I started to understand why we were up against this challenge in this lifetime.

I share this with you not to convince you of anything, but in case it brings you comfort, meaning, or a sense of connection to something greater. This may feel “out there” for some, and that’s okay. You can take it or leave it.

But for me, believing that there’s a bigger picture to our pain and suffering has helped me hold it all with more compassion and grace. It has also helped me feel like less of a victim, as I knew deep down I had chosen this path so I could learn and grow… I had agency in choosing this experience.

Whether or not that perspective resonates with you, I want to close with a message I hope everyone can take in.

You Have the Power Within

After everything we’ve talked about—after all the intensity and heartbreak—here’s what I want you to hold onto most:

If this is your life right now, I want you to know:
You’re not alone.
You’re not failing.
You’re not crazy for feeling like this is abuse.

Your nervous system is trying to keep you safe.
And even in the darkest moments, you are doing something profoundly sacred: loving a child who is struggling, while fighting to stay whole yourself.

But here’s what I want to leave you with—something deeper still:

Even when it feels like there is no way out… you have the power to create space.
Even when it feels like you have no choices… you can reclaim agency, one breath, one small action at a time.
Even when your body is screaming “I can’t do this”… you have the ability to bring in the cues of safety, to regulate yourself enough to stay present, to rise—again and again.

This is not easy. This is not quick. But it is possible.

And when you begin to bring that sense of safety and choice back into your nervous system—however slowly, however imperfectly—you begin to realize something profound:

That your power was never about control. It was about presence.
It was about discovering the part of you that exists beyond survival—the part of you that can meet the storm, not because you’re unaffected, but because you’ve remembered who you truly are.

That is what we’re here to learn.
That is the deeper calling beneath this unimaginable challenge.
To awaken to our true capacities. To our resilience. To our soul.

You have the power to bring this to yourself. Not all at once. Not forever. But in this moment—and the next one.

And that… is enough for today.

If this resonated with you, please share this with someone who needs to feel seen, validated, and less alone. We are in this together. ❤️