Becoming the Parent Your Child Needs After Abuse and Trauma

This blog was written for us by Dr. Christine Cocchiola, a researcher, educator, and expert in coercive control and its impact on children and adult survivors.

You know that feeling when you hear the door open.

There's a moment, just before they walk in, where you hold your breath. You're not sure which version of them you're about to get: the child you know, or the child they send back.

Then they walk in and say something that doesn't sound like them at all. Something cruel or dismissive, something in his words, not theirs. And you have to decide in about three seconds how to respond.

I spent an hour talking through exactly this with the MEND community; you can watch it here. Not the broad picture of what coercive control does to children, but the specific moments. What's happening in your child's brain. Why they say what they say? What you can do that actually helps.

If you missed our conversation about navigating family court, you can read that here: What No One Tells Protective Parents About Family Court.

What Abuse Does to a Child's Sense of Safety

Safety for a child isn't about physical danger alone. It's a felt experience that starts before they have words for it.

From the time a child is born, and sometimes even in utero, they're reading the emotional environment around them. If there's tension in the home, they feel it in their bodies. If the parent they depend on is scared or walking on eggshells, they feel that too. Secure attachment, the kind that lets a child move through the world knowing they are unconditionally loved, gets built in small moments over time. 

In homes where coercive control is happening, those moments keep getting interrupted.

Children who grow up in these homes don't think that something is wrong with their parent. They think something is wrong with the world. And they learn very early to manage themselves in ways that keep them safer. Those are called trauma responses, and the four most common ones are fawn, freeze, flight, and fight.

Fawning looks like a child who just goes along with everything, who never pushes back, who seems easy because they've learned that being easy keeps the peace. 

Freezing looks like a child who doesn't remember things they should remember, whose brain has quietly tucked away what was too hard to hold. 

Flight looks like the child who is an A student, on every team, overachieving everywhere, and you tell yourself they're fine because they look fine. 

Fight looks like the child who came home last weekend and said the thing that knocked the wind out of you.

None of these are character flaws in your child. All of them are survival tactics.

Why Your Child Says What They Say When They Come Home

When your child is with the predatory parent, they are told things about you. Not once, not occasionally. Regularly, and with intention. You caused the divorce. You took the family's money. You don't really love them. You're not safe.

Your child doesn't process all of this the way an adult would. But they're living in a house where it's the water they swim in, and they aren't old enough or free enough to sort through it on their own. So when they come home, they sometimes bring it with them.

Your child is carrying what was handed to them. They have nowhere else to put it.

I always say, imagine they're walking in the door with a satchel on their back full of poisonous arrows. He loaded that satchel. Then he sent them home to you. The arrows aren't theirs. The satchel isn't even theirs. They've just been carrying it all weekend with no way to put it down.

What Happens When You React

Before the strategies, I want to talk about what's happening in your body when your child walks in the door angry.

You're a trauma survivor. Your nervous system has been on high alert for a long time. When someone comes at you with accusations, especially accusations that mirror the things he used to say, your brain doesn't stop and think. It goes straight to survival. Your nervous system has been trained by years of threat. That makes complete sense.

The problem is that when you react from that place, when you say “how dare you talk to me that way,” or “you sound just like your father”, two things happen. Shame gets activated in your child, and shame is exactly what makes them more controllable by him. The arrow he loaded in that satchel just landed.

He wants you to react. That's the whole point. If he can get your child to walk through the door loaded, and you react, and your child comes back to report that you lost it, then he's controlling you both from across town without doing a single thing.

What to Do Instead: The 4 P's

Predict: Before they come home, sit down and write out the things they're likely to say. You probably already know what that will be. There's a pattern. The accusations tend to be the same ones, slightly rearranged. If you can see the arrow coming, you can get off the tracks before it hits you.

Prepare: Come up with one response. One sentence. Something calm, short, and in "I" statements. Practice it out loud. Not in your head, out loud. Because when your child walks in and says the thing, your brain is going to go into survival mode, and you will not be able to think. You need to have the response already in your body.

Practice: Find a friend who will role-play this with you. Ask them to come at you three times, escalating each time, the way your child does. Practice staying calm. Practice saying the sentence. Practice disengaging.

Protect: When you stay regulated, your child can regulate too. Brains sync. When you signal safety with your body and your tone, their brain takes the cue. You're not just managing the moment. You're repairing their nervous system, one return home at a time.

The VEST 2DK Response

I use this acronym with protective parents because it gives you something to hold onto in the moment.

VEST stands for Validate with Empathy in a Soft Tone. 2DK means twice, then Disengage Kindly.

When your child comes in and says something that came from him, you respond once with a calm, short statement. Something like: "Sweetheart, that's not true. I'm sorry you heard that."

They say it again. Because they will. You say it again, maybe slightly differently. "Mom tells the truth, and I didn't do that."

The third time, you don't engage. You say gently that you're done with this conversation for now, and you leave the room or shift to something else. "I'm going to take a shower. If you want to talk later, I'm here."

That's it. Engaging more than twice gives the argument more oxygen than it deserves, and more power to the person who sent them home with it.

Leave kindly. If you leave angry, you've lost the moment. If you leave calmly, your child has just watched you handle something hard without falling apart. Even if they don’t show anything, they see it.

How to Rebuild the Relationship

Repairing a fractured attachment doesn't happen through conversations about what he's doing. It happens through moments.

Positive memories heal the brain. Neuroscience backs this up. When you create a genuinely good experience with your child, their brain files it. Over time, those moments build a different story about who you are and how safe you are.

This might mean changing some things on the day they come home. If dinner at the table is where things fall apart, change dinner. A picnic on the floor. Waffles instead of pasta. A walk before you sit down together. 

It also means watching for the opportunities the predatory parent hands you. When he doesn't show up for the third Saturday in a row, you don't say, "Daddy loves you, he was just busy.” You say, "That's gotta hurt. This is the third Saturday." You name the pattern without naming him as the villain. Your child can put the pieces together. They just need you to acknowledge what's real.

And you never put him down directly. There's no version of that which helps your child. But you can talk about what respectful behavior looks like, what it means when someone keeps letting you down, using examples from your own life or something they saw in a movie. 

You're giving them a way of seeing the world that they'll apply on their own timeline.

When One Child Seems Lost to You

Some of you are reading this, thinking about the child who isn't coming back. The teenager who has completely aligned with him. The one who won't take your calls.

I call this the lifeboat situation. You might have three children, and two of them are in the boat with you. One is out to sea. You keep a lifeline out for the one out to sea. You don't cut the rope. But you put your energy into the two in the boat, because he's coming after them next.

This is one of the hardest things I say to protective parents. And I say it because I have watched mothers pour every ounce of themselves into the child who won't receive it, while the children who are still reachable slowly drift.

For the child who has pulled away, especially older children and young adults, the work is showing up without an agenda when you see them. Go to lunch. Pay the bill. Don't ask about his house or the court case. Don't process your pain with them. Just be present, functioning, and okay. They're watching to see which story is true. Every meal where you show up calm is evidence.

You Are Their Healer

You didn't ask for this. Your children didn't ask for this. And yet here you are, doing the hardest parenting of your life.

The attachment your child has with you, the one he has spent years trying to damage, is still there. It has always been there. He has been working to break something he cannot actually destroy.

You don't have to be a perfect parent in this. You have to be the parent who doesn't shame them when they act out, who stays calm when they test you, who creates small moments of safety over and over again. Your brain heals when you do this. So does theirs.

That is the most protective thing you can do. And it is already more than he thinks you're capable of.

I hope you'll join me next time I'm with the MEND community.