The Black Sheep and Secondary Abuse: The Insidious Ways Toxic Parents Perpetuate Abuse After Estrangement
This is how I became estranged from my parents: after receiving a long email from my mother about all the ways I’d been cruel to her and my father at my 10th wedding anniversary party — accusing me of ignoring them; of behaving like her alcoholic father (though my father was the one who got wasted and picked a fight with the bartender); of not inviting her to get her hair and makeup done with me (I had); of not inviting them to stay with me (I had); of not telling her the money I’d given her for Mother’s Day wasn’t a gift (of course it was a gift); etc. etc. etc., I sent a brief reply:
These are not my problems. I am done with this. Please get help and call me when you do. Until then, I can’t have a relationship with you.
It took me a week to recover from the way my mother’s email exploded in my psyche. I waited that whole week to reply, thinking of all the ways to defend or explain, to put the facts down so — maybe this time — she would see that I hadn’t done what she was accusing me of. That I had, in fact, fretted and worked and gone out of my way to make my parents comfortable.
And I finally got it. As long as I continued to engage in this toxic pattern of being attacked, feeling worthless, defending myself, wondering if in fact I had messed up, writing down evidence that I hadn’t messed up — which she wouldn’t accept — and on and on, it would never end. I was 37 years old. And I wanted the gaslighting, the accusations, and the abuse to end.
The only way to do that was to stop engaging.
After I sent my reply, I went into a tailspin of fear. When your abusive parents have had their claws in you your entire life, your fear of them is primal. Even as an adult, it felt like they had the power to to control me, to punish me, even kill me. I waited for the other shoe to drop; I expected it to fall in the form of a furious phone call from my father, engaging in his pattern: telling me how much I’d hurt my mother, how I needed to apologize, how it was my job to make her feel better, how her life, her feelings were so much harder than mine, didn’t I see that? Didn’t I see how easy I had it compared to her? How lucky I was that she was my mother?
That call never came. My mother never got help for what I now know is Narcissism and Borderline Personality Disorder. So they dropped me. I let them.
Finally, I had created the space in my life to begin to heal a lifetime of accumulated trauma. By separating from them, I had freed up all the time, energy, and emotion I’d been spending as an adult trying to get them to see me, to hear me, to love me, all while withstanding constant verbal and emotional attacks on my life choices, my motives, my behavior, my body, my tone of voice, my lack of gratitude… the list was long. And my father — who both worshipped and feared his wife — enabled her behavior every step of the way.
In her book Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members, Sherrie Campbell writes about the space that opens up after estrangement:
When you establish no contact with toxic family members, the greatest gift you give yourself is the uninterrupted time and space to repair your core wounds, to start recovering truly and deeply.
Now, I claimed that time and energy for myself. I started therapy twice a week. I garnered support from my spouse, my siblings, and my friends. I began to trust my own sense of reality and, slowly, believe that I deserved to prioritize my own health and wellbeing.
But my parents weren’t going to let go so easily.
First, they tried to pull in my younger sibling, Jess. When Jess called them to complain about how they’d treated me, the scapegoating began. My father claimed that what I said and did made no sense, that he believed everything Mom had written was true. He said I had no idea what unconditional love was. My mother, sobbing, yelled, “Amy destroyed the family!” Jess hung up and has not contacted them since.
That Christmas, I got a card from them. In her book, Campbell writes about the cards, emails, and other quiet ways parents try to perpetuate abuse: “Your predatory family members transmit abuse in packages that look like love.”
Inside the card, my my mother had penned: “No matter what you do, you will always be a part of us.” Someone else might have thought this was an olive branch. It hit me as a threat — ”there’s no way you can escape us.”
My father wrote, “Hope your day is special.” With that period at the end. He’d pressed down on the pen so hard that he’d practically embossed the words on the card. Someone else might think that’s a quirky way of writing. I saw in it his fury, his sense of betrayal that I had not obeyed his rules of taking care of my mother.
Campbell discusses this in her book:
After you have established no contact, your family may try to sneak back into your life by sending presents or cards. The words and gifts sent typically have a cryptic and passive-aggressive undertone not always recognizable to others.
I threw the card into the wood stove so I would never have to see it again.
I told a few extended family members what had happened. I said that I didn’t expect them to take sides, but to please trust that I had good reasons, that there were things they didn’t know about how I grew up. One cousin replied via email:
Oh no, please don’t do this. When your parents estranged from us, it was so painful for me. I don’t want to go through that again. Please make things right.
Again, I was being scapegoated for what my parents had done — they had estranged from my father’s family when I was a child. I could only imagine what they were telling people. Eventually, I began to hear whispers from those closer to me: my parents were saying they didn’t understand, all they did was love me. I didn’t care about them. I didn’t know what love was. I had destroyed the family.
It wasn’t an accident that my parents were spreading these stories. As Campbell writes, it is a strategy that allows abuse to continue through mutual family members and friends:
Secondary abuse is the reaction secondary people have to their not being able to see, understand, or verify the abuses of your family when they are directly happening to you.
Because they couldn’t verify whose story was correct, many family members chose to side with my charming mother, who played the role of misunderstood victim.
While scrolling Facebook one morning, I received a DM from another cousin:
Your mother’s right! You think you’re too good for your family. I would never leave my family like you did.
This hit me hard. My mother’s accusation that I thought I was “too good” for them had been repeated over and over throughout my life. It hurt and confused me as I tried so hard to gain their approval. What was I doing to make them think that? And here it was again, being hurled at me by who I now understand was a secondary abuser.
I called Jess and told her exactly what the email said and how it hurt.
Jess laughed. “But Amy! she said. “You are too good for them!”
I thought about that for a moment, almost wanting to contradict her, then I had a realization: if they think I’m the black sheep, that I destroyed the family, that I don’t understand love, that I’m too good for them, then… okay! They can think that.
As a matter of fact, I’m going to lean into it. I am the black sheep. I’m the one who harnessed the strength and personal courage to end the cycle of abuse. I’m the one who stood up and realized that I have to take accountability for my own life. I’m the one responsible for healing my trauma — no one else. I made a decision to go no contact so I could do this. And to this day — 21 years later — it remains the healthiest and most profoundly life-affirming decision I’ve ever made.
