The Reflex to Excuse Abuse: How Society Fails Survivors

Imagine arriving at an Emergency Room with a life-threatening, bleeding wound, only to have the doctor lean in and say, "But have you considered that the person who did this to you was probably just very stressed and had a difficult upbringing themselves?" In that moment, the physician is not being nuanced or balanced; they are being dangerously negligent by prioritising the hypothetical motives of an attacker over the immediate survival of the patient. This is exactly what happens in the collective consciousness of our society every single day when survivors speak out and strangers rush to find excuses for the people who harmed them.

No one would accept this behaviour in a medical emergency, yet when the wounds are psychological rather than physical, society suddenly feels entitled to play defence attorney for the perpetrator. The bleeding might be invisible, but the harm is just as real and the need for immediate, unconditional support is just as urgent.

Society's immediate instinct to defend an abuser is rarely about the abuser themselves and almost always about the bystander's own comfort. Accepting that a mother can be cruel, indifferent or systematically abusive shatters the cherished myth of universal maternal devotion; a narrative that many people rely on for their own sense of security in the world. If mothers can be malicious, if families can be dangerous, if the people who are supposed to protect us can be the ones who destroy us, then the foundation of how we understand love and safety crumbles.

To protect this fragile worldview, observers reflexively rewrite the survivor's reality, turning calculated psychological harm into "struggling" or "exhaustion" because it is easier for them to believe in a tired parent than a malicious one. This reframing serves the bystander's emotional needs, not the survivor's healing needs. It allows them to preserve their comfortable beliefs about family while effectively gaslighting the person who lived through the abuse.

The problem is that this protective impulse; this need to believe that all parents fundamentally love their children, becomes a wall that survivors must climb over just to have their reality acknowledged. They are forced to prove not only that harm occurred, but that it was "bad enough" to warrant the loss of the comforting family narrative.

We live in a culture that treats "both sides" as a moral requirement, but in the context of abuse, this false nuance is a weapon used to silence victims. When people insist on "understanding" why a parent was cold or neglectful, they are performing an amateur psychoanalysis that shifts the focus away from the damage and back onto the perpetrator's history. This intellectual exercise might feel like "perspective" to the outsider, but for the survivor, it is a refusal to let their truth sit in the room without being litigated against the abuser's potential struggles.

The language of "balance" and "understanding" sounds compassionate on the surface, but it functions as erasure. Every time someone says, "Maybe she was depressed" or "Maybe she didn't know how to love," they are essentially saying, "Your experience of harm matters less than my need to believe there was a good reason for it". This isn't empathy; it's the prioritisation of the abuser's theoretical inner world over the survivor's documented outer reality.

What makes this particularly insidious is that it masquerades as wisdom. The person offering these "balanced" perspectives often believes they are being more mature, more evolved, more compassionate than the survivor who is "just angry" or "stuck in victimhood". In reality, they are simply more comfortable with complexity that protects the powerful than with the stark truth that protects the vulnerable.

The most damaging part of this defensive reflex is that it replicates the original environment of the abusive home, where the child's pain was always secondary to the parent's emotions. When society tells a survivor to "see it from her side" or "give her grace," they are forcing that survivor back into the role of the emotional caretaker; the very dynamic they are trying to escape through recovery .

Children who grow up with narcissistic or emotionally abusive parents spend their entire childhoods managing the adult's feelings, scanning for danger, minimising their own needs and performing emotional labour that should never be a child's responsibility. When they finally break free and begin to centre their own experience, society swoops in and demands they return to that caretaker role one more time; this time for the comfort of strangers who need to believe abuse isn't as bad as it sounds.

This "second wound" tells the survivor that their healing is less important than the abuser's reputation and that even in their own space, they must continue to prioritise the needs of the person who broke them. It communicates that their value lies not in their own humanity, but in their willingness to keep making excuses for the person who harmed them. For survivors who have spent decades doing exactly that, this feels less like support and more like being shoved back into the burning building they just escaped.

One of the most common refrains in defence of abusers is the phrase "hurt people hurt people," as if recognising that someone was traumatised themselves somehow absolves them of responsibility for traumatising others . While it's true that many abusive parents were themselves abused, this piece of information does nothing to heal the child they went on to harm. It explains the pattern; it does not excuse the perpetuation.

Understanding intergenerational trauma is useful for researchers, therapists and people working on prevention. But when it's deployed in survivor spaces as a reason to soften the narrative or extend sympathy to the abuser, it becomes another tool of silencing. The survivor has already spent years; often decades, trying to understand their parent, searching for reasons, making allowances, hoping that empathy would transform the relationship. They don't need strangers to teach them compassion for their abuser; they need permission to finally centre their own pain .

Breaking generational cycles means acknowledging harm, not explaining it away. It means refusing to pass the trauma forward, not offering infinite grace to those who do .

What survivors actually need from society is not a better understanding of the abuser, but an unwavering belief in the person sharing their story. Healing requires a safe container where the reality of abuse is not up for debate and where a survivor's truth doesn't have to compete with an abuser's "maybes".

This doesn't mean abandoning critical thinking or accepting every story without question. It means recognising that when someone shares their experience of abuse, the immediate response should be support, not interrogation. The time for nuance about the abuser's struggles is not in the comment section of a survivor's post; it's in therapy rooms, academic settings or spaces specifically designed for that exploration .

Instead of searching for reasons to justify harm, we must learn to sit with the discomfort of the survivor's reality, offering validation and support without the reflex to "balance" the narrative. This means saying, "I believe you" before "Have you considered..." It means resisting the urge to soften what they've named as abuse just because it makes us uncomfortable to imagine a parent being that cruel.

The most radical thing you can do for a survivor is to stop being an advocate for their abuser and start being a witness to their recovery. This requires checking your own discomfort at the door and asking yourself, “Am I more invested in protecting the idea of good parents or in supporting the real person in front of me who was harmed?” “Am I trying to help them heal or am I trying to help myself feel better about what happened to them?”

When we choose belief over excuses, we give survivors something many of them have never had, someone who stands on their side without being begged to, someone who refuses to negotiate their pain against their abuser's reputation, someone who finally says, "You matter more than the story we want to tell about families".

That is what healing looks like. Not in forcing survivors to extend endless empathy to people who showed them none, but in finally extending to survivors the unconditional support they deserved all along.

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