by Juli Fraga, psychologist, psyche.co

As a therapist, I’ve seen many patients finally break the cycle of abuse. It took more than not being abusive themselves

Unlike the trauma that follows a tragic accident, natural disaster or serious illness, relational trauma is a lasting emotional wound inflicted by someone close, often a parent or other caregiver. These wounds can stem from physical abuse, but also from repeated verbal abuse (such as calling a child ‘worthless’ or ‘stupid’), or from repeatedly forcing a child to take care of their parent’s emotional needs. Research connects early relational trauma with a greater risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and anxiety in adulthood. It can distort the way people see themselves, others and the world around them.

For decades, talking about relational trauma mostly happened behind closed doors, with a psychotherapist. But with the rise of ‘therapy speak’, a growing number of people are opening up about their childhood wounds, the scars left behind, and what those mean for their present and future. ‘Don’t let yourself become the same person who traumatised you,’ one video on TikTok warns. In other words: don’t repeat your parent’s mistakes.

Healing trauma at its root requires some understanding of the scars, and without this awareness, there’s a risk that trauma will pass down from generation to generation. The mistreatment a person faced as a child and the harm it caused can lead to behaviours that have adverse effects on one’s own children. As numerous psychoanalysts have argued, ‘we repeat what we know’, even when what we ‘know’ was excruciating.

Stopping the spread of family dysfunction has a name of its own: ‘cycle-breaking’. The term has become trendy on social media, and it’s often peppered into conversations about childhood trauma and mental health. Therapy influencers such as the psychotherapist Amanda Smith and the writer and musician Orenda Fink use it to describe how survivors heal and break free from past narcissistic and emotional mistreatment. In my experience as a therapist, however, not everyone knows what this buzzword means in practice.

Cycle-breaking isn’t only about ending physical or verbal abuse. It can mean managing a whole range of potentially harmful behaviours that sometimes travel along with past trauma – behaviours such as rejecting and criticising others, raging out, using too many substances, self-blame or people-pleasing. Cycle-breaking requires someone affected by abuse to do the ‘deep work of [their] own trauma healing’, the psychologist Ingrid Clayton tells me. As a therapist, I’ve seen this in my work with patients, too. Just like dealing with grief, cycle-breaking is a complex, individual journey.

Take a former patient of mine, whom I’ll call Samantha. (Some details of her story have been changed to protect confidentiality.) Growing up, she was repeatedly emotionally abused by her father, who ridiculed and blamed her for his problems. If Samantha spilled a glass of milk, her father called her ‘good for nothing’. Whenever she disagreed with him, he accused her of being spoiled, ungrateful and selfish. As a child, she felt like she was walking on eggshells. Samantha’s mother was treated the same way.

Years of this harsh treatment left a mark on Samantha. As an adult, whenever someone (even her young children) raised their voice slightly or criticised her, her nervous system lit up. Her heart rate increased, her stomach ached, and her breathing became shallow. Without realising it, Samantha responded the same way she learned to respond to her father. She always said ‘yes’ and never set boundaries. She often shouldered the blame for mistakes that weren’t hers. She felt trapped and alone.

Aware of how awful her father’s treatment made her feel, Samantha did not pass on the abuse to her children. But, still, they inherited an echo of it. They saw Samantha treating herself unkindly and never standing up for herself. These behaviours left her feeling insecure, deflated and, at times, depressed. By witnessing Samantha’s actions, her children were at risk of equating unconditional love with endless self-sacrifice, and learning that self-care is selfish and off-limits. Beliefs like these can make relationships feel burdensome rather than fulfilling.

In some cases, the same kind of mistreatment gets repeated across generations, such as when someone who was abused as a child becomes a parent and physically harms their own child. No one sets out into parenthood to inflict pain; behaviours like these happen when the parent doesn’t know how to regulate their emotions. Without this skill set, emotions come out in the same forms of harm that injured them when they were kids.

Cycle-breaking involves ‘learning to feel emotions’ that were never safe to experience, as Clayton says. If someone was not allowed to express certain emotions as a child, it can be very difficult to regulate them as an adult, she explains. Healing involves ‘turning towards those difficult, often contradictory feelings’, such as grief, anger, fear and even ambivalence.

Focusing on emotions is a tenet of AEDP (originally an acronym for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy), a trauma-focused therapy that was developed by the psychologist Diana Fosha, and which I practise with my clients. AEDP helps survivors work through the emotions that so often get blocked and buried by past trauma. Samantha, my patient, experienced an unbearable amount of guilt. For her, guilt had become a kind of coping mechanism: it protected her from feeling another emotion – anger – that she had blocked and buried for years due to her father’s abuse.

In AEDP therapy, guilt, shame and anxiety are known as ‘inhibitory emotions’. These emotions typically ensure that people behave in ways that help them fit in with their families and society. But they can also block access to other emotions, such as anger, fear, sadness and excitement. Those important, ‘core’ emotions often help human beings take actions that serve them well, such as standing up to others when angry, running from danger when afraid, or crying when sad.

Samantha’s core anger was never validated when she was a child, and she learned to block it with guilt and anxiety. This sort of inhibition is not done with conscious awareness. It’s a survival strategy that allows children to continue relying on their caregivers, especially when their caregivers mistreat them. However, this coping mechanism doesn’t vanish once a child leaves home. Adults like Samantha can remain cut off from their anger. This left Samantha feeling like she had nothing left to give. All she knew was guilt, which made her feel miserable.

To help my patients explore the dynamics of their emotions, I use a practical tool called the Change Triangle. When adverse experiences cut someone off from their core emotions, this tool – which was initially developed by David H Malan and adapted by Hilary Jacobs Hendel – serves as a compass that guides a person back to those emotions. Naturally, the triangle has three points, representing:

  • core emotions, such as anger, sadness, fear, disgust, excitement or joy;
  • inhibitory emotions, such as guilt, shame and anxiety;
  • and defences, which include anything one does to avoid feeling painful emotions, such as criticising one’s self or others, denying problems, withdrawing, or overeating.

When someone is cut off from core emotions, they are unable to make good use of the messages those emotions carry. Instead, they stay on one side of the triangle, vacillating between inhibitory emotions and defences.

With Samantha, I used the Change Triangle to help her name, validate and work through the core emotions that had gotten buried. First, I noticed the guilt that she repeatedly expressed – guilt for not volunteering at her children’s school, for instance, or for wanting some time to herself. I recognised her guilt as an inhibitory emotion. Studying the way Samantha communicated, I also noticed telltale signs of shame: when she mentioned her guilt or spoke about her painful childhood, she broke eye contact and looked down, and it seemed as if she wanted to hide.

Identifying and working with defences is another important step toward healing

When AEDP therapists notice a patient’s distress, we help them ground and breathe, which allows the nervous system to settle. I invited Samantha to ‘slow down’ and take some deep breaths with me. Taking a deep belly breath and exhaling through pursed lips, like blowing on hot soup, elicits the body’s relaxation response and helps a person feel calmer – a helpful step before exploring the source of distress.

Identifying and working with defences is another important step toward healing. In Samantha’s tendency to agree to requests for her time and assistance, even when her plate was already full, and to treat it as her ‘job’ to take care of other people’s feelings, we recognised defences that prevented her from experiencing unbearable emotions.

It took a few sessions but, soon, Samantha could name and validate some of the emotions she had been avoiding. In one of our sessions, after she felt calmer and described the bodily sensations she noticed, I asked her three simple questions: ‘Is there sadness there?’ ‘Is there anger there?’ ‘Is there fear there?’

‘I feel angry,’ Samantha stated, as her voice got louder.

Simply labelling emotions in this way can help to temper distress. And once anger or any other core emotion is acknowledged, it is easier to identify what the emotion is asking you to do. To remind Samantha that she wasn’t alone with her anger, as she had been as a child, I said: ‘Can you stay with your anger and stay with me? I am here with you.’

Then, I invited her to direct the energy of her anger toward its true source. ‘Where does it want to go?’ I asked. Without hesitation, she replied: ‘It wants to go to my father.’

‘Of course it does,’ I said, affirming her. ‘Your father treated you so poorly and really hurt you … What does anger want to say to him?’

Samantha sat up straight – a sign that anger was no longer something she was blocking or ashamed of. ‘It wants to say: “I am so mad at you! I didn’t deserve the way you treated me.”’

As she practised naming and validating her anger, Samantha’s guilt and shame diminished. She recognised her defences as side-effects of what she had experienced growing up, and worked through emotions that had been off-limits when she was a kid. As a result, she began setting boundaries with her kids, such as telling them ‘no’ when they asked for more screen time or a later bedtime. She started taking time for exercise and no longer saw self-care as a selfish act. And when fellow parents asked Samantha to volunteer, she could decline without feeling ashamed or too guilty. Finally, after several years of therapy, Samantha stood up to her father. ‘I don’t like the way you speak to Mom and me,’ she told him.

Without these tools, Samantha likely would have remained consumed by guilt. She would have continued avoiding boundaries and feeling burdened and resentful. Research shows that feeling resentful can lead to parental burnout, which can cause parents to emotionally distance themselves from their kids. When this happens too much, the parent-child relationship can suffer.

Those who, like Samantha, successfully break the cycles initiated by relational trauma must look inward, becoming detectives of their own emotional lives. With some support, they can identify their patterns of coping and the ways those patterns work against them. Although it’s challenging at first, in time, they learn to befriend their emotions instead of burying them.

About the author; Juli Fraga is a licensed psychologist specialising in parenting and women’s health concerns. She is the co-author of the parenting book Parents Have Feelings, Too (2025). Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Time magazine and The New York Times, among others. She lives in San Francisco, California.

Keywords; trauma, parenting