How can extreme abandonment trauma trickle down into the next generation, if unaddressed

I’ve been confronted recently with a lot of reports from mothers lamenting the fact that their adult kids hate them.

We’re not talking about the common tension that can exist in a parent–adult–child relationship, the result of unresolved issues cemented over time. We’re talking about a kind of bitterness that cuts so deep that sometimes the adult child might even try to kill the parent — in a certain way. With words. Or sometimes with violence.

How can a situation reach this point?

Even more so that, what struck me most about these women was that they were warm, kind, funny, and — in some ways — even profound.

What started to spark my interest was noticing very unique life experiences they had in common.

For instance, more often than not, they’d been in marriages that had fallen apart. The men they described ranged from emotionally absent to perversely abusive.

Another common thread? These women had difficult childhoods. Usually, one parent — often the father — disappeared without explanation and never stayed in touch. Or the parent who did stay — often the mother — placed the child in the impossible role of meeting her own narcissistic needs for validation and recognition.

How Can This Lead to Hate?

But how can a hard life experience translate itself into motherhood, into bringing up a child who ends up being a deeply resentful adult — sometimes with psychotic or paranoid disorders?

Because yes, most of these patients also reported their adult child had developed a mental disorder, usually on the psychotic side.

It feels like such a far stretch. And yet, their lives’ uncanny resemblance gave me the feeling that there was a pattern here, a causal link.

And I started wondering about the deeper mechanisms at play. And I found the beginning of the threads actually… well, in my own life as a mother.

Recently, I learned a painful truth about life. Life is hard and unpredictable. And I’d better prepare my kids for that, rather than protect them from it.

I used to think early childhood was a place where you had to shelter young children as much as possible from hardships and disappointments.

There’s probably a different threshold for every person. But for me, it was a very low one: if they cried, if they got frustrated, if they were scared, if something was unfair, if someone took a toy away from them — I would get alarmed. Panicked, even.

The alarm that rang was:“Reality alaaaaarm: imperfection alert. An imperfection has permeated the peace bubble you’ve created around your child. Your child will be damaged and grow up hating the world. Alert. Alert. Bubble about to burst.”

I was sure that every single second of their early lives had to be monitored so they would grow up feeling safe, heard, understood, and all the stuff we want strong adults to have as assets once they get there.

But I was exhausted. Depleted. And worst of all, resentful about my job as a mother.

I thought: “I can’t possibly do it. It’s too hard. Who succeeds at that? What’s wrong with me? I hate being a mum most of the time.”

I was micro-rescuing them.

It took a few hard life events, one after the other, to force me to realise that life’s never going to be easy just because we wish it to be. It will either be at times, or it won’t, and we have little control over when that happens.

And I was training my children to think that life owed them the good stuff all the time. They were heading towards a cliff of constant frustration, disappointment, and victimhood.

Life is hard. Life does not give us what we want most of the time. Life is unpredictable. And they’d better be ready for it.

So I shifted. I stopped taking the disappointments, the injustices, the hurts, the frustrations, the fears away from them.

As long as nothing was directly, physically threatening, I decided to let them experience how life burns.

And then just quietly be there to acknowledge and understand what they were going through. Gently explain to them: yes, this is a feeling that’s uncomfortable. Yes, it’s here now. Yes, it will pass eventually.

And. That’s. It.

That’s it. Just quiet presence.

And then I realised that presence was what was actually helping them become stronger and more independent. Not avoiding problems. Just knowing there was someone standing with them, and that it would pass.

Trauma, trauma, trauma. It's all about trauma.

When I thought back to my patients’ lives, I saw that presence had lacked totally.

Some of them even said: “Somehow I lived my life, but I don’t know how I got so far.”

Somehow they had found a way to cope. But then their child came into the world. And when that child started facing hardships, suddenly these mothers got deeply triggered again. They faced that same old vacuum again, through their child, vicariously.

That same helplessness came back. But this time, they could maybe do something about it.

And so, they started trying to protect their children from every hardship:

• “Don’t do this, you’ll get hurt.”

• “Don’t do this, you’ll fail and feel frustrated. You’ve tried it before, it doesn’t work for you.”

• “I’ve been telling you to stop doing this.”

And yes, micro-managing everything.

And slowly, their children learned that they should not trust themselves. That they were, in essence, fragile, incapable beings.

It’s so sad because it was absolutely not the intention of these mothers. They were just trying to protect their children from their own horrific experience of losing it — and no one being there for them.

But trauma from what?

As children, we can’t really cope on our own. Even if we as parents give space for our children to experience hardship, we still come back every day — to pick them up from daycare, to pay attention to what they put in their mouths when they are little, who their friends are, which school they go to.

We pay attention to alarm signals, while leaving space for realistic expectations.

We still make hard decisions, like moving cities or countries, sometimes even — sadly — divorce, which has profound impacts on them. But we also try to stay available for them as much as we can.

Why? Because they need us to create a safe boundary between what’s a tolerable hardship and what puts them in real danger.

Why? Because they can’t tell the difference.

But if no one is there for us in a moment of hardship, it’s easy to think that the trauma comes from the experience itself — the context — rather than from the absence of a caring adult.

And these mothers had experienced exactly that. So now, they confused hardship with trauma.

Rather than seeing that the hardship was nothing — and could have easily been turned into resilience and strength — had it not been for the total absence of a caregiver.

They simply had not been supported. That was the trauma. Not the event itself.

A well-intentioned parent with traumas of deep abandonment will always confuse hardship and vacuum together as one.

Why Hatred?

But why, in some cases, does it lead to such intense levels of hatred from the child?

I thought again: we rage in anger when we feel something is getting in the way of us and life.

In a way, these mothers were not letting their child into reality. They were overprotective, but also over-preventive, trying to teach them to not trust any choices they made on their own, any steps they took by themselves, any judgments they were making… in order to step in and be the one in control.

Because once in control, they could be sure they could protect them properly, avoid hard situations for them… as the seeing, experienced adult.

They wanted the steering wheel.

But that’s also, in a way, like standing in the way of life.

And I think there is an inherent survival need in the child to remove the obstacle that stands between them and life: the parent. It’s survival.

But at the same time, the parent has made themselves indispensable. They became the referee for everything.

And it’s very scary to let go of that. Because what if they were right? What if I actually can’t handle it? What if this situation is actually dangerous and life-threatening? How do I know the difference?

Some children who grow into adults develop a strange but quite clever unconscious coping mechanism: they choose to create an alternative reality bubble where they feel in control and make their own rules.

That’s becoming psychotic.

And some — often these same kids — when they sense they are not really connected to reality, then turn towards what they think is forcing them into their self-made psychotic bubble: their mothers. And they want to destroy that obstacle.

In that moment of rage, I don’t think they actually hate their mothers. I think they have an impulse, a drive to live, that is so intense it channels itself into destroying what gets in the way.

It’s unfortunate that it appears that what gets in the way of life is their very own life-giver.

How confusing must that feel? There’s no way out, really, from a certain point of view. You can really lose it, I think.

It feels like such a harsh price to pay for a mother who just wanted to protect her children from her own traumatic experience.

I have a lot of compassion for that.

The Hope

What’s the hope for these adult children of abandonment-trauma mothers?

I think something extremely profound needs to be resolved. To understand that the source of life itself is not rejecting them, not stopping them from entering life. It is just carrying a wound.

It’s not about them.

The antidote is compassion towards the parent — the very opposite of what they are experiencing (rage).

But if the child won’t do the work, the parent has to. Otherwise they’ll be stuck in a forever loop of confusion and rage and sadness and guilt. For everyone involved.

For the mother, it’s about realising that her child must, in a way, be allowed to suffer the life they are in. Which is extremely hard, because usually when a mother of an adult child gets into therapy, patterns are already well implemented and feeding a vicious circle: the adult child struggles through life, the mother sees the struggles, and becomes even more overbearing.

Yet her antidote again is to let go. Realising she is not abandoning by stepping aside. She can still choose to be present.

Is it not interesting how deep traumas get interwoven trans-generationally, and how the ways to heal are often about releasing the really, really strong hold we have on something?

But you see, ultimately, no one is evil here. They are just carrying a lot, without being fully aware of it.

That’s the truth about intergenerational pain.