When the Person Who Needs Care Is the One Who Hurt You

Somewhere between 9 and 26 percent of adult family caregivers are providing care to the very parent who abused or neglected them in childhood (Kong et al., 2021). If you are one of them — or are considering becoming one — you are navigating something that goes far beyond ordinary caregiving stress. You are being asked to offer intimate, compassionate care to your abuser. That is not a small thing, and it deserves to be named clearly.

Research is unambiguous: caregivers who provide care to a perpetrating parent experience significantly higher rates of depression and psychological distress than other caregivers — including those who were abused but are caring for a different parent (Kong et al., 2021). The source of that difference is not weakness. It is the particular weight of confronting old harm in a new, relentless context.

Why This Hits Differently

Childhood abuse and neglect shape the developing self in lasting ways — eroding self-trust, depleting psychological resources like self-esteem and mastery, and creating what researchers call stress proliferation: the tendency for new stressors to amplify rather than simply add to existing ones (Kong et al., 2022). When caregiving tasks trigger old memories and feelings of powerlessness, the stress does not simply accumulate — it compounds. The adult body is doing the work. The child's nervous system is responding.

There is also a particular grief embedded in this situation. When a parent who harmed you becomes ill, you may mourn not just their decline, but the relationship that was never what it should have been — and the narrowing hope that it ever could be. Adult survivors of parental maltreatment are at elevated risk for anticipatory grief, disenfranchised grief, and complicated grief after the parent's death precisely because the relationship was never simple (Kong et al., 2021). Others may assume you had a loving bond. The reality, and your feelings about it, may be something they cannot hold.

The Most Important Thing: You Have a Choice

The research is clear on this point, and it bears stating plainly: adult children are not obligated to provide caregiving for a parent who abused them. When a parent causes harm to a child, they break a fundamental contract. Cultural expectations of filial duty do not override that rupture (Kong et al., 2021).

Deciding not to provide care is a legitimate choice — one that a good therapist or social worker will respect without judgment, and support by helping you find alternative arrangements and process the complicated emotions that follow. Deciding to provide some care, on your own terms and with clear limits, is also a legitimate choice. What matters is that the decision is yours, made consciously and revisable at any time (Kong et al., 2021). That sense of authorship over the choice is itself protective.

Grief That Has No Clear Name

When an abusive parent dies, survivors often face what researchers call disenfranchised grief — loss that cannot be openly acknowledged or socially validated in the expected way (Kong et al., 2021). Others may offer condolences that assume a closeness that never existed, or wonder why you seem more complicated than sad. You may feel relief alongside grief, anger alongside yearning, love alongside profound indifference. All of it is real. None of it requires justification.

Forgiveness, if it comes, is for your benefit — not theirs. It is not a requirement of healing, and it is not something that can be rushed or demanded of you by anyone else.

What Support Looks Like

Post-traumatic growth is possible for adult survivors navigating this terrain — not as a silver lining, but as a genuine outcome of sustained, supported work (Kong et al., 2021). Research on adults who grew up in harmful family environments finds that with trauma-informed therapy, strong external support systems, and the ongoing practice of self-compassion, people do rebuild self-trust, establish healthier relationships, and reclaim a sense of self that childhood could not give them (Simonič & Osewska, 2023).

That process requires support from outside the family — therapists trained in childhood trauma and complex grief, survivor communities, and people who can offer perspective without judgment. It requires recognizing that you were not the cause of what happened to you, and that taking care of yourself is not a betrayal of anyone. It is the work (Kong et al., 2021).

You already survived your childhood. You do not have to sacrifice your adulthood to prove something to anyone — least of all to the person who made that childhood harder than it should have been.