I see more and more conversations on social media, including on LinkedIn, about male victims of abuse and violence.

I think we need those conversations.

But I also think we need to be willing to have an even harder one:

Sometimes the dynamics inside a family do not fit neatly into categories of victim and abuser. Sometimes wounded people hurt other wounded people. Sometimes someone can be experiencing abuse while also behaving abusively themselves. And sometimes the person everyone assumes is the victim is causing tremendous harm behind closed doors.

It has taken me years to understand that.

Part of my own healing has been learning how to move from reacting entirely through an emotional, survival-driven brain into being able to step back and examine behavior more rationally.

That doesn’t mean removing compassion.

It means adding context.

The Bob Evans Story

There is a story I frequently tell in my trainings about something that happened years ago at Bob Evans.

I tell it because it represents an uncomfortable period of my life.

At that time, I was still deeply trauma bonded. I was still unhealthy enough to remain in situations where I was being harmed, but I was also wounded enough that my wounds were spilling onto other people.

Both things were true.

I was a victim.

And I hurt people.

Understanding the first does not erase responsibility for the second.

That realization became an important part of my healing because it forced me to stop seeing human behavior as simply “good people” and “bad people.”

Trauma is more complicated than that.

And families are much more complicated than that.

Hurt People Don’t Always Look Hurt

We talk frequently about generational trauma, but I sometimes wonder whether we fully understand what that means.

Trauma doesn’t stay neatly contained inside the person who experienced it.

It can show up in relationships.

Parenting.

Anger.

Control.

Attachment.

Avoidance.

People pleasing.

Manipulation.

Substance use.

Aggression.

The inability to tolerate rejection.

The desperate need to control another person.

The inability to walk away from someone who is hurting you.

And sometimes, hurting other people.

We often recognize this more easily when discussing boys who experienced violence growing up and later become physically aggressive themselves.

But women carry wounds into relationships, too.

Women can be controlling.

Women can manipulate.

Women can emotionally abuse.

Women can isolate partners.

Women can use children, family members, social media, reputations, or institutions as weapons.

Women can be victims.

Men can be victims.

Women can be perpetrators.

Men can be perpetrators.

And sometimes people can occupy more than one of those spaces over the course of their lives—or even within the same relationship.

That is why I have become increasingly uncomfortable with blanket statements about abuse.

Behavior matters more than the demographic category of the person displaying it.

When You See It Inside Your Own Family

This lesson becomes much harder when it isn’t theoretical.

I have watched complicated dynamics unfold within my own family.

There is someone I love who experienced significant adversity growing up. I don’t know that he would describe what happened to him using the same language I would today. In fact, I suspect there are trauma bonds within our family that make acknowledging some of those experiences incredibly difficult.

I understand that because I lived it myself.

For years, I defended people and situations that were hurting me.

I couldn’t see what other people could see.

And nobody could force me to see it before I was ready.

As an adult, this family member has had relationships where I have heard accounts of hurtful and verbally abusive behavior on his part.

Today, I also believe he is living inside a profoundly unhealthy relationship dynamic himself.

That is where the labels stop being useful.

Because what happens when someone is both wounded and wounding?

What happens when two people bring unresolved trauma, unhealthy attachment, control, manipulation, anger, and survival behaviors into the same relationship?

What happens when each person can point to something the other person has done?

We have to be mature enough to acknowledge that these situations exist.

Control Doesn’t Always Look the Way We Expect

There was one moment years ago that has stayed with me.

My mother and I were having a meal at a local restaurant. We invited this family member to stop by with his daughter.

Afterward, I learned that simply meeting us had created conflict at home because his location had been monitored.

That moment bothered me deeply.

Not because location sharing itself automatically means abuse. Plenty of healthy couples share their locations.

Context matters. Patterns matter. Intent matters.

But when technology becomes part of monitoring, punishment, isolation, intimidation, or control, we should be willing to recognize that behavior regardless of whether the person doing it is male or female.

Over the years, I have experienced other behaviors connected to this situation that caused me to document interactions, save communications, establish boundaries and ultimately create significant distance.

I am deliberately not sharing those details publicly.

That is part of what being guarded looks like for me now.

I don’t need to publish every screenshot.

I don’t need to release every conversation.

I don’t need the internet to decide who is right.

I know why I established my boundaries.

And that is enough.

Social Media Makes This Even More Complicated

One of the things I have learned through advocacy work is that social media gives us an extraordinarily distorted window into people’s lives.

We see the version someone chooses to publish.

We don’t see what happens in their homes.

We don’t see the text messages.

We don’t hear the arguments.

We don’t see who is walking on eggshells.

We don’t know what happened before the 30-second video someone uploaded.

We don’t know the history.

And we certainly don’t know an entire family system from someone’s Facebook or LinkedIn posts.

I have personally experienced situations where private family decisions—particularly difficult decisions surrounding my mother’s dementia and safety—were interpreted publicly in ways that did not reflect why those decisions were made.

One of those decisions involved driving.

When my mother’s cognitive decline reached a point where I believed she could no longer drive safely, I had to look at the situation not only as her daughter but through the lens of someone who has spent decades in emergency medicine.

There came a point when doing nothing was no longer an acceptable option.

That decision wasn’t easy.

It also wasn’t malicious.

It was about safety.

Yet I learned how quickly someone can take pieces of a complicated family situation, place them online without the full context, and create an entirely different story.

That experience taught me something important:

Social media is evidence of what someone posted. It is not necessarily evidence of what actually happened.

Trauma Explains. It Does Not Excuse.

This may be one of the most important lessons of my entire journey.

Understanding someone’s trauma does not require tolerating their behavior.

I can look at someone and think:

I understand how you became this person.

And still say:

You are not allowed to treat me this way.

Those two statements can coexist.

In fact, I think real trauma-informed practice requires both.

If trauma becomes an excuse for harming other people, then we aren’t ending generational trauma.

We are simply explaining why it continues.

Healing requires understanding and accountability.

I have had to apply that to other people.

More importantly, I have had to apply it to myself.

There were years when my wounds affected people around me.

I cannot rewrite those years by saying, “But I was traumatized.”

I can understand why I behaved the way I did.

I can forgive the woman I was.

I can make amends where appropriate.

And I can take responsibility for becoming someone different.

That is healing.

Sometimes Love Means You Cannot Rescue Someone

This may be the hardest lesson for me.

There is someone I love whom I desperately want to reach.

There are moments when everything in me wants to say:

Please wake up. Please see what is happening. Please get help.

And then I remember how many people tried to do exactly that for me.

I didn’t listen.

I couldn’t.

My nervous system, attachment, fear, conditioning and trauma bond were stronger than their words.

Eventually, something shifted.

But it had to happen inside me.

So today, loving someone sometimes means accepting that I cannot rescue them.

I can leave the door open for healthy help.

I can refuse to participate in destructive dynamics.

I can establish boundaries.

I can protect myself.

And I can hope that someday they become ready to see what they cannot see today.

I Am No Longer Willing to Be Silenced

I have debated whether I should ever write about family dynamics.

Part of that hesitation has been fear of retaliation.

What will someone post?

What will they say about me?

Who will they contact?

How will my words be twisted?

And recently I realized something.

If fear of another person’s reaction determines what I am allowed to say about my own experiences, then they are still controlling part of my life.

I don’t want to live that way anymore.

That doesn’t mean I need to expose people.

It doesn’t mean naming names.

It doesn’t mean publishing private communications or trying to rally strangers to my side.

There is a difference between telling your story and trying to destroy someone else’s.

I can guard people’s identities while still speaking honestly about what these experiences have taught me.

And maybe that is exactly what I am supposed to do.

We Have to Stop Reducing Abuse to Gender

If we genuinely want to reduce violence, we have to become willing to examine behavior rather than simply choosing teams.

Not all men are abusive.

Not all women are victims.

Not every difficult relationship has one completely innocent person and one completely evil person.

Not every person who experienced childhood trauma becomes abusive.

And trauma never removes personal responsibility.

What trauma can do is help us understand the pathways that sometimes lead people into unhealthy behaviors, unhealthy relationships and repeating family patterns.

Understanding those pathways gives us an opportunity to interrupt them.

But only if we are willing to look at the whole picture.

We need better pathways for people who recognize harmful behaviors in themselves and genuinely want to change.

We need safe avenues for people trying to leave unhealthy relationships.

We need to support people who determine that no contact is necessary.

We need to stop shaming people for establishing boundaries with family simply because “that’s your mother,” “that’s your brother,” “that’s your daughter,” or “that’s your spouse.”

And we need to teach people what coercion, manipulation, trauma bonding, emotional abuse and healthy relationships actually look like—without assuming we already know who the victim is based on gender.

Because generational trauma will not end simply because we talk about it.

It ends when someone becomes willing to see the pattern.

To understand it.

To take responsibility for their own part in it.

To establish boundaries around the parts that aren’t theirs.

And finally say:

It may have reached me. But it does not get to keep moving through me.

That is where cycles begin to end.

And for me, that is what healing has increasingly become:

Not deciding who the monster was.

But understanding the system clearly enough that I no longer have to live inside it.