Breaking the Cycle: Parenting Through the Hidden Wounds of Verbal Abuse
- Jessica Narowlansky
- Jul 5
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 9
Imprinted on the psyche. Etched deep into the nervous system.
The words our carers say to us shape the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are worth. They forge our earliest ideas of how we believe we deserve to be treated. Words impact how we expect to be valued and determine if we believe we can be loved by others. As significant as actions, words create the foundation upon which we stand in life – they craft the very essence of our emotional DNA.
For those whose beginnings were not safe, stable, emotionally secure, the journey of parenthood begins from a very different place.
For many of the parents I work with, the echoes of childhood are not gentle. They arrive in sharp phrases and cutting tones, stored deep in the nervous system. Long after the shouting has stopped, the messages endure: You are useless. You are too much. You are not enough.
Historically, verbal abuse has often been minimised as it leaves no visible scars. But, in truth, what we are told as children about who we are shapes our internal world with relentless precision. The reality is, as research increasingly bears out, verbal abuse in childhood leaves a lasting imprint on brain development and self-concept, altering neural pathways linked to emotional regulation and self-worth in ways as enduring as the damage caused by physical abuse or neglect.
These wounds are deep, vulnerable, and follow us into our adult lives.
It is not as simple as what we heard back then and how it distorted definitions of safety just fades away once the torrent stops.
Parents can be confused and frustrated as to why the distant past remains so powerful. For this reason it is so important to think about — to validate — how much more is at play here than the past events themselves.
The greatest obstacle, most often, is how the nervous system never forgets. Once we are wired to understand that language signals danger, survival responses become embedded within us at a granular level. As Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory suggests, our earliest experiences of safety or threat are encoded through tone of voice, facial expression, and prosody — the rhythm and tone in how words are spoken. All of these cues can become distorted in the context of verbal abuse: tone may be deceptive, facial expression may mask intention, and prosody can turn into a vehicle for threat.These cues, and our understanding of them, shape how we learn to respond to connection, conflict, and care. If a child cannot make sense of these foundational interactions, the autonomic nervous system becomes wired for one thing above all else — survival.
Words spoken by the people we needed most — parents, carers, teachers — become the scaffolding of our self-worth. They build, brick by brick, the belief systems we carry into adulthood: how we love, how we parent, how we forgive, and whether we dare to believe we are lovable at all.
Children, as John Bowlby reminds us, are biologically wired for attachment. When their carers become a source of danger, children instinctively turn the narrative inward: it feels safer to believe their carer is right about them than to face the terrifying idea that the person they depend on is unsafe. In this way, children internalise the message: I must deserve this, because maintaining attachment is, at its core, a matter of life and death.
I sit with parents who have suffered the reality of navigating early life filled with fear, shame and anger. They devote themselves to raising their children in an environment of safety and trust, even though this may never have been their mother tongue. They catch themselves when their voice sharpens, when old scripts rise to the surface. Struggling with each phase of their child’s development, wondering, How do I give what I never received? Yet they do — they rupture, they repair, they stand present. It is the everyday work of what Donald Winnicott called the “good enough” parent: how for any parent the aim is not to be perfect (as this is impossible), but attuned enough to help a child feel seen, safe and held.
More painful yet is how the internal alarm systems can sound when, invariably, their child stumbles upon a phrase or tone of voice that brings the tsunami of their own hard-wired survival systems crashing back in.
It is perhaps here that the parent raised in an environment of abuse must dig the deepest.
When the involuntary, overwhelmed, somatised response is inadvertently triggered, they try to hold on to the reality that their child’s emotional lexicon is completely different from their own. Hate does not mean hate as they, the parent, understand it. For a child spared the cruelty of an unsafe, abusive world, this is simply a word tossed out in a moment of frustration. However, for the survivor this opens up a chasm which speaks to feelings they have likely harboured all their lives about their complex and conflicted feelings around their own caregivers. Wilfred Bion described the capacity to manage a child's emotions as “containment” — the caregiver’s capacity to metabolise and reflect a child’s raw emotions in a more bearable form. In that moment, the survivor must not only hold their child’s strong emotion, but also the legacy of what was never contained for them.
The paradox of needing to become the container they themselves were denied.
The nervous system’s long-dormant but ever-present alarms sound — ears may ring, heads may swim, bodies may tense. The heart races and the wounds — they activate — but the pain is so much more profound because the unwitting instigator is one’s own offspring.
Sometimes this brings a new fury: that even after the danger of one’s own childhood has passed, it still has the power to rear its tormenting head and disrupt the here and now.
To not lose sight of all of this in that moment — to remember that was then and this is now — is an act of love that few can ever truly understand.
Those of us supporting families navigating this complex ground know all too well the loving parent who believes themself to be failing, when in truth they are doing the most radical thing a person can do: commit to breaking a cycle that once felt unbreakable.
We speak often about generational trauma, but not enough about the specific weight of verbal abuse — the way it seeps into language, into tone, into how a parent might interpret a child’s need or misbehaviour. For those who grew up being told they were a burden, a failure, a disappointment, it takes enormous strength to respond to their child with patience, curiosity, and warmth.
So for the parent who has survived this, those moments of reactivity can feel unspeakable — attempting to keep hold of a nervous system wired for hyper-vigilance when, in a blinding flash of emotional overload, one’s own child can feel like the perpetrator. Finding the strength to keep hold of where they now are in time can feel like a herculean task.
But they do. Again and again.
Like all parents in moments of stress, a response may not be perfect, but it is intentional. The process of interrupting intergenerational harm is slow and often invisible. Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson describe this in The Power of Showing Up, where they note that parents who make sense of their own story — even if it was painful — are significantly more likely to form secure attachments with their children.
In sessions, parents and I often speak about how, although it might not be possible to always control the nervous system’s immediate response — that old, wired survival reflex — what happens next is always a choice. Once they have righted their own dysregulated state, if they feel they did not handle the moment well, there is always the opportunity to come back to it — to own it and speak it aloud. There is no sell-by date on addressing something important; a parent and child can talk about what happened, and together they can think about how to communicate differently next time.
The words we speak to our children matter, as do the words we say to ourselves as we learn to parent differently. Words like: I am trying. I am learning. I am enough.
Healing is not just about protecting our children from the wounds we carry — it is also about daring to believe that we, too, deserve gentleness.
The stories we inherited can be rewritten. The words that once defined us can be replaced by ones we choose for ourselves.
Words do more than describe reality. They create it. And in the quiet moments of repair — when a parent catches their breath and chooses a different tone, a different phrase, a different response — they are not just raising a child. They are, in essence, raising themselves, too.
It is also important to say, sadly, most often it is not one type of abuse alone exacted on the child. All forms of abuse — physical, sexual, emotional, verbal, or neglect — distort a child’s developing sense of self, safety and worth.
What matters most is acknowledging and validating the impact — and the ongoing acts of love and courage it takes to break that cycle.
References
Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development.
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation.
Siegel, D. J. & Bryson, T. P. (2020). The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired.
Teicher, M. H. et al. (2006, 2010, 2022). Ongoing research on the neurobiological impact of verbal abuse and childhood maltreatment.
McLaughlin, K. A., Sheridan, M. A., & Lambert, H. K. (2014). Childhood adversity and neural development: Deprivation and threat as distinct dimensions of early experience. Neuroscience
& Biobehavioral Reviews, 47, 578–591.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.
