Collusion Can Be a Form of Abuse Too | Annie Wright, LMFT

Collusion Can Be a Form of Abuse Too

FAMILY DYNAMICS & BOUNDARIES • November 29, 2020

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

She Was Always Right There

She was in the kitchen when it happened. You remember that. The way the light came through the window over the sink, the smell of whatever was on the stove. You remember the sound. The raised voice, the impact, the silence that came after. And you remember looking up, through the doorway, and seeing your mother standing at the counter.

She didn’t move.

She turned back to the cutting board. She kept her shoulders very still in that particular way she had. The way that meant she’d decided not to hear it. Not to see it. Not to be in the room, even though she was right there in the room.

You were eight years old, maybe nine. And in the span of that moment. The violence, the silence, your mother’s carefully averted eyes. You learned something that would take you twenty years to unlearn: that the person who was supposed to protect you had decided that protecting the peace mattered more than protecting you.

She didn’t hit you. She didn’t call you names or make you feel small. She baked birthday cakes and came to every school play and said she loved you on a regular basis. By almost any external measure, she was a good mother.

And yet.

This post is for the woman who keeps asking why she’s still so angry at the parent who “wasn’t the abuser.” It’s for the woman who finds herself full of grief over the person who stayed, who watched, who normalized, who explained it away. And who never, not once, said: what is happening in this house is not okay, and I will not let it continue.

That parent is part of your story too. And naming their role. With as much clarity and as much compassion as we can hold at the same time. Is part of how healing works. This is particularly true if you’re exploring developmental trauma or recognizing that your early environment shaped you in ways you’re still untangling today.

What Is Collusion in Family Systems?

Let’s be specific about what collusion can look like inside a family system, because it often hides behind language that sounds reasonable:

• “He was just stressed. He didn’t mean it.”. Minimizing
• “Your mother only wants the best for you. She’s doing her best.”. Defending the abuser at the expense of the harmed person
• “We don’t air our dirty laundry.”. Enforcing silence
• “That’s just how things were back then.”. Normalizing
• “I don’t want to get in the middle of it.”. Opting out while functionally choosing the abuser’s side
• “You’re so sensitive. You always make everything such a big deal.”. Gaslighting the harmed person to protect the family system
• Saying nothing at all. Which sends its own unmistakable message about whose reality matters

Alice Miller. Psychoanalyst and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. Spent decades tracing the ways children are taught to adapt to family systems that don’t serve their emotional needs. What she described, over and over, was the child who learns to repress their own perceptions and feelings in order to maintain the attachment relationships they depend on. Collusion by secondary family members accelerates this process. When the people around you confirm the abuser’s reality rather than yours, you don’t just doubt the abuse. You doubt yourself.

Miller wrote: “A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress her emotions.” The colluding parent is precisely that missing person. The one who could have been the anchor of reality, and wasn’t.

This is why collusion isn’t a secondary harm. It often becomes the primary wound. Not because the direct abuse wasn’t real, but because the silence of the person who was supposed to be safe delivers a specific and devastating message: you are not worth protecting. This pattern is deeply connected to what clinicians call betrayal trauma. Harm inflicted not just by the person who hurt you, but by the institutional structure (the family) that was supposed to keep you safe.

The Science: Bystander Effect, Family Loyalty, and Why People Don’t Intervene

One of the things that makes it so hard to reckon with a colluding family member is the human instinct to extend them the benefit of the doubt. They didn’t know. They couldn’t help it. They were scared too. They had their own trauma. And often, these things are true. The psychology behind non-intervention is real, well-documented, and worth understanding. Not to excuse the harm, but to help you make sense of it.

The Bystander Effect in Family Systems

In 1968, social psychologists John Darley, PhD, and Bibb Latané, PhD, both of Columbia University at the time, conducted a series of landmark studies demonstrating that individuals are less likely to offer help in an emergency when other people are present. The more bystanders, the less likely any single one is to intervene. This became known as the bystander effect, and while the original research examined strangers in public situations, subsequent research has extended its principles into family and intimate partner violence contexts.

What makes the bystander effect so powerful. And so relevant to family collusion. Is the concept of diffusion of responsibility. When multiple people are present during harmful behavior, each person unconsciously assumes that someone else will act. In a family system, this dynamic plays out as: Surely Dad will stop. Surely Grandma will say something. Surely someone will intervene. And when no one does, everyone’s inaction normalizes everyone else’s.

Research on bystander intervention in intimate partner violence settings, including the work published in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, shows that family members who witness abuse are among the most likely to know about it. And among the most conflicted about intervening. The reasons are both relational and structural: confronting an abuser within a family system means risking rupture, rejection, and retaliation in ways that confronting a stranger does not.

Family Loyalty and the Cost of Truth-Telling

Family systems. Like all systems. Have a drive toward homeostasis. They organize themselves around equilibrium, and they resist disruption, even when that disruption is necessary. In families where abuse is present, the “equilibrium” is often built on a collective agreement, usually unspoken, to not see what’s happening. The identified patient. The child who’s labeled “too sensitive,” “too dramatic,” “the problem one”. Functions as the pressure valve that allows the system to keep running without confronting its actual dysfunction.

, MD, psychiatrist and founder of Bowen Family Systems Theory, described how family emotional systems exert powerful pull on individual members to prioritize group cohesion over individual differentiation. Naming abuse disrupts that cohesion. It breaks what Bowen called the “undifferentiated family ego mass”. The collective emotional field where family members subordinate their individual perceptions to the group’s preferred narrative. The colluding family member who says “let’s not make this into a bigger thing” isn’t being cruel. They’re being pulled by one of the most powerful forces in human psychology: the need to belong to their primary group. () ()

Salvador Minuchin, MD, psychiatrist and founder of structural family therapy, documented how family systems create rigid coalitions and hierarchies that protect certain members at the expense of others. In families with abusive dynamics, those coalitions almost always protect the abuser. Siblings align with the dominant parent. Extended family enforces silence to avoid being excluded. Church or community systems close ranks around the family’s public image. The child being harmed is functionally outvoted by the people whose survival needs are organized around not seeing the truth. (PMID: 14318937) (PMID: 14318937)

Why People Stay Silent: The Trauma of Witnessing

It’s also worth acknowledging something that can be genuinely difficult to hold: some colluding family members were themselves traumatized by what they witnessed and did not have the psychological resources to act. The mother who watched the abuse happen had, in many cases, her own history of being taught to be silent, invisible, accommodating. Her failure to protect wasn’t only a moral failure. It was also, often, a trauma symptom. This is the nature of intergenerational trauma: the patterns of silence and accommodation passed down through generations, each person doing to the next what was done to them, rarely with full awareness of what they’re perpetuating.

This doesn’t erase the harm. But it does help explain it. And understanding the why. Even when the why doesn’t justify the outcome. Can sometimes be the beginning of a grief process that is more sustainable than pure fury.

The critical distinction here is what Judith Lewis Herman, MD, described in Trauma and Recovery: moral neutrality is not actually available in the conflict between a victim and a perpetrator. “Like all other bystanders,” she writes, therapists and family members alike “are sometimes forced to take sides.” Staying neutral. Refusing to intervene, refusing to name what’s happening. Is itself a choice. It’s a choice that functions to protect the abuser and abandon the person being harmed. Even if that choice came from fear. Even if it was unconscious. Even if no one ever intended it that way.

What This Looks Like: Angela’s Story

Note: The following is a composite vignette drawn from common clinical themes. It does not represent any single individual.

Angela came into therapy at thirty-four, initially identifying her mother as the source of her childhood harm. Her mother had been cold, withholding, critical. The kind of parent who used silence as a weapon and comparison as a management tool. Angela had done significant work in therapy naming this, grieving it, understanding how it had shaped her patterns in relationships and work.

It was in her second year of work that she started talking about her father.

“He was the good one,” she said. “He was soft. He’d give me hugs. He never said anything mean.” She paused. “He never said anything at all, actually.”

What emerged, slowly, was the picture of a man who had been present for every significant event of Angela’s childhood. And who had never once intervened. He’d been in the next room when her mother screamed. He’d been at the dinner table when her mother made the comments about her body. He’d been in the car for the silent, icy drives that followed any expression of need on Angela’s part.

He hadn’t done any of those things himself. He’d just been there while they happened.

What Angela realized, slowly and with considerable grief, was that her father’s warmth. The hugs, the softness. Had functioned as a kind of pressure release that made the system tolerable without changing the system. She could go to him and be held. She could never go to him and be helped. The distinction matters enormously. Being comforted in private while the abuse continued publicly is not protection. It’s a sophisticated form of maintenance.

“He made it easier to stay,” she said, one session. “He made it possible to survive it. But he never made it stop.”

In my work with clients like Angela, I see this pattern regularly. The gentle, passive parent whose warmth is real but whose protective capacity is absent. Their gentleness doesn’t erase the harm their absence of action caused. Both things are true. What Angela needed was not to stop loving her father; it was to be honest about what his love could and couldn’t do, and to grieve the protection he never gave her. Understanding childhood emotional neglect helped Angela recognize that the absence of protection is itself a form of harm. One that can feel invisible precisely because it’s defined by what never happened rather than what did.

The Secondary Wound: When Silence Confirms the Abuser

There is a specific and devastating injury that comes not from the abuse itself, but from the confirmation the bystander’s silence provides. When the person you looked to for protection turned away, two things happened simultaneously: you were abandoned in the immediate moment of harm, and you received powerful evidence about your own worth.

Children are meaning-making creatures. They don’t have the cognitive tools to think: this adult has a trauma history that makes intervention feel impossible. What they think, at the level of the nervous system and the developing self, is: no one is coming. I am not worth rescuing. What is happening to me is not wrong enough to stop.

This is the secondary wound of collusion. The wound that lives inside the original wound. It’s often the wound that’s harder to name in therapy, because it requires locating harm not in the dramatic acts of the abuser but in the quiet, ordinary choices of the person who loved you and stayed still. Many driven women I work with are far angrier at the passive parent than at the abusive one. Or discover, over time, that the passive parent’s betrayal sits heavier because it was a betrayal from someone from whom they expected more.

The concept of betrayal trauma, developed by Jennifer Freyd, PhD, psychologist and researcher who coined the term, is deeply relevant here. Freyd’s research shows that trauma is more psychologically damaging when it’s perpetrated by someone the victim depends upon. And betrayal trauma extends to those who knew and failed to protect. The non-protective parent is a betrayal trauma figure. Their inaction doesn’t just fail to protect. It actively confirms the abuser’s power and the child’s helplessness.

What I want to say clearly, because I see so many women minimize this: your anger at the parent who didn’t abuse you but also didn’t protect you is legitimate. It is not ungrateful. It is not evidence that you’re impossible to please. It is a reasonable response to something that was genuinely wrong. You deserved protection. They were capable of providing it, even imperfectly. They chose not to. That choice had consequences for you, and naming those consequences is not the same as refusing to forgive.

Both/And: The Colluding Parent May Have Been Scared AND Their Silence Still Harmed You

One of the most important moves in healing from family trauma is learning to hold the Both/And without collapsing into one side or the other. And nowhere is this more necessary. Or more difficult. Than with the colluding parent.

Both/And means: your passive parent may have been genuinely terrified of the abuser AND their terror did not give them a pass to leave you unprotected. Both things are true. Their fear was real AND the consequence of their fear landing on you was harm you didn’t deserve and couldn’t carry alone. They may have loved you AND love without action, love without protection, love that stays silent to preserve itself. Is not the love a child needs.

This isn’t a call to cruelty toward the passive parent. It’s a call to honesty. Because the alternative. The collapse into “but they had their own trauma” or “but they did their best”. Forecloses a grief process that you need. If you move straight to understanding and forgiveness without moving through the anger and the loss, you’re doing a kind of spiritual bypass that protects the family system at your own expense. Again.

In my work with clients navigating this terrain, I find that the Both/And becomes genuinely inhabitable. Not just intellectually possible. Only after the grief has been done. You have to feel the full weight of what was lost: the protection you deserved and didn’t receive, the reality-confirmation that was withheld from you, the loneliness of being left with an abuser by someone who knew. You have to let that be as big as it actually was. And then, and only then, can the understanding of why the passive parent acted as they did take its proper place. Not as an erasure of the harm, but as a context that makes the harm comprehensible without minimizing it.

The path through is not: understand and therefore don’t feel angry. It’s: feel the anger fully, and also understand. Let both exist without one canceling the other.

What This Looks Like: Ana’s Story

Note: The following is a composite vignette drawn from common clinical themes. It does not represent any single individual.

Ana is thirty-eight when she calls to inquire about therapy. She’s a product manager at a tech company in Seattle, and she describes herself in our first conversation as someone who’s “done a lot of work already”. Which is usually code for: I’ve processed the obvious parts and I’m now running into something harder.

Ana grew up with a father who was physically abusive and a mother who’s described, by every family member, as a saint. Her mother was generous, patient, warm with everyone she met. She was also, in Ana’s memory, completely absent from the rooms where the abuse happened. Not literally absent. She was often in the house. But functionally absent in the specific way that mattered: she never acknowledged what was happening, never intervened, never said afterward, “that wasn’t right, and I should have stopped it.”

What Ana has come to therapy to work on. After years of processing her relationship with her father. Is the complicated love she has for her mother. Because she does love her. Enormously. And the love sits alongside something that’s hard to name without feeling like a traitor: a quiet, enduring rage at the woman who could have stopped it and didn’t.

“She cried at my wedding,” Ana tells me. “She cried the good tears, you know? And I looked at her and thought. Where was this love when I was ten? Where was this love in that hallway?”

What Ana is grappling with is the grief of loving someone who failed you. Not someone who was cruel to you. Someone who was kind to you in all the ways that didn’t cost them anything. The colluding parent’s love is often real and often insufficient, and both of those things have to be true at the same time.

Over the course of our work, Ana doesn’t stop loving her mother. But she does stop protecting her mother from the full picture. She begins to tell the complete story. Not the story where her father was the villain and her mother was the innocent bystander, but the story where two adults made choices in the presence of a child, and one of those choices was to look away. That’s the story Ana needed to be able to tell. Not to punish anyone. But because the incomplete story had been costing her something real: the capacity to fully trust her own perceptions about who is and isn’t safe.

If you’re working through something similar, individual therapy with someone trained in relational trauma can offer a space to hold these complicated truths. To love your parent and be angry at them, to understand their limitations and still name the harm, without collapsing into simplicity in either direction.

The Systemic Lens: Family Loyalty, Cultural Silence, and Who Gets Protected

It would be a mistake to look at family collusion only as an interpersonal problem. As a matter of individual choices made by individual people. Collusion is also, and always, a systemic phenomenon. It is produced by structures larger than any one family member’s decision-making.

Consider what it takes, culturally and institutionally, for a parent to speak the truth about abuse happening in their household. They have to be willing to be seen as a family that has abuse. They have to risk the judgment of their community, their extended family, their religious institution. In many cultural contexts, this is an enormous risk. One that carries real social and sometimes economic consequences. The family that acknowledges violence is the family that loses face. The family that enforces silence is the family that stays intact, stays respected, stays embedded in its community network.

Cultural silence around family abuse is not incidental. It’s structural. Religious communities that emphasize family preservation over individual safety. Cultural norms that locate shame in the victim or the family that reveals the victim rather than in the abuser. Extended family networks that actively enforce silence to protect their own reputations by association. Immigration contexts in which reporting abuse to external authorities feels. Or genuinely is. Dangerous. These structures don’t cause the collusion, but they make it possible, make it rational in a specific distorted way, make it the path of least resistance.

When I work with women from cultures or communities where these pressures were particularly strong, I try to hold both things clearly: the structural forces that made their parent’s silence more likely AND the reality that those forces didn’t eliminate the parent’s agency entirely. The passive parent made a choice, even if that choice was constrained by context. The child paid for that choice. Both facts are true simultaneously. If you grew up in a family where these dynamics played out within the context of a narcissistic parent or a parent whose personality disorder shaped the entire household, the collusion may have been particularly entrenched. Because the abusive parent actively worked to prevent anyone from seeing clearly.

There’s also the question of gender. In many family systems, the colluding parent is the mother. And the mother’s silence is often structured by her own position within the household. A mother who is financially dependent on an abusive partner, who has been isolated from her own support network, who has been systematically undermined in her own sense of reality. That mother’s capacity for protective action is genuinely compromised in ways that a mother with full resources and autonomy’s capacity is not. This doesn’t change the outcome for the child, but it does contextualize the collusion within the larger reality of how intimate partner violence constrains the choices of everyone in the household, including the adults.

What remains true, regardless of the systemic and structural factors: you, as a child, deserved protection. You deserved someone who would risk the system’s comfort to ensure your safety. That someone often wasn’t there. And the absence of that protection. Whatever its causes. Shaped you. Understanding those causes doesn’t mean minimizing what their absence cost you.

How to Heal: Naming It, Grieving It, Setting Limits with Colluders

Healing from the harm of collusion requires a somewhat different path than healing from direct abuse. Because the wound itself is defined by what was absent rather than what was present. You’re not trying to process a specific violent act so much as you’re trying to metabolize the reality of being left alone with something you couldn’t handle, repeatedly, by the people whose job it was to handle it with you.

Here are the stages I see in the healing process, and what tends to be most useful at each.

1. Naming it. In full, without minimizing. The first and often hardest step is simply allowing yourself to say, out loud or in your own mind: the person who didn’t protect me caused harm. Not just the person who abused me. Not just one person. The full cast of people who knew or should have known and chose silence. Many driven women I work with have spent years protecting the passive parent in their own storytelling. Editing them out, contextualizing them immediately before the anger can even form. The work begins with stopping that edit. You don’t have to tell the story publicly. You have to be able to tell it honestly to yourself first.

2. Grieving the protection you deserved and didn’t receive. This grief is specific and often bypassed in favor of the more legible grief about the abuse itself. But it’s essential. What would your childhood have looked like if someone had intervened? What would have been different about you. About your nervous system, your relationships, your capacity for trust. If you’d had someone who confirmed your perceptions and protected your safety? You don’t have to be specific in the counterfactual; you just have to let yourself feel the loss of it. This grief is worth doing with a therapist, because it can be very deep. If you’re exploring your developmental trauma history, this is one of the most important layers to surface.

3. Updating your relationship with the colluder. This step is optional and depends entirely on the current state of the relationship. If the colluding parent is still alive, still present, and still maintaining the silence and minimization. You have a choice about what the relationship looks like going forward. That choice doesn’t have to be binary (full estrangement or full relationship). It can be graduated. You can limit what you share with someone who has demonstrated that they’re not a safe holder of your truth. You can reduce your expectations of them down to what they’ve actually shown themselves capable of. You can love them at the distance that doesn’t require you to keep performing the family system’s preferred version of reality.

4. Rebuilding trust in your own perceptions. One of the most lasting injuries of collusion is the damage it does to your reality-testing. When the person who should have confirmed your perceptions instead turned away, the message was: your read on things is wrong. Your discomfort doesn’t mean anything. Your pain isn’t real enough to act on. Part of healing from collusion is deliberately rebuilding your trust in your own internal signals. Learning to take your discomfort seriously, to trust your read on dynamics and people, to believe that when something feels wrong, that feeling is worth examining rather than suppressing. This is often some of the most valuable work of trauma-informed therapy, and it tends to have reverberating effects in every area of a client’s life.

5. Understanding that healing doesn’t require reconciliation or forgiveness. I want to say this clearly, because it runs counter to a narrative that’s very prevalent in therapeutic and spiritual communities: you don’t have to forgive the colluding parent to heal. Healing is about your internal state, not about extending absolution. You can understand why someone did what they did, you can have compassion for the fear or limitation that drove them, and you can still hold them accountable in your own mind for the harm their choices caused. Those things are not in conflict. Forgiveness, if it comes, tends to arrive naturally as a byproduct of genuinely completing the grief. Not as a destination you must drive toward in order to be healed.

A Note Before You Go

If you’ve read this far, there’s a good chance you’re sitting with something. Maybe it’s clarity you’ve been trying to locate for years. Maybe it’s grief you’ve been deferring. Maybe it’s anger you’ve been editing out of the family story because it felt like too much, or because you didn’t want to be the one who burned everything down.

You don’t have to burn anything down to tell the truth. You can hold the full picture of what happened. Including who was there and what they chose. And still love the people involved. Complexity isn’t disloyalty. Grief isn’t an attack. Naming what happened is how you stop organizing your life around a wound you’ve never been allowed to name.

The women I see do this work. Really do it, not just intellectually understand it. Come out the other side with something that can’t be taken away: a relationship with their own perceptions that doesn’t depend on anyone else’s permission. That’s worth working for. And you don’t have to do it alone. Whether that means working with a therapist one-on-one, exploring through developmental trauma resources, or beginning to look at patterns in intergenerational trauma. There are real paths through this, and you deserve one of them.

Recovery from this kind of relational pattern is possible. And you don’t have to navigate it alone. I offer individual therapy for driven women healing from narcissistic and relational trauma, as well as self-paced recovery courses designed specifically for what you’re going through. You can schedule a free consultation to explore what might help.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Gómez JM, Smith CP, Gobin RL, Tang SS, Freyd JJ. Collusion, torture, and inequality: Understanding the actions of the American Psychological Association as institutional betrayal. J Trauma Dissociation. 2016;17(5):527-544. PMID: 27427782.

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