Collusion Can Be a Form of Abuse Too

NARCISSISTIC ABUSE & FAMILY SYSTEMS • April 3, 2026

She Was Always Right There

Rosalind is forty-seven when she says it out loud for the first time, in my office, on a Tuesday in a year she can no longer keep straight in her memory. She’s holding a chipped blue mug of tea she never drinks, just holds, the way she’s held it in every session for three months. “My mother was in the kitchen,” she says. “She was always right there.”

She describes the light through the window over the sink, the smell of dinner on the stove, the particular sound a raised voice makes in a small house, and what happened after: she looked up through the doorway and saw her mother standing at the counter, not moving.

Her mother turned back to the cutting board, shoulders very still in the way that meant she’d decided not to hear it. Rosalind was eight, maybe nine. In that one moment, she learned something it would take her nearly forty years to name: the person who was supposed to protect her had decided that protecting the household’s calm mattered more than protecting her.

Her mother hadn’t hit her. She baked birthday cakes. She came to every school play. She said “I love you” on a regular, almost scheduled basis. By nearly any outside measure, Rosalind’s mother was a good mother.

And yet.

This is for the woman who keeps asking herself why she’s still so angry at the parent who “wasn’t the abuser.” It’s for the woman grieving the person who stayed, who watched, who normalized, who never once said: what’s happening in this house is not okay, and I won’t let it continue. That parent is part of the story too, and naming her role, with clarity alongside compassion, is part of how the healing happens. This is especially true if you’re untangling relational trauma and seeing how your early environment shaped you.

What Is Collusion in Family Systems?

Collusion often hides behind language that sounds almost reasonable. “He was just stressed. He didn’t mean it.” That’s minimizing. “Your father only wants what’s best” defends the person causing harm at the expense of the person hurting. “We don’t air our dirty laundry” enforces silence. “I don’t want to get in the middle of it” opts out while functionally choosing a side. And saying nothing at all sends its own unmistakable message about whose reality is allowed to matter.

I recently found myself back in the work of Alice Miller, the psychoanalyst and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, who spent decades tracing how children adapt to family systems that don’t serve their emotional needs. What she described, again and again, was the child who represses her own perceptions to preserve the attachment relationships she depends on. When the people around you confirm the abuser’s version of reality instead of yours, you don’t just doubt what happened. You start doubting yourself. Miller wrote that a child can only experience her feelings fully when someone accepts and supports her, and that if that person is missing, the child learns to repress what she feels rather than risk losing what love remains. 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 so often isn’t a secondary harm. It 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 connects directly to what clinicians call betrayal trauma, harm inflicted not only by the person who hurt you but by the very structure, the family itself, that was supposed to keep you safe.

Salvador Minuchin, MD, the psychiatrist and founder of structural family therapy, spent his career mapping how families organize into coalitions and hierarchies that protect certain members at the expense of others (Salvador Minuchin). I think about his framework often, because it explains something that feels almost too simple to be true: in families with abusive dynamics, those coalitions almost always protect the person doing the harm. Minuchin documented how siblings align with the dominant parent and how extended family enforces silence to avoid being excluded (Minuchin, PMID: 14318937). The child being harmed ends up functionally outvoted by everyone whose sense of safety depends on not seeing the truth.

Why Don’t the People Who Love Us Step In?

One of the hardest things about reckoning with a colluding family member is the instinct to extend her the benefit of the doubt. She didn’t know. She couldn’t help it. She was scared too. She had her own trauma. Often, these things are true. The psychology behind non-intervention is real and well documented, and understanding it doesn’t excuse the harm. It just helps make sense of it.

In 1968, the social psychologists John Darley, PhD, and Bibb Latané, PhD, both at Columbia University at the time, ran landmark studies showing that people are less likely to help in an emergency when other people are present. The more bystanders, the less likely any single one is to intervene. That’s the bystander effect, and while the original research looked at strangers in public, later work extended the same principle into family and intimate-partner violence.

What makes the bystander effect so relevant to family collusion is diffusion of responsibility. When multiple people witness harmful behavior, each one unconsciously assumes someone else will act. Inside a family, this becomes: surely Dad will stop it. When no one does, everyone’s inaction quietly normalizes everyone else’s.

I keep coming back to a 2021 paper by Robert Thornberg, PhD, and Tiziana Pozzoli, PhD, researchers who study bystander behavior and moral disengagement in young people. Their work distinguishes defending bystanders, the ones who intervene, from passive bystanders, and links passivity to a specific mechanism: moral disengagement, the mental maneuvers people use to convince themselves that not acting isn’t really a moral choice at all (Thornberg & Pozzoli, PMID: 34376081). Reading it, I recognized every colluding parent I’ve sat across from in a client’s story. The mechanism isn’t exotic. It’s what lets a person watch harm happen and still sleep that night, telling herself it wasn’t really her business to stop it.

Family systems, like all systems, drive toward homeostasis. They organize around equilibrium and resist disruption, even necessary disruption. In families where abuse is present, that equilibrium is often built on an unspoken agreement not to see what’s happening. The child labeled “too sensitive” becomes the pressure valve that lets the system keep running without confronting its own dysfunction.

There’s also research on codependency worth naming here. Megan Zielinski and Steven Bradshaw, researchers who studied the neurological correlates of codependent traits, found a significant negative association between codependency and activation in the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the brain region most associated with self-referential decision-making and asserting one’s own needs (Zielinski & Bradshaw, PMID: 31090992). Put plainly, some colluding parents aren’t choosing paralysis the way you or I might choose to stay quiet in a meeting. Their capacity to locate their own needs as separate from the family’s may be genuinely, neurologically compromised by years of conditioning. That doesn’t erase the harm. It does help explain why “just say something” was never as simple for her as it sounds.

None of this softens the reckoning. It’s an invitation to hold two things at once: the well-documented reasons people don’t intervene, and the fact that non-intervention still cost you something real. You’re allowed to understand the mechanism and still name the wound.

How Does Collusion Show Up for Driven Women?

In my work with clients like Rosalind, I see this pattern with striking regularity: the gentle, passive parent whose warmth is genuine and whose protective capacity is simply absent. Rosalind’s mother wasn’t cruel. She hugged her, showed up, said “I love you.” What she never did was intervene. She’d been in the next room during the worst of it more times than Rosalind can count. She’d been at the dinner table for comments that should have stopped a fork mid-air.

She hadn’t done any of it herself. She’d just been there while it happened.

What Rosalind came to understand, slowly and with real grief, was that her mother’s warmth had functioned as a pressure valve that made the system tolerable without ever changing it. She could go to her mother and be held. She could never go to her mother and be helped. Being comforted in private while the harm continues in public isn’t protection. It’s a sophisticated form of maintenance. “She made it easier to stay,” Rosalind told me once. “She made it possible to survive. But she never made it stop.”

Priscilla’s story looks almost nothing like Rosalind’s on the surface, and that’s exactly the point. Priscilla is forty-four, a partner at a mid-sized law firm, the kind of woman who runs client meetings with total command and then goes quiet the moment the subject turns to her own family. Her collusion story isn’t about a parent watching physical violence. It’s about a mother who watched Priscilla’s older brother verbally dismantle her for two decades of holidays and responded every time by changing the subject. “Let’s not do this at dinner,” her mother would say, as if the problem were the timing and not the content. Priscilla spent years believing her brother was simply “intense” and her mother was simply “a peacemaker.” It took a work conflict, where a colleague dismissed a junior associate in front of the whole team and no one said a word, for Priscilla to feel something crack loose. She recognized the silence in the room. She’d been living inside that exact silence her entire life.

What both women’s stories share is the discovery that gentleness and protection are not the same thing, and that a parent can be loving in every observable way and still leave a child fundamentally unguarded. Kathryn Gagnon and Michelle Lee, researchers who study the dynamics between victims and those who enable perpetrators, describe how betrayal trauma theory applies not only to the direct relationship between victim and abuser but to every relationship in which someone depended on a caregiver who failed to act as a protective figure (Gagnon & Lee, PMID: 28300483). Reading their work, I thought of how many driven women I’ve sat with who spent years furious at the wrong parent, the loud one, before ever turning their attention to the quiet one who’d been standing at the counter the whole time. Understanding childhood emotional neglect often helps name this pattern, because the absence of protection is itself a form of harm, one that can feel invisible precisely because it’s defined by what never happened.

The Secondary Wound: When Silence Confirms the Abuser

There’s 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 at once: you were abandoned in the actual moment of harm, and you received powerful evidence about your own worth.

Children are meaning-making creatures. They don’t think, this adult has a trauma history that makes intervention feel impossible. What they think, at the level of the developing nervous system, is simpler and more brutal: no one is coming, I am not worth rescuing.

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

“You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise.”

Maya Angelou, poet, from “Still I Rise”

The concept of betrayal trauma, developed by Jennifer Freyd, PhD, the psychologist who coined the term, is deeply relevant here. I think about her research often, because it reframes something that used to sound almost too clinical to be useful: trauma is more psychologically damaging when it’s perpetrated, or permitted, by someone the victim depends on. Freyd’s work on institutional betrayal, co-authored with Alec Smidt, examines how government-mandated systems can compound an individual’s trauma by failing to respond when they had the power and the obligation to (Smidt & Freyd, PMID: 30058958). A family is its own kind of institution, with its own unwritten rules about who gets protected. When I read Smidt and Freyd’s argument that betrayal compounds when the betraying entity had the power to prevent harm and didn’t use it, I recognized the exact shape of what so many clients describe about their non-abusive parent. The parent had power. She had a voice. She chose the family’s story instead (Jennifer Freyd).

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

Both/And: The Colluding Parent May Have Been Scared AND Their Silence Still Wounded 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 this: your passive parent may have been genuinely terrified of the person causing harm, AND her terror didn’t give her a pass to leave you unprotected. Both things are true at once. Her fear was real, AND the consequence of that fear landing on you was harm you didn’t deserve and couldn’t carry alone. She may have loved you, AND love without action, love without protection, love that stays silent to preserve itself, isn’t the love a child actually needs.

This isn’t a call to cruelty toward the passive parent. It’s a call to honesty. Collapsing straight into “but she had her own trauma” forecloses a grief process you need. Moving to understanding and forgiveness before moving through the anger is 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 the Both/And only becomes genuinely inhabitable, not just intellectually possible, after the grief has actually been done. You have to feel the full weight of what was lost: the protection you deserved and didn’t get, the confirmation of your own reality that was withheld, the loneliness of being left with someone who hurt you by a person who knew. You have to let that be as big as it actually was. Only then can an understanding of why the passive parent acted the way she did take its proper place, not as an erasure of the harm, but as context that makes the harm comprehensible without minimizing it. The path through isn’t understand-and-therefore-don’t-feel-angry. It’s feel the anger fully, and also understand. Let both exist without either one canceling the other.

The Systemic Lens: Whose Silence Gets Excused?

It would be a mistake to treat family collusion as only an interpersonal problem, a matter of individual choices made by individual people. Collusion is also, and always, a systemic phenomenon, 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 inside her own household. She has to risk being seen as the parent of a family with abuse in it, and risk the judgment of her community, her extended family, her religious institution. In many cultural contexts that’s an enormous risk, one with real social and sometimes economic consequences. The family that acknowledges harm is the family that loses face. The family that enforces silence is the family that stays intact and stays embedded in its community.

Cultural silence around family abuse isn’t incidental. It’s structural. Religious communities that prioritize family preservation over individual safety, cultural norms that locate shame in the person who reveals the harm rather than the person who caused it, extended family networks that enforce silence to protect their own reputations by association, immigration contexts where reporting to outside authorities feels, or genuinely is, dangerous. These structures don’t cause the collusion on their own, but they make it the path of least resistance.

When I work with women from cultures or communities where these pressures run especially strong, I try to hold both things clearly at once: the structural forces that made her parent’s silence more likely, AND the reality that those forces didn’t eliminate her parent’s agency entirely. The passive parent made a choice, even a choice constrained by real context. The child paid for that choice regardless. If you grew up watching these dynamics unfold around a narcissistic parent whose personality shaped the entire household, the collusion may have been particularly entrenched, because the parent causing harm actively worked to prevent anyone else from seeing clearly.

There’s also the question of gender. In many family systems, the colluding parent is the mother, and her silence is often structured by her own position inside the household. A mother who’s financially dependent on an abusive partner, who’s been isolated from her own support network, who’s been systematically undermined in her own sense of reality, has a genuinely compromised capacity for protective action. This doesn’t change the outcome for the child, but it contextualizes the collusion within the larger reality of how trauma bonding and intimate partner violence constrain the choices of every adult in the household, not only the one being harmed directly. Recognizing these patterns of enmeshment across generations often helps women see their mother’s paralysis in fuller context, without excusing what it cost.

What remains true regardless of the systemic and structural factors: you, as a child, deserved protection. You deserved someone willing to risk the system’s comfort to secure your safety. That person often wasn’t there, and the absence of that protection, whatever its causes, shaped you. Understanding the causes doesn’t require minimizing what their absence cost you.

How Do You Heal from a Parent Who Colluded?

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 processing one specific violent act so much as metabolizing the reality of being left alone with something you couldn’t handle, repeatedly, by the people whose job it was to handle it alongside you.

The first and often hardest step is letting yourself say, out loud or in your own mind, that the person who didn’t protect you caused harm too. Not just the person who caused the direct abuse. Many driven women I work with have spent years protecting the passive parent inside their own storytelling, editing her out 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.

From there comes the grief you deserved and didn’t receive: what your childhood would have looked like if someone had intervened, what would be different about your capacity for trust if you’d had someone who confirmed your perceptions. You don’t need a precise counterfactual. You just need to feel the loss of it, and this grief is often worth doing with a trauma-informed therapist, because it can run very deep.

If the colluding parent is still alive and still maintaining the silence, you get to decide what the relationship looks like going forward, and that choice doesn’t have to be binary. It can be graduated. You can limit what you share with someone who’s shown she isn’t a safe holder of your truth, and reduce your expectations of her down to what she’s actually demonstrated she’s capable of.

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 turned away instead, the message was: your read on things is wrong, your pain isn’t real enough to act on. Part of healing is rebuilding trust in your own internal signals, believing that when something feels wrong, that feeling deserves examination rather than suppression. And I want to say this clearly, because it runs against a narrative popular in therapeutic circles: you don’t have to forgive the colluding parent in order to heal. Healing is about your internal state, not extending absolution on a schedule. Forgiveness, if it ever comes, tends to arrive as a byproduct of genuinely completed grief, not a destination you drive toward in order to call yourself healed.

Rosalind is two years into this work now. She still keeps that chipped blue mug in her office at home, the one she never drinks from, the one she just holds. Last month she told me she’d finally said one true sentence to her mother out loud: “You were right there, and you knew.” Her mother went quiet, the same quiet from the kitchen thirty-nine years earlier. But Rosalind didn’t look away this time. “I used to think her silence meant I was the problem,” she said. “Now I know it just meant her silence.” The wound hasn’t closed. It’s become a room in the house she’s finally allowed herself to call her own, and the room, for the first time, has a door.

(Rosalind and Priscilla are composites, and identifying details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.)

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 she 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 were never allowed to name.

Warmly, Annie.

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