The Hurt Loops Back: When Women’s Wounds Shape the Men Who Harm Them
Why Unprocessed Women Create the Men They Resent
Data Collectors,
The Algorithm is loud but there’s a particular kind of silence I’ve been noticing. A silence that shows up when harm doesn’t match the usual narrative. Society today is quick to name harm when it’s a man harming a woman. We’re fast to diagnose, expose, and react often with moral clarity as if we saw the dynamic first hand. But.. What happens when harm flows in the other direction? Now what?
When the woman is the one silencing, stonewalling, manipulating, infantilizing…
When the father becomes the scapegoat or disappears out of fear or shame…
Suddenly the volume drops.
The curiosity fades.
The story changes.
And I think we need to talk about that.
Kristy Scott & Desmond Scott: The Cultural Case Study
As a clinician it’s been my due diligence to make sure I keep this noise from infiltrating my own perception. Once I am the session room, or placing my attention on the lives of other’s situations—what I think seizes to exist. I am a hunter, like a veloceiraptior hunting prey, except I hunt for the patterns that go unnoticed, unspoken, or completely bypassed.
I’m interested in how we respond to these narratives to these patterns.
So lets collect the data:
A woman files.
Says he cheated. (This is very important data) but what is more fascinating is how quick the internet believes her. Full stop.
Later, Desmond releases a statement—not denying the infidelity, but revealing that he asked for separation first. A subtle SOS embedded in his admission, one that of course gets bypassed but in the most invalidating way, this level of invalidation is mockery. Remember, we are a society that screams “Mental Health Awareness” just remember that… So, because the narrative was already set he cheated, she was betrayed—
there’s no space left for complexity or even nuance.
We say “believe victims” without vetting facts.
We say “create safe spaces” while treating someone’s public humiliation as viral entertainment. We say “be kind” while stitching and stitching and stitching our way into psychological warfare—all in the name of justice.
Now let’s really be honest:
There are influencers, celebrities etc, who don’t care about the grief, the trauma, or the nervous system collapse they care about the reward of aligning with the “correct” side. And now we’re being algorithmically rewarded for blind loyalty. Say the “right” thing, support the “right” person, and boom—you get the clicks, the validation, the exposure. Even if you don’t know the person. Even if you don’t care about the truth.
Just support the “side” and you’ll be included.
This isn’t about taking sides. It’s about how fast we choose one before asking questions. Nuance, critical thinking, discernment. These are crucial mind muscles that are necessary for a healthy nervous system and healthy attachment. We must learn how to train these otherwise the polarity poison from the upside down pollutes us all!!
The Somatic Safari Begins
This series is my way of thinking out loud—my brain hunches that I gather from therapy rooms, cultural patterns, nervous system data, and lived observation. You’ll often hear me say this is a mental gym, but it’s also a somatic field trip a safari ride through human experience.
Are you ready to begin?
As always we’re going to have to call on Doc for this one…
For the first stop on our Safari field trip, we have to go back in history. I don’t want to spend too much time in history because—well, we pull from historic wounds all the time in this generation. The sole reason for taking you this route is to refresh the memory. Many women, our mothers as children, grandmothers when they were children, so on had childhood experiences that didn’t have the safety to speak let alone held. Let your mind’s eye picture what it meant to be a woman in a prior generation—maybe the 1930s, 40s, 50s. Think about what it meant to have your worth directly tethered to how quiet you could be, how clean your home was, how compliant your children looked, how devoted you were to being small, selfless, sacrificial, and “seen but not heard.” Think about what it meant to have no bank account, no legal autonomy, no right to say no without consequence.
Yes, these are historical facts.
But more importantly they are psychological blueprints. In family systems terms (Bowen, 1978), this was role-based conditioning at its core. These women didn’t just accept their roles—they adapted to survive them. And survival adaptations, when repeated over time, become traits, coping mechanisms, patterns. Soon they develop into personality traits.
From Silent Wives to Strategic Mothers
Now, I want you to take this further. Don’t just see those women. Feel into them. Imagine what it takes to stay married to someone abusive because there are no resources to leave. Imagine what it feels like to lose a child to war and still be expected to cook, smile, and serve dessert.
Now ask yourself:
What kind of adaptations does the nervous system develop in that environment?
Fawning. People-pleasing. Emotional shutdown. Overfunctioning. Control masked as care, affection, love. Fragility that get’t masked as submission.
All of these are classic trauma adaptations (Herman, Trauma and Recovery)and when weaponized over time, they become covert control tactics passed down through generations. In The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller explains how children of emotionally repressed parents often become “mirrors” for the adult’s unmet needs.
That doesn’t go away just because the mother is “doing her best.” It gets coded into the emotional ecosystem of the home.
Somatic Checkpoint: Pause & Scan
So before we leave this historical stop on our safari Tour, I want you to check in with your body. What are you noticing?
Is there tension in your chest? A heaviness in the belly? A flutter in your throat?
What memories are flashing? What sensations are surfacing?
Pause.
That’s data.
We’re not judging it. We’re not labeling it.
We’re collecting it because what we don’t metabolize what the generations before us couldn’t metabolize—we often end up reenacting.
Back to the Now: The Inherited Survival Playbook
Okay, now we’re back. 2026. Present time. But are we really free from those patterns?
Because here’s what I’m seeing:
A whole generation of women raised under the unspoken rules of survival.
Where emotions were manipulated for attention.
Where silence was a form of protest.
Where tears could be turned on to deflect accountability.
Where shame was redirected before it was felt.
Where “I’m just a bad mom” or “You always think I’m wrong” was a way to shut down the conversation instead of sitting in it.
That’s the survival strategy being played out live!
And it’s one many of us were raised under. Janina Fisher (in Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma) calls these “parts adaptations” — parts of the self that developed for protection, not connection. But when left unchecked, they become loops.
They hijack intimacy. They sabotage repair. They hide in plain sight.
I see them…
Can you?
Why Would That Stop at Motherhood?
Now ask yourself:
If those were the survival strategies modeled in the home…
What makes us think they would magically stop once someone becomes a wife or a mother? If anything, the nervous system may feel more unsafe in marriage.
More trapped. More visible. More needed. (Insert arranged marriage women)
All of this means, more vulnerable. So, when a nervous system feels cornered, it doesn’t reach for self-reflection. It reaches for what worked:
Covert control. Emotional redirection. Narrative flipping. Fragility. Defensiveness. Manipulative incompetence. These are not “toxic traits.” They are unmetabolized trauma loops we grasp for when we don’t have the crayons to use in that situational event. This is problematic because, when we fail to name them they become intergenerational inheritance.
And that’s what we’re here to interrupt.
Clinical Lens: Generational Injury Doesn’t Skip the Boys
In Scattered Minds, Dr. Gabor Maté emphasizes that emotional availability and regulation are crucial in childhood—not just for girls, but for boys, too.
Yet boys are often raised with a split experience:
Over-mothered (infantilized)
Under-fathered (neglected or absent)
Emotionally dismissed (“Man up”)
Emotionally smothered (“He’s my whole world”)
Some daughters became shields.
Some sons became pawns.
Some got both.
I’ve worked with men who were raised by mothers in survival mode, covertly controlling, emotionally dysregulated, narratively manipulative.
This wasn't because they were “bad,” but because no one had taught them another way. Given them the what I call crayons to color life with. Remember, some of us were only give very few if any.
Now, Fast forward to the future… (I told you this was a field trip) those boys are noe men who carry the shame of collapsing as fathers.
They’re terrified of messing up.
They freeze when left alone with the baby and it’s not because they don’t care, but because their own nervous systems are still children.
And shame… is louder than logic.
Now let’s pause…
Because I can already feel some of the internal voices rising up. Some women reading this are saying, “Well, we didn’t get that either. We didn’t have support. We were scared too.”
And that’s the point.
We know.
We know you didn’t get that.
We know you weren’t mothered.
We know the system didn’t nurture your fear or guide you through your first time.
And still—you chose your partner. You said you loved him.
You stepped into this life with him, which means at some point, there was trust. There was intention. There was a “yes.”
So this… this is where love shows up.
This is where the vows get tested.
This is where we either pass down our blueprints or we interrupt the loop.Because when a man becomes a father, he’s not just hearing your voice.
He’s hearing his mother’s voice in his head, in his body. He’s hearing the tone of every woman who disarmed him with love but punished him with silence.
And yes, you are going through your own unraveling too. But that’s the part we forget: you’re both scared. You’re both brand new. And no one taught either of you how to do this with nervous system safety.
Do men need to step up?
Absolutely.
But how can they learn in an environment that shames them before it shows them? How can any of us? Parents…
Let’s be real. Most women didn’t get shown either.
Most women are entering motherhood terrified, overwhelmed, emotionally raw.
And that cocktail of anxiety, hypervigilance, and responsibility often leads to control. Why? Because control feels safer than chaos and many women confuse safety with control the same way their mothers, grandmothers etc did.
So what do we do?
We micromanage.
We take over.
We silently narrate: “You don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll do it.”
And the baby becomes a battleground for competence.
Now, Here’s the issue…
If the first message a man receives after becoming a father is “I don’t trust you,”
don’t be surprised when he shrinks.
When he defers.
When he stops trying.
When his nervous system says, “See? I knew I couldn’t do this.”
That’s not him weaponizing incompetence.
That’s his trauma saying, “You’re right. I’m not safe here.”
And that’s the setup for the very problem we claim we didn’t sign up for.
When we say, “Why won’t he help with the baby?” Well… maybe it started the moment he tried and felt like a burden. Maybe he started clocking the eye rolls, the corrections, the side comments. Maybe his freeze response activated because his nervous system got paired with your disapproval instead of your belief.
This is not about blame. This is about wiring. Making it about blame proves your nerves systems need to be the victim. Were you raised under that? The minute the baby enters the world, a new energetic contract is written and both partners bring their nervous systems into that contract. If we want fatherhood to feel like a safe identity for men, we need to ask:
How am I showing up in those first moments, those first weeks, those tiny ruptures?
Am I reinforcing his fear of failure?
Or am I modeling what repair looks like?
Because your regulation—or lack of it—is now shaping two generations.
Weaponized Accountability, Cultural Projection, and the Scapegoat Complex
A lot of us were raised in systems where being accountable was a survival strategy, especially if you were the scapegoat. You learned to take the blame to keep the peace.
To carry the dysfunction so the family didn’t collapse. So now, as adults, when someone calls us out—we’re not just hearing feedback. We’re hearing danger.
But here’s where it gets tricky: Some people only demand accountability from others to avoid doing their own work. They perform call-outs as a form of power not as a path to healing. They weaponize “insight” as a form of shame-displacement.
And some of us grew up with people like that.
So when we say we fear “being corrected,” what we’re really afraid of is being abused again under the guise of accountability. This is why we have to build new emotional ecosystems.
What I call The Rules.
These must include not just safe spaces but mature ones. Spaces that distinguish between a call-out, a correction, and a conversation.
What We Don’t Clean, We Pass Down
We talk a lot about the “mother wound.”
But what about the mothering wound in men? What happens when boys are raised by women who never processed their own grief, shame, fear, or trauma? What happens when emotional enmeshment gets mislabeled as love? When the son becomes the therapist, the emotional husband, the emotional hostage? And what happens when these boys grow up, try to become fathers, and no one has trained their nervous systems to tolerate the identity of being needed?
Some collapse.
Some disappear.
Some rage.
Some cheat.
Some distract.
Some shut down.
Now, our safari is about to hit some bumpy terrain as we pivot perspectives and explore the area of mens impacted development. Because what we’re seeing now is the result of those dynamics we already named. Some of these men?
They were infantilized.
Some? Parentified.
Some? Both.
And when boys are raised like this, they often go one of two ways.
They either become submissive, passive, shut down or they become aggressive, controlling, manipulative. There’s rarely a third path without deep inner work and external reparenting.
Let’s start with the first one.
You’ve probably seen the collapse.
The freeze.
The stonewall.
The delayed routines. The disappearing acts right before breakfast.
The drawn-out trips to the bathroom every time bedtime starts.
Let’s Zoom Out.
This is regressed child behavior. Think about kids who stall when they don’t want to do something. This isn’t just irresponsibility, it’s the nervous system stalling, it’s nervous system movement. It’s fawn and freeze patterns wrapped in “I don’t know how” and reinforced by a partner who keeps saying, “You’re doing it wrong.”
Think about it. If men are always doing it wrong when will they ever do it right to your standards? Do you even have standards? Or is being constantly unfulfilled a baseline personality trait that creates a double bind not just for your husband but also for your kids? A reenactment of your mother’s moods maybe?
But then there’s the second path.
The one that doesn’t look like collapse.
It looks like dominance.
It looks like gaslighting.
It looks like a man who makes his partner feel small, confused, doubting her own sense of reality—because that’s what he had to do to himself to survive his own upbringing.
This is often when narcissism enters the chat, not as a personality disorder right away, but as a pattern of delusion required to maintain a sense of self. It’s not that he wants to lie or manipulate. It’s that he was never allowed to just be.
And when you’re raised by a mother or any caregiver for that matter who emotionally hijacks every moment, who re-centers everything around her pain, her emotions, her shame—you learn to do the same, because it’s the only way you ever got attention, safety, or identity. We must not confuse these with “skills.” These are maladaptive survival patterns.
If we never pause to name them, we start reinforcing them.
We start dating them.
We start building families with them.
And then calling it fate when it falls apart. So many women are in relationships with men like this men who are drowning in shame but performing control.
Men who seek validation through cheating, flirting, overworking, or status, because it’s the only way they know how to feel good enough. Now here’s the thing…
A lot of those women are reenacting their own wounds, too. They choose these men because the dynamic is familiar. Because it matches what their nervous system was raised on. And that’s not chemistry.
That’s trauma. That’s your past recycling itself.
All of this doesn’t excuse anything. We name to interrupt the reenactment.
Macro-Micro Loop: Is Culture Conditioning the Family, or the Other Way Around?
Here’s a hypothesis I’ve been sitting with:
What if the family system isn’t just reenacting the culture…
but the culture has always been reenacting the dysfunction of the family?
We are fed narratives.
Who deserves empathy.
Who should be forgiven.
Who is always safe.
Who is always harmful.
When was the last time you asked yourself… “Where did we get these blueprints from?” Who told us we had to chase perfection, be the “good wife,” raise the polite child, and suppress our mess?
Advertising did.
The church did.
The state did.
The neighborhood did.
The PTA did.
Marketing campaigns didn’t just sell us products—they sold us identities.
They sold us what safety was supposed to look like and then punished us for not achieving it. But what happens when modern influencers are perpetuating a life that not even they are living? This is why discernment skills are so important.
The deeper truth: We don’t have to keep reenacting any of it, and that is terrifying for some of us. We don’t have to let the algorithm of our nervous system or society decide our values. We don’t have to choose between family conditioning and cultural messaging. We can choose something else: We can choose alignment. That’s what this whole field trip is about. Not burning down the system, but getting honest about whether it’s been living in our bodies this whole time and the necessary rewiring work needed rewire what’s been imbedded within our system.
Closing Thought: The Shame You’re Avoiding Is the Growth You’re Delaying
Let me say this plainly:
I’m not here to argue that all men are victims. I’m not here to suggest women can’t be harmed. I’m not here to “both sides” real abuse. I’m here to say that our perception filters… You know the ones shaped by pain, family roles, culture, and shame— yeah, those filtration systems often prevent us from seeing the full picture.
And that blindness…
hurts our kids.
hurts our partners.
hurts our healing.
More importantly hurts ourselves.
The shame you’re avoiding isn’t dangerous.
Sitting with it is the real work.
That’s the hypothesis.
I’ll see you on the next field trip.
🎵Music: “Etc…”- Franz Gordon
Licensed via Epidemic Sound