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A friend of mine who BTW started the Fuller Seminary Graduate School of Psychology once told me that, "All parents abuse their children, that the only difference is that I (he) deal with my(his) abusive behavior once confronted with it." I had to paraphrase a bit to get the flavor of what he meant in the context of our conversation. This means that the only way to break a chain of abusivnessfrom generation to generation is for the child to confront their parents with that abusive behavior. One of the problems is that when we grow up in an abusive enviroment we think thats the way it ought to be and that everybody suffers the same kind of thing. Each family has it's own dysfunctionality, after all we are only human beings.

Further it takes a great deal of courage for a child ( a grown one) to confront a parents absuviness, to have the courage of ones convictions..it is going against the family myth so to speak and many times the child will not get the support of the siblings let alone parents who have bought into the family myth. One then faces abandonment by the family and also faces being truly alone.