When a child's psyche is abused, there is no escape route

An advice-seeker in therapist Lori Gottlieb’s New York Times column (October 22, 2026) expressed her frustration and implied a dilemma. Her brother’s wife cheated on him and emotionally abused their four-year-old daughter, calling her a “stupid little girl” and saying she hated her. The brother has stayed in the marriage through the cheating and child abuse. Letter writer, angry at her sister-in-law, has stayed away from family gatherings and informed her brother not to gift her with bad news about his marriage unless he is going to leave it. What to do? she asked Gottlieb. Miss the “fun times” of family gatherings or attend them and seethe with anger?

Gottlieb said the writer was * punishing herself by missing family events, * giving her brother an unfair ultimatum, and * depriving the child (and one-year-old sibling) of her “aunt’s warm and calming presence.”

TPS published this globally ignored comment (four “recommends”) to the question-and-its-answer:

If the sister follows Gottlieb’s advice and attends family gatherings to enjoy and “be there” for her niece; and if she assumes (per advice) this will give her niece her “warm and calming presence,” I’m suggesting that it will not work that way at all. The little girl will inevitably internalize the sense that the adults who love her are helpless and incompetent. She will not know that this sense is being planted in her psyche – it’s too nonintuitive and obscure for a child to detect. But it will be there, affecting her present and future relationships with authority figures and intimate partners. It may even lead her someday to be drawn to an effete partner: A competent mate would painfully accentuate what she missed in her childhood: a caring, effective savior.

Gottlieb was being her mellifluous self – not appropriate. The child would see but not see her father either condoning or helplessly acquiescing to his wife’s abusiveness. She would see but not see her aunt’s warmth that will look like blindness to the pain being caused, or she would feel that “this pain is right and sanctioned by good people.” Or she would compartmentalize feeling loved from feeling abused which would surely, later in life, expand to other kinds of dissociation.

I had hoped that some other NYT commenter would add a rejoinder to my unpleasant explanation: “How can you say it would be destructive for the aunt to be present for her niece? Better to make the girl feel ghosted and left to the wolves?” I would have re-rejoined: “You are right. The child would either feel crazy-made – receiving love that was oblivious to her abuse – or abandoned. There are no happy alternatives. There are no happy endings when the parent-child bond is sick.”

Our inner child in the real world

Is there any reason to dwell so much on the “inner child”? On the wounds inflicted in specific passing or repeated moments in our earliest years? Even if it’s true that the unhealed child in us is prepotent, the law underlying our life, it’s obviously not where we live. It is not our present thoughts and plans, the activities we do every day, our ideas of meaning, the energy or inertness of our relationships. It is not our intelligence and competence.

Does that historical self actually manifest now, or is it comatose in the deep and dark bilge of our ship? A less theoretical question: If our simple, younger, brighter words and feelings are somehow diffused throughout our aged chemistry, does it matter?

The answer, I'd say, is that it depends on how delusional we want to be and have to be. We can believe, insanely, that every thought and feeling and behavior is on the plateau of adultness or is the more or less successful evolution of our child self. We can be psychologically laden, a mongrel of insane adult and sane child: remembering and feeling abuse, abandonments and other injuries, and even allowing them to enervate our present energies. There are those, the most grounded, who remain predominantly stunted and don’t know it. The weaker their delusion of adulthood, the more incapacitated they’ll be in the world.

Our inner child may inevitably make us fail, but if we’re delusional, we won’t see failure.

This speaks to a paradox: In a background of dysfunction, the most real person is the ungrown child who can’t handle life with any competence: the psychotic inpatient, the man or woman in chronic crisis, self-medication and projection. The unreal person is an organism of defenses and delusions that, cobbled together, enable dictionary-definition success. It could be a billionaire or a Nobel Prize winner in Economics.

The most troubling ramification of the inner child, possibly, is that awareness of it can make us feel that time has never passed, we have never moved on, we are still the infant. We still need sick substances for comfort; we still have only primitive likes and dislikes, or diametrically, fantasy candy notions; we still follow our parents or lie in their hands; we are estranged, cosmically. Individuals in regressive therapy may grasp some strand of that (“ha ha, I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up”) but don’t let themselves fall into the deep end of its implications. I have never heard clients name full existential desperation. Thank goodness for their insanity.