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 mentally 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.”