Mother Admits She Hates Her Daughter After Years of Feeling Betrayed by Her During an Abusive Marriage

Some wounds do not come from strangers. Sometimes they come from the people you spent your life trying to protect.

This Redditor shares the painful reality of being unable to forgive her daughter after a traumatic family breakdown. Years earlier, she fled an abusive marriage with her two children, only for her daughter to reveal her location to her abusive ex-husband.

After the divorce, their relationship deteriorated further, leaving years of anger, distance, and unresolved pain between them.

Now, as an adult, her daughter has reached out hoping to arrange a meeting with her father, but instead of relief, it has brought back feelings of betrayal and resentment that she has struggled to bury.

A mother struggles with resentment toward her daughter after years of trauma and family betrayal

Some wounds are difficult to explain because they involve people we are told we should love unconditionally. When the person who causes the deepest pain is a family member, especially a child, emotions can become filled with guilt, grief, anger, and confusion all at once.

Admitting resentment toward someone we expected to love forever can feel almost impossible, but hidden pain does not disappear simply because a relationship carries a special title.

This story is not only about a mother saying she hates her daughter. It is about years of trauma, betrayal, and unresolved grief. The mother experienced abuse from her husband and made a desperate decision to escape with her children.

The moment her daughter revealed her location had life-changing consequences, and from the mother’s perspective, it became connected to the danger she was trying to escape. Over time, that moment appears to have transformed into a deep wound that was never addressed.

The daughter, however, was also a teenager caught inside an abusive family system. She may have experienced the divorce as a loss of the life she understood and may have interpreted events through the influence of her father. Two people can carry completely different versions of the same painful history.

A different perspective is that trauma often distorts family relationships because children in abusive homes are not simply observers. They are affected by manipulation, fear, loyalty conflicts, and the emotional pressure of choosing sides.

Research on domestic violence shows that children exposed to abusive environments can struggle with understanding responsibility and may develop complicated attachments to both the victim and the abusive parent. This does not erase the harm caused by the daughter’s actions or the mother’s pain, but it adds context to why their relationship became so damaged.

Trauma psychologist Dr. Judith Herman, whose work on trauma recovery is widely recognized, explains that healing after traumatic experiences often requires rebuilding a sense of safety, understanding what happened, and reconnecting with personal meaning. Trauma can affect how people interpret relationships and protect themselves emotionally.

Similarly, psychologist Dr. Nadine Burke Harris has discussed how childhood exposure to stressful and unsafe environments can influence emotional development, relationships, and coping patterns later in life.

These insights do not mean the mother must immediately forgive, forget, or accept contact before she is ready. Her anger is connected to real experiences of fear and abandonment.

At the same time, viewing her daughter only through the worst moment of her teenage years may prevent any possibility of understanding how both of them were shaped by the same harmful environment.

The daughter’s public support for domestic violence issues may feel painfully contradictory, but it may also reflect a person trying to make sense of a subject that has deeply affected her life.

The hardest truth about family trauma is that love and hurt can exist together. A parent can love a child and still feel anger toward the choices that child made.

A child can have caused harm and still have been a frightened young person navigating an unhealthy environment. Healing does not require pretending nothing happened. It requires creating enough space to see the full picture.

Before deciding whether reconciliation is possible, the most important step may be addressing the pain that has remained frozen for years. Sometimes forgiveness begins not with excusing another person, but with allowing ourselves to stop carrying the entire weight of the past alone.

Here’s the input from the Reddit crowd:

These commenters encouraged OP to separate deep hurt from hatred and process emotions more carefully

These Redditors recommended therapy and support systems to handle the emotional trauma

These users questioned missing details and wanted to hear the daughter’s perspective

Can a relationship survive after nearly a decade apart? Should the mother accept the apology request, or protect her own peace first? Share your thoughts below.