The Truth About "Mutual Abuse". Why Your Reactions Don't Make You Abusive

"Maybe I'm just as bad as they are."

You've said this to yourself a hundred times. Lying awake at 3am, replaying the moments you're most ashamed of. You remember the screaming. The things you threw. The names you called them. You remember how you looked in those moments, wild, desperate, out of control. Everything they said you were.

And now a question gnaws at you, relentless: If I reacted that way, doesn't that make me abusive too? Doesn't that make us both the problem? Doesn't my behavior prove they were right about me?

This is the question that keeps survivors awake at night. It's the doubt that makes leaving feel impossible. It's the shame that silences you when you try to tell someone what happened. It's the secret you carry like a stone.

And it's exactly the question your abuser wants you asking.

Here's what I need you to understand before we go any further: “Mutual abuse” isn't real. What people call mutual abuse is almost always something else entirely—reactive abuse. And the difference between the two could change everything about how you see yourself and what happened to you.

If you're questioning whether what you experienced was really abuse, you might find this helpful: You're Not Imagining It: How Emotional Abuse Shows Up and How to Trust Yourself Again.

Why "Mutual Abuse" Is a Dangerous Myth

When therapists, friends, or family say “it takes two”or “you're both responsible,” they're applying logic that works for healthy conflict to a situation where power is fundamentally unequal.

They're describing relationship conflict, not abuse. And they're making a dangerous mistake. More on this distinction here: When Does Relationship Conflict Become Abuse?

Relationship conflict looks like:

• Two people with relatively equal power having a disagreement

• Both people able to express their needs without fear

• Arguments that are loud or emotional but don't involve systematic control

• Conflicts that resolve or at least reach some kind of understanding

• Both people capable of repair, apology, and change

Abuse looks like:

• One person systematically dismantling the other's sense of self, reality, and autonomy

• The other person struggling to survive that dismantling

• A pattern of power and control designed to dominate and manipulate

• Conflicts that leave one person smaller, quieter, more afraid

• Only one person genuinely able to make changes that stick

These are not equivalent dynamics, even when the survival looks messy, loud, or aggressive.

Fiona (not her real name) came to me carrying a fear that many survivors know intimately:

“I think I might be just as abusive as he was.”

She remembered screaming at him until her throat was raw. Throwing his phone across the room. Calling him names she'd never said to anyone else. She remembered the look on his face when she did": shocked, hurt, almost frightened. A masterclass in wounded innocence.

And she remembered his words, delivered with perfect calm:

“See? You're the violent one. You're the one who needs help. I've been trying to love you and you repay me with this.”

For months after leaving, Fiona believed him. She believed she was equally responsible for the dysfunction in their relationship. She believed that her reactions made her just as bad, maybe worse, because at least he stayed calm while she “lost it.”

But here's what Fiona didn't see at first, what her abuser had carefully obscured: her body had been telling a different story all along.

Abuse Isn't a Moment, It's an Environment

Abuse isn't a single fight, a bad day, or an isolated incident. It's an environment, carefully constructed and meticulously maintained over time.

Think of it like a building. On the outside, everything looks normal, functional, even beautiful to passersby. People who see you together might say, “they seem so happy” or “they're so good together”. But inside, where no one else can see, the walls are slowly closing in.

Every interaction, every comment, every gesture is designed to make you smaller. To make you doubt yourself. To make you question what's real. This is what experts call coercive control, a pattern of behaviour that traps someone without necessarily using physical violence. When Control Isn’t Physical - Understanding Coercive Control

What the Environment Looked Like for Fiona

For Fiona, the architecture of abuse was built from:

Monitoring disguised as care
He checked her phone “because he loved her so much and couldn't bear the thought of losing her”. He needed to know where she was at all times “for her safety”. He questioned who she talked to “because he was interested in her life”. Each intrusion was wrapped in the language of love.

Gaslighting that made her doubt her own mind
He'd say something cruel, then later deny it completely. “I never said that. You're remembering wrong. You always do this—twist my words to make me the bad guy”. She started recording conversations to prove to herself what was real. How to Trust Yourself Again After Gaslighting

Emotional invalidation every time she expressed hurt
”You're too sensitive”. “You're too emotional”. “You're being dramatic”. “Why do you always make such a big deal out of nothing?” Her feelings were never legitimate, never reasonable, never valid. She learned to stop sharing them.

Isolation from her support system
He never explicitly forbade her from seeing friends. Instead: “Your friends don't really care about you the way I do”. “Did you notice how she didn't even ask about your promotion?” “Your family has always treated you like shit. Why do you keep going back to them?” Slowly, subtly, her world shrank until he was the only person left in it.

Unilateral decisions presented as joint choices
He'd make major decisions about their lives, where they lived, how they spent money, plans for their future, without consulting her. When she protested, he'd act confused, hurt. “I thought you'd be happy about this. I did this for us. Why are you being so ungrateful?”

And when she finally pushed back, when she screamed that she needed him to stop, threw something in desperation, demanded to be heard, he stepped back with calculated calm and said:

“Look at how you're acting. Look at yourself. You're completely out of control. This is exactly why I worry about you”.

This is the insidious architecture of abuse: it creates the very reactions it then uses as evidence against you.

Fiona's abuser wasn't a monster. Monsters are easy to identify, easy to leave, easy to warn others about. He was something far more dangerous: a charming, intelligent person who, with surgical precision, dismantled her sense of self piece by carefully chosen piece.

And then blamed her for breaking.

Conflict + Misconception = Mutual Abuse? Think again.

What Your Body Was Actually Doing

When you've been living under sustained psychological threat and that's what abuse is, sustained threat, your body changes. Not just emotionally. Biologically.

Your nervous system rewrites itself for survival. Bessel van der Kolk explains this beautifully in his groundbreaking book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

Here's what happens:

Your amygdala, your brain's threat-detection centre, learns to stay on high alert.
It's constantly scanning: Is he in a good mood? Is his tone shifting? Did I say something wrong? What's about to happen? This isn't paranoia, it's pattern recognition. Your brain has learned that subtle cues predict danger.

Your cortisol levels remain elevated.
This stress hormone keeps your body in a constant state of readiness for threat. It's like living with your hand permanently on a hot stove. Your system never gets to rest, reset, or repair.

Your hippocampus, the part of your brain that processes memories and regulates emotions, becomes overwhelmed.
Under chronic stress, it actually shrinks. This is why trauma memories are fragmented, why you might not remember things in order, why you struggle to explain what happened in a coherent narrative.

Your prefrontal cortex, responsible for rational thinking and emotional regulation, goes partially offline.
When you're constantly in survival mode, you lose access to the parts of your brain that help you think clearly, regulate your responses, and make thoughtful decisions.

This isn't a choice. This isn't a character flaw. This isn't you being “crazy” or “too emotional”. This is neurobiology.

When therapists talk about fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, we're describing your autonomic nervous system's survival responses. For someone living with abuse, these aren't occasional reactions to isolated stressful events. They become your baseline. Your default mode.

Every interaction becomes a threat evaluation. Every disagreement feels like potential danger.

Because often, it is.

Fiona's Body Knew

Fiona's body knew she was in danger long before her mind could fully articulate it:

• The tightness in her chest when she heard his car in the driveway

• The way her stomach dropped when he used a certain tone, that careful, measured voice that meant she was about to be “educated” about her failures

• The hypervigilance that made her track his moods the way others track weather patterns

• The way she'd freeze mid-sentence if he shifted his posture

• The chronic fatigue from sleeping with one eye open, always alert for the next crisis

Her body was doing exactly what it was designed to do: keep her alive.

And when she finally exploded, when she screamed until her throat ached, threw something, pushed back physically, that wasn't aggression. That wasn't abuse. That was her nervous system's last-ditch effort to create space, to be heard, to survive.

It was fight-or-flight finally choosing fight after flight had stopped working.

The Truth About Reactive Abuse

Imagine being trapped in a room where the walls are slowly closing in. Not all at once—that would be too obvious, too easy to name. But gradually. Inch by inch.

A subtle comment here: "You're being overly sensitive."
A controlling gesture there: "I'm just trying to help you."
A dismissive glance: "You're overreacting again."

The space gets tighter and tighter. You ask them to stop and they act confused: "What are you talking about? I'm not doing anything. You're imagining things."

You can't breathe. You're suffocating. You need them to see what they're doing, to stop, to give you room to exist.

So you push back. Not to attack, but to create space. To be able to breathe. To exist without disappearing.

And in that moment of pushing back, the person controlling the walls steps away with a calculated expression and says:

"Look how violent you are. Look how out of control. This is exactly what I've been telling you about yourself."

This is reactive abuse. And it is categorically, fundamentally not the same as being abusive.

The Difference That Changes Everything

Abuse is about power and control.
It's a pattern of behavior designed to dominate, manipulate, and diminish another person. It's systematic. It's calculated. It serves a clear purpose: to maintain power over someone else, to keep them small, confused, dependent.

Reactive abuse is about survival.
It's a response to ongoing harm. It's your nervous system fighting back when it can't flee. It's the desperate, often chaotic behaviour that emerges when someone has been pushed beyond their capacity to cope, when all other strategies have failed.

One is a strategy. The other is a symptom.

One is about gaining power. The other is about reclaiming the basic right to exist.

Fiona's so-called “aggressive” responses were never intended to control or dominate. She wasn't trying to make him smaller, rewrite his reality, or isolate him from everyone who cared about him. She wasn't building an environment designed to trap him.

She was trying to break out of the environment he'd built to trap her.

When she screamed, it was because months of calm, reasonable requests had been dismissed, mocked, or turned back on her.

When she threw something, it was because her words weren't reaching him and her body needed to do something with the panic flooding her system.

When she called him names, it was after hours of him systematically dismantling her sense of self and she was desperately trying to name what was happening to her.

When she pushed him away physically, it was because he was backing her into a corner, literally or metaphorically and her body needed space.

These weren't equivalent to what he was doing. These were responses to what he was doing.

If you're wondering about the dynamics that keep people stuck in these cycles, this might help: Trauma Bonding and Why You Can't Let Go: The System That Keeps You Trapped

How to Tell the Difference

If you're still wondering whether you were abusive or whether you were reacting to abuse, these questions can help clarify:

1. Were Your Reactions Specific to This Relationship?

You don't scream at your friends when they disagree with you.
You don't throw things at your colleagues when they frustrate you.
You don't call your family members names when conflicts arise.
You don't push your support network away when they set boundaries.

Your “out of control” behaviour emerged specifically with this one person, in this one relationship. It didn't exist before them. It doesn't exist with anyone else. It's not who you are, it's what this specific dynamic brought out in you.

2. Did the Behavior Stop When the Relationship Ended?

This is one of the clearest indicators.

Once you were away from them, once the constant threat was removed, once you felt safe again, you didn't continue behaving this way. You stopped screaming, throwing things, reacting with the intensity that characterised that relationship.

Abusers don't stop when a relationship ends. They find new targets. The pattern continues with someone else because the pattern originates from them, from their need for power and control.

Survivors calm down when the threat is removed. The reactive behavior was tied to the specific environment of that relationship. Remove the environment, and the behavior stops.

3. How Do You Feel About What You Did?

This might be the most telling question of all.

Abusers feel entitled to their actions. They justify: “They made me do it.” They minimise: “It wasn't that bad.” They deny: “That never happened.” They blame: “If they hadn't pushed my buttons, I wouldn't have reacted that way.”

They don't carry the kind of shame you're carrying right now.

Survivors feel deep, crushing shame. They're horrified by their own behaviour. They can't believe they acted that way. They wonder if they've become someone they don't recognise. They feel guilt that eats at them, especially when their reactions made sense given what they were enduring.

If shame is something you're wrestling with, you may find this useful: Understanding Toxic Shame: The Wounds of Childhood

The very fact that you're asking yourself “Was I abusive?” is strong evidence that you weren't.

Abusers don't lie awake at night torturing themselves with this question.
They don't sit in therapy asking “What if I was just as bad?”
They don't read articles like this trying to understand what happened.

That kind of self-reflection, that willingness to examine your own behaviour with brutal honesty, that's not characteristic of abusive people.

4. Did They Use Your Reactions Against You?

Think about what happened after you “lost control.”

They stayed calm, or appeared to, while you “lost it.” Then used your loss of control as proof that you were the problem. They might have:

• Recorded you during your worst moments to “show people what you're really like”

• Told friends and family about your behavior while conveniently omitting what led up to it

• Threatened to use your reactions in custody battles or legal proceedings

• Used your reactions to justify their own behaviour: “See? This is why I have to...”

• Made you feel like you owed them for putting up with your "craziness"

This is a common tactic called DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

They deny what they did, attack you for your reaction and reverse the roles so they become the victim of your “abuse”.

This tactic often works in concert with gaslighting. More on this here: How to Recover from Gaslighting in a Toxic Relationship

5. What Did the Power Dynamics Actually Look Like?

Even if you occasionally “won” an argument or got your way on something minor, look at the fundamental structure of power:

Who controlled the finances?
Who made the major decisions?
Who decided what story got told to others?
Who had more social support?
Who could leave more easily?
Who held the power to end the relationship?
Who controlled access to housing, transportation, or children?
Whose version of events was believed by others?

In abusive relationships, the power imbalance is structural and systemic, not just about who wins individual arguments. One person consistently holds more power across multiple domains.

For many survivors, abuse extends beyond the relationship itself into legal and systemic abuse: Legal Abuse & Systems Abuse: When the Court Becomes a Weapon

Reflection Prompt: Make a list of the major decisions in your relationship over the past year. Who made them? Were you consulted? What happened when you disagreed?

6. Context: What Was Happening When You Reacted?

Your reactions didn't occur in a vacuum. They happened in specific contexts that matter:

• Were you responding to months or years of accumulated harm?

• Had you tried calmer approaches that were dismissed or ignored?

• Were you being cornered, physically or emotionally?

• Had they just said or done something particularly cruel?

• Were you trying to protect yourself or someone else?

• Had your attempts to leave been blocked or sabotaged?

Fiona's most “violent” reaction, throwing his phone, happened after he'd spent two hours preventing her from leaving the room, blocking the door, following her from room to room when she tried to walk away, all while calmly explaining why she was wrong about everything she was feeling.

Her throwing the phone wasn't random aggression. It was a desperate attempt to create an exit when all other exits were blocked.

The Body Keeps the Score: Why Your Nervous System Tells the Truth

There's a reason Fiona's body told her story before she could put it into words. Trauma lives in the nervous system, not just in memory or conscious thought.

Bessel van der Kolk's research shows that trauma is stored somatically, in the body, often more accurately than in narrative memory. More on this here: Memory and Trauma: Why Your Mind Forgets What Your Body Never Does

When you live under sustained threat, your body adapts in specific, measurable ways:

Your cortisol levels stay elevated, as if danger is always just around the corner. This chronic stress response affects everything from your immune system to your digestion to your ability to sleep.

Your hippocampus struggles to file memories coherently, leaving you with fragments, flashbacks, and gaps. This is why you might not be able to clearly explain “what happened” in chronological order, why some moments are crystal clear while others are blank.

Your autonomic nervous system becomes dysregulated. You may feel jumpy at sudden noises, struggle with insomnia, experience sudden panic for no apparent reason, or swing between numbness and overwhelm.

Your vagus nerve, which helps regulate your stress response, loses flexibility. You get stuck in states of hyperarousal (anxiety, panic, hypervigilance) or hypoarousal (numbness, shutdown, depression).

It's like having a smoke alarm that goes off at the slightest cooking, or doesn't go off at all even when there's actual fire. Your threat-detection system has been fundamentally altered.

These aren't random symptoms or proof that you're “broken”. They're your body's intelligent, adaptive response to prolonged danger. Your nervous system did what it needed to do to keep you alive.

When Fiona screamed after months of gaslighting and control, her body wasn't choosing violence. Her system was dysregulated, overwhelmed, trying desperately to discharge the energy of trapped fear and rage. That's different from strategic, calculated cruelty.

Her reactions were symptoms of nervous system dysregulation caused by ongoing threat. His behavior was the cause of that threat.

These are not equivalent.

Check-in: As you read this, notice what's happening in your body right now. Tightness in your chest? Lump in your throat? Defensiveness? Relief? Your body is responding to recognition. Just notice it without judgment.

Why This Distinction Matters So Much

Understanding that you weren't “mutually abusive” isn't just about feeling better about yourself—though that matters too. It's about safety, healing, justice, and your future.

It Affects Whether You Can Actually Heal

If you believe you're equally responsible for the abuse, you'll focus on fixing the wrong problem.

You might pursue anger management when what you actually need is trauma-informed therapy that addresses the nervous system dysregulation caused by living under threat.

You might work on “communication skills” when the real issue is that no amount of communication skill helps when the other person is deliberately misunderstanding you.

You might try to become “less reactive: through willpower when what you need is nervous system healing that allows your body to recognise it's finally safe.

More on this: Trauma-Informed Therapy: What It Actually Means and Why It Matters

It Affects Whether You'll Leave (or Stay Gone)

The belief that you're “just as bad’ keeps people stuck in dangerous situations.

Why leave if you think you're equally at fault? If the problem is “both of you”, then maybe you can fix it by changing yourself, trying harder, being better. This keeps you trapped in the fantasy that there's something you could do differently that would make the abuse stop.

And for those who have left: the belief that you were mutually abusive makes you vulnerable to going back. They reach out, they've “changed”, they promise it'll be different and you think “well, I wasn't perfect either, maybe I should give it another chance”.

It Affects Your Future Relationships

If you carry the belief that you're abusive into future relationships, you may:

• Silence your needs to avoid conflict

• Tolerate poor treatment because you think you don't deserve better

• Over-apologize and over-explain

• Become hypervigilant about your own behavior while ignoring red flags in others

• Choose partners who reinforce your belief that you're “difficult” or “too much”

• Abandon yourself repeatedly to keep the peace

You might avoid all conflict, slide into people-pleasing, and ultimately leave yourself vulnerable to further harm. The shame becomes a trap that keeps attracting similar dynamics.

It Lets Abusers Avoid Accountability

“Mutual abuse” is a powerful smokescreen. It makes something clear and patterned seem murky and mutual. It allows abusers to:

• Avoid taking responsibility for their systematic behavior

• Paint themselves as victims of your “equal” abuse

• Garner sympathy and support from others

• Continue the pattern with new partners while blaming you for the “toxic dynamic”

• Use professional language to pathologize your survival responses

When therapists, mediators, or courts accept the narrative of “mutual abuse”, they often recommend couples counselling or mediation, which is actively dangerous when one person is being abused. It gives the abuser another platform to manipulate and control.

For Fiona, understanding this was a turning point. She stopped trying to fix her “anger problem” and started processing the trauma of living under psychological and emotional abuse for years.

She stopped asking: “Why did I react that way?”

She started asking: “What was being done to me that made those reactions feel necessary for my survival?”

That shift, from self-blame to self-compassion, from shame to understanding, changed everything.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

Healing from reactive abuse isn't about learning to”never get angry again”. It's not about becoming so calm and regulated that you accept mistreatment without flinching.

It's about understanding what your anger was trying to protect.

It's about recognizing that your reactions, while painful and sometimes destructive, were intelligent responses to impossible circumstances.

It's about creating a life where your nervous system doesn't have to live in survival mode.

Approaches That Help

Trauma processing (EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy)
These therapies help your nervous system finally register that the danger has passed. They work with the body's stored trauma, not just the cognitive understanding. Your system can start living in the present rather than constantly reenacting protective responses from the past.

Understanding your nervous system
Learning to recognise your own activation signals: racing heart, tight chest, blank mind, sudden rage, numbing out. This helps you distinguish between present danger (respond now) and remembered danger (my system thinks I'm in danger but I'm actually safe).

Rebuilding trust in yourself
Abuse makes you doubt your own perceptions, reactions, and judgment. Healing means gradually reclaiming trust: that your feelings are valid information, that your perceptions are accurate enough, that your needs matter and deserve to be voiced.

Learning what healthy conflict actually looks like
In healthy relationships, people can be angry, frustrated, or upset without using gaslighting, threats, the silent treatment, punishment, intimidation, or coercive control. Conflict feels uncomfortable but ultimately safe. You can fight and still trust that the relationship is secure.

Processing the shame
The shame you carry about your reactions is often the heaviest burden. Therapy provides space to examine those moments with compassion instead of judgment. To see them in context. To understand them as survival rather than character defects.

Building a life where you're safe
This might mean physical distance from your abuser, establishing firm boundaries, building a support system that believes you, or creating financial independence. Safety isn't just internal, it's also external circumstances that protect you.

Reclaiming Your Story

Fiona's healing didn't follow a straight line. There were days she believed she'd made progress, and days she still wondered if maybe she really was “just as bad”.

But over time, something shifted. She learned that her worth was never determined by what was done to her or by how she responded when pushed past her breaking point.

She learned that her “inappropriate” reactions were actually her body's appropriate responses to inappropriate treatment.

She learned that trauma doesn't define you, but understanding it can set you free.

This is what I want you to hear:

You are not equally responsible for the abuse because you reacted to it.

Your screaming wasn't the same as their systematic control.
Your desperate attempts to be heard weren't the same as their calculated efforts to silence you.
Your survival responses weren't equivalent to their abusive strategy.
Your reactivity wasn't the same as their pattern of domination.

One person created an environment of harm. The other tried to survive in it.

These are not the same thing.

The person who wants you to believe in “mutual abuse” is often the one who benefits most from that belief. It's a tactic, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, to avoid accountability and keep you confused, ashamed, and stuck.

If You Need Support

In Australia:

• 1800RESPECT – 1800 737 732 (24/7 counselling and support for domestic, family, and sexual violence)

• Lifeline – 13 11 14 (24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention)

• Safe Steps (Victoria) – 1800 015 188 (family violence response center)

Remember: These services are confidential, trauma-informed, and here for you whether you're still in the relationship, have just left, or left years ago.

If You're Ready to Talk

If you're struggling with the aftermath of an abusive relationship, questioning whether your responses make you “just as bad”, or trying to understand the difference between abuse and survival, I'm here.

I offer trauma-informed therapy that understands the complexity of these dynamics and helps you rebuild trust in yourself without judgment or pressure.

You don't have to figure this out alone.

kat@SafeSpaceCounsellingServices.com.au

or call me on 0452 285 526