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. 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 you're wondering: If I reacted that way, doesn't that make me abusive, too? Doesn't that make us both the problem?

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.

If you’re unsure whether what you went through was abuse, you might also find this helpful: You’re Not Imagining It, How Emotional Abuse Shows Up and How to Trust Yourself Again.

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

Here's what I need you to understand: "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.

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.
More on that here: When Does Relationship Conflict Become Abuse?

But abuse isn't conflict. Abuse is about power and control.

One person systematically dismantles the other's sense of self, reality, and autonomy. The other person struggles to survive that dismantling. These are not equivalent actions, even when the survival looks messy, loud, or aggressive.

Fiona was one of my clients, though her name has been changed. When she first came to see me, she carried a fear that many survivors know intimately:

"I think I might be just as abusive as he was."

She remembered screaming at him. Throwing things. Calling him names. She remembered the look on his face when she did—shocked, hurt, almost frightened. And she remembered his words:

"See? You're the violent one. You're the one who needs help."

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.

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

Conflict + Misconception = Mutual Abuse? Think again.

Abuse isn't a single moment. It's an environment, carefully constructed and meticulously maintained.

Think of it like a building. On the outside, everything looks normal, functional, even beautiful. But inside, 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 overlaps with what’s often called coercive control: Breaking the Chains: Understanding Coercive Control.

For Fiona, it looked like this:

• He monitored her phone under the guise of “concern.”

• He questioned her memory of conversations until she stopped trusting her own mind (gaslighting). See: How to Trust Yourself Again After Gaslighting

• He told her she was too sensitive, too emotional, too dramatic whenever she expressed hurt or fear.

• He isolated her from friends with subtle comments about how they “didn’t really care” about her.

• He made decisions about their life without consulting her, then acted confused when she was upset, as if she was being unreasonable.

And when she finally pushed back—when she screamed, threw something, demanded to be heard, he stepped back with calculated calm and said: "Look at how you're acting. You're out of control."

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. 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.

What Your Body Was Actually Doing

When you've been living under sustained psychological threat, your body changes—not just emotionally, but biologically. Your nervous system rewires itself for survival.
If you want to understand this more deeply, you might like the book by Bessel Van Der Kolk, who explains it beautifully: The Body Keeps The Score. BRAIN, MIND, AND BODY IN THE HEALING OF TRAUMA.

Your amygdala, your brain's threat-detection centre, learns to stay on high alert.
Your cortisol levels remain elevated, keeping your body in a constant state of stress.
Your hippocampus, the part of your brain that processes memories and regulates emotions, struggles under the weight of ongoing threat.

This isn't a choice. This isn't a character flaw. This is neurobiology.

When therapists talk about "fight, flight, or freeze," we’re describing your nervous system's survival responses. For someone living with abuse, these aren’t occasional reactions to isolated events. They become your baseline. Every interaction becomes a threat evaluation. Every disagreement feels like a potential danger.

Because often, it is.

Fiona's body knew she was in danger long before her mind could fully name 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

• the hypervigilance that made her track his moods like others track the weather

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

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

The Truth About Reactive Abuse

Imagine being trapped in a room where the walls are slowly closing in. Not all at once, but gradually. A subtle comment here. A controlling gesture there. The space gets tighter and tighter, and you can't breathe.

You push back. Not to attack, but to create space, to be able to breathe. To exist.

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."

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

Here’s the difference:

• Abuse is about power and control. It’s a pattern of behaviour designed to dominate, manipulate, and diminish another person. It’s systematic. It’s calculated. It has a clear purpose: to maintain power over someone else.

• 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.

One is a strategy.
The other is a symptom.

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. They were desperate struggles for survival, expressed in the only language her overwhelmed nervous system had left.

When she screamed, it was because months of calm requests had been dismissed.
When she threw something, it was because her words weren’t reaching him and her body needed to do something with the panic.
When she called him names, it was after hours of him dismantling her sense of self and she was trying to name what was happening.

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

If you’re curious about the dynamics that keep people stuck in these cycles, this may 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, here are some questions to consider:

1. Were your reactions specific to this relationship?

You don’t scream at your friends. You don’t throw things at your colleagues. You don’t call your support network names. Your “out of control” behaviour emerged specifically with this one person, in this one relationship.

2. Did the behaviour stop when the relationship ended?

Once you were away from them, once you felt safe, you didn’t continue behaving this way.
Abusers don’t stop when the relationship ends, they find new targets. Survivors calm down when the threat is removed.

3. How do you feel about what you did?

Abusers feel entitled to their actions. They justify, minimise, or deny.
Survivors feel deep shame, even when their reactions were understandable.

If shame is something you’re wrestling with, you may find this useful:
Was It My Fault? When Love Becomes Confusing.

4. Did they use your reactions against you?

They stayed calm while you “lost it,” then used your loss of control as proof that you were the problem.
This is a common tactic called DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) and often appears alongside gaslighting. See: How to Recover from Gaslighting in a Toxic Relationship

5. What did the power dynamics look like?

Did they control the money, housing, or access to the children?
Did they isolate you from friends or family?
Did they decide what story was told to others?

Even if you occasionally “won” an argument, the fundamental structure of power likely wasn’t in your favour. For many survivors, this also includes legal and systems abuse:
Legal Abuse & Systems Abuse.

Fiona didn't control her partner. She didn’t isolate him, gaslight him, or systematically destroy his sense of self. She reacted to him doing those things to her.

Her reactions, while painful and sometimes destructive, were not abuse.
They were survival.

The Body Keeps the Score

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.
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:

• Your cortisol stays elevated, as if danger is always just around the corner.

• Your hippocampus struggles to file memories coherently, leaving you with fragments and flashbacks.

• Your autonomic nervous system becomes dysregulated—you may feel jumpy, struggle with sleep, or experience sudden panic.

It’s like having a car alarm that goes off at the slightest touch.

These aren’t random symptoms. They’re your body’s intelligent survival mechanism, a complex protective response to prolonged danger.

It’s your body saying: “I remember. I’m trying to keep you safe.”

When Fiona screamed after months of gaslighting and control, her body wasn’t choosing violence. Her system was dysregulated, not “cruel”. There is a difference.

Why This Distinction Matters So Much

Understanding that you weren’t “mutually abusive” isn’t just about feeling better. It’s about safety, healing, and justice.

• It affects whether you can heal.
  If you believe you're equally responsible, you'll focus on fixing “anger issues” instead of addressing trauma. You may pursue anger management when what you actually need is trauma-informed therapy. See: Trauma-Informed Therapy: What It Actually Means

• It affects whether you’ll leave.
  The belief that you’re “just as bad” keeps people stuck. Why leave if you think you’re equally at fault?

• It affects future relationships.
  If you carry the belief that you’re abusive, you may silence your needs, avoid all conflict, and slide back into self-abandonment—leaving you vulnerable to further harm.

• It lets abusers avoid accountability.
  “Mutual abuse” is a powerful smokescreen. It makes something clear and patterned seem murky and mutual.

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. She stopped asking, “Why did I react that way?” and started asking, “What was being done to me that made those reactions feel necessary?”

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

What Healing Actually Looks Like

Healing from reactive abuse isn’t about learning to “never get angry again.” It’s about understanding what your anger was trying to protect.

It’s not about punishing yourself into better behaviour. It’s about creating a life where your nervous system doesn’t have to live in survival mode.

Approaches that can help include:

Trauma Processing (e.g., EMDR, somatic therapy)

These therapies help your nervous system finally register that the danger has passed. Your body can start to live in the present, rather than reenacting the past.

Understanding Your Nervous System

Learning to recognise activation: racing heart, tight chest, numbness, blanking out, helps you distinguish present danger from remembered danger.

Rebuilding Trust in Yourself

Abuse makes you doubt your own perceptions and reactions. Healing means reclaiming trust: that your feelings are valid, your perceptions are accurate enough, and your needs matter.

Learning What Healthy Conflict Looks Like

In healthy relationships, people can be angry, frustrated, or upset without using:

• gaslighting

• threats

• silent treatment

• punishment

• coercive control

Conflict doesn’t feel like walking on eggshells; it feels uncomfortable but ultimately safe.

Reclaiming Your Story

Fiona's story didn’t end with shame. It moved toward understanding.

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 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.

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.

You deserve the truth:

What happened to you was abuse. How you responded to it was survival. And there is a world of difference between the two.

For Those Still Carrying the Question

If you're still asking yourself, "Am I just as bad?" please hear this:

• Your pain is valid.

• Your responses were intelligent adaptations to impossible circumstances.

• The very fact that you’re worried you might be abusive is strong evidence that you’re not.

Abusers don’t lie awake wondering if they’re the problem.
They don’t sit in therapy asking, “What if I was just as bad?”
They don’t carry the kind of shame you’re carrying.

That shame doesn’t belong to you. It was placed on you by someone who needed you to carry it so they wouldn’t have to.

You get to put it down now.

If You Need Support (Australia)

• 1800RESPECT – 1800 737 732 (24/7 counselling and support)

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

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

This is not an ending. It’s the beginning of understanding yourself with compassion instead of shame.

You are not broken.
You are not equally responsible.
You are not a bad person for how you responded to being hurt.

You are a human being who survived something you should never have had to survive. Your reactions weren’t proof of your character. They were proof that some part of you, deep down, knew you deserved better and was willing to fight for it—even in desperate, chaotic ways.

That fight for survival? That’s not something to be ashamed of.
That’s your resilience. That’s your strength.
That’s the part of you that refused to disappear.

And that part of you deserves to be honoured, not condemned.

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.

kat@SafeSpaceCounsellingServices.com.au

or call me on 0452 285 526