The Truth About “Mutual Abuse”. Why Your Reactions Don't Make You Abusive
Fiona came to therapy eight months after leaving a relationship she described as “mutually toxic” She'd spent those months carrying a particular kind of shame, not just about what had been done to her, but about what she'd done in return.
“I screamed at him”, she told me. “I threw things. I said things I can't take back. I tracked his phone. I went through his messages. How can I call myself a victim when I behaved like that?”
She wasn't asking rhetorically. She genuinely believed that her behaviour during the relationship made her equally responsible for what had happened. That the harm had gone in both directions and therefore cancelled out. That “mutual abuse” was the honest and fair description of what they'd had.
By the time we finished working together, she understood something different: she had been in an abusive relationship. Her reactions, the screaming, the throwing, the phone-tracking, were responses to sustained psychological harm, not evidence of her own abusive nature. Understanding the difference between reactive behaviour and systematic control wasn't minimising anything. It was the truth.
That distinction matters. And this piece is about why.
If you're questioning whether what you experienced was really abuse, you might find this helpful: You're Not Imagining It - Emotional Abuse Explained
The Concept of “Mutual Abuse” and Why It's Usually Wrong
“Mutual abuse” is a term that gets used to describe relationships in which both partners behave badly toward each other. On its surface, it seems fair, an acknowledgment that both people contributed to the dynamic, that no one is purely innocent.
In the context of genuinely abusive relationships, it is almost always inaccurate. And the inaccuracy does real harm, to survivors who carry unnecessary shame, to abusers who use it to avoid accountability, and to the systems that are supposed to provide safety.
Genuine mutual abuse, where both partners independently and systematically use control tactics to dominate the other, is documented in the research, but it's rare. What is extremely common is something that looks like mutual abuse from the outside but is functionally something quite different: one person using systematic control and manipulation, and the other person reacting to that system in increasingly dysregulated ways.
The distinction isn't about who screamed louder or who said the cruellest thing on the worst night. It's about the underlying architecture of the relationship, about who is systematically organising their behaviour around controlling the other, and who is scrambling to survive a dynamic they didn't create.
What Reactive Abuse Actually Is
Reactive abuse is what happens when a person who is being systematically manipulated, gaslit, or controlled eventually breaks, when the sustained pressure produces a response that looks, on the surface, like aggression or instability.
It often looks like screaming after months of being told their feelings don't count. Like throwing something after years of having their reality denied. Like going through a partner's phone after being lied to consistently and then accused of paranoia. Like saying something cruel in a moment when cruelty is the only language available, because every other form of expression has been systematically closed off.
These responses are not evidence of an abusive personality. They are evidence of a nervous system pushed past its capacity to regulate, a body and mind responding, imperfectly and sometimes harmfully, to conditions of sustained psychological pressure.
They are also frequently exactly what an abusive partner is trying to produce. Reactive abuse is not a side effect of coercive control; it is often one of its primary goals. When you react, they have what they need: proof that you're unstable, proof that you're the real problem, proof to show to friends and family and therapists and courts. The provocation is the strategy.
DARVO - When They Become the Victim
There is a specific pattern that runs through many abusive dynamics at the point of confrontation, and understanding it is one of the most clarifying things available to someone trying to make sense of their own experience.
DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It describes what happens when an abusive person is held accountable: they deny that the harm occurred, attack the person who named it, and position themselves as the real victim of the confrontation.
“I never said that.” “You're always twisting things.” “I can't believe you're accusing me of this after everything I've put up with from you.” “Do you have any idea how much your behaviour has hurt me?”
DARVO is extraordinarily effective for several reasons. It exploits the empathy of the person it's used against. It reframes the conversation from what they did to what you're doing by raising it. It produces the cognitive dissonance of suddenly being the accused rather than the harmed, which is disorienting enough that many people back down, apologise, and abandon the original concern entirely.
It also, over time, contributes to the internalisation of the “mutual abuse” narrative. If every time you raise harm, you are immediately confronted with evidence of your own harm, your tone, your words, your reactions, you begin to believe that the relationship really is mutually destructive. That you're as much a part of the problem as they are.
You may be a part of the dynamic. That's different from being a part of the abuse.
Conflict + Misconception = Mutual Abuse? Think again.
The Difference Between Pattern and Reaction
The most important question in distinguishing systematic abuse from reactive behaviour is not “what did each person do?” but “what is the underlying pattern, and who is driving it?”
Abuse is characterised by intent and pattern. It involves deliberate, sustained behaviour organised around controlling another person's reality, autonomy, and sense of self. The tactics may vary, gaslighting, isolation, financial control, contempt, intermittent reinforcement, but they share a consistent direction: they move toward dominance of one person over another.
Reactive behaviour is characterised by response. It arises in the context of sustained pressure and tends to escalate as that pressure escalates. It is often inconsistent, poorly controlled, and followed by genuine remorse, not because remorse is performed, but because the person reacting doesn't actually want to behave this way. They're responding to a situation, not executing a strategy.
A useful way to hold the distinction: an abusive person tends to be calculating in their cruelty, targeting the other person's specific vulnerabilities, modulating the intensity to maintain maximum control. A reactive person tends to be desperate in their cruelty, saying the worst thing available, doing the most dysregulated thing, because the ordinary resources of self-regulation have been overwhelmed.
Neither behaviour is acceptable without qualification. Reactive behaviour can cause real harm, and that harm deserves to be named honestly. But the source, the pattern, and the intent are different and those differences matter enormously for understanding what the relationship actually was.
Reflection: Think about the moments in the relationship when you behaved in ways you're ashamed of. What preceded those moments? What had been happening in the hours or days or weeks before? What were you responding to, specifically? And how did you feel afterwards: relief, or shame and distress? The answers to those questions often reveal whether your behaviour was strategic or reactive, which is one of the clearest markers of the distinction.
What It Looks Like in Practice
Some of the most common forms of reactive behaviour that survivors carry shame about:
Screaming and verbal aggression
When every attempt to express hurt has been minimised, mocked, or used against you; when your calm communication has been met with contempt or stonewalling; when you've been gaslit out of your own reality so many times that the only way to make yourself heard feels like volume, the scream is not the beginning of the pattern. It's the accumulated product of a systematic communication shutdown.
Physical reactions
Throwing things, slamming doors, physical gestures of distress, these are often the body's response to a situation in which the normal channels of expression have been closed off. They're not evidence of an inherently violent nature. In most cases, people who react physically in abusive relationships have no history of violence in other contexts and no pattern of it outside this specific dynamic.
Surveillance and checking
Going through their phone. Tracking their location. Reading their messages. Monitoring their social media. This is frequently evidence not of controlling behaviour but of a reasonable response to sustained deception, an attempt to establish a stable ground of truth in an environment of systematic dishonesty. When you've been lied to consistently and then accused of paranoia for noticing, the impulse to seek verifiable evidence is understandable. It can also become unhealthy. But its origin is different from the controlling surveillance of an abusive partner.
Emotional escalation and “craziness”
Perhaps the most insidious form of reactive behaviour is the emotional breakdown, the crying that won't stop, the panic, the apparent inability to regulate, that abusive partners frequently use as evidence that you're the unstable one. The breakdown is often a genuine trauma response to sustained psychological harm. The irony is that it's typically produced by the same person who then presents it as proof of your instability.
When Children Are Witnessing Both Sides
One of the most painful applications of the mutual abuse framework is when children are involved. Both parents behave badly during and after separation, one systematically, one reactively, and the children witness both. The reactive parent's behaviour is used as evidence that they're equally harmful, equally unstable, equally unfit.
This is one of the most effective tools available to an abusive parent in custody proceedings. And it's one of the most serious situations in which the distinction between systematic abuse and reactive behaviour needs to be clearly understood by courts, by mediators, by child welfare professionals.
Your reactive behaviour toward your abusive partner is not the same as their systematic abuse of you. Both may need to be addressed. They are not equivalent.
What This Means for Your Healing
Carrying the “mutual abuse” label when it doesn't accurately describe what happened is not neutrality or fairness. It's a weight that belongs to someone else.
This doesn't mean you have no responsibility for your behaviour during the relationship. If you said things that caused real harm, if you behaved in ways that hurt people, including your children, those things deserve honest acknowledgment, not to feed the shame spiral, but because honest acknowledgment is part of how people change and grow.
The distinction is in what that acknowledgment means. Your reactive behaviour was a response to conditions of sustained harm. Understanding that context doesn't excuse what you did, it explains it. An explanation, unlike an excuse, creates the possibility of genuine change rather than just shame.
Many survivors find that once they understand the reactive behaviour for what it was, they stop behaving that way entirely in subsequent relationships. Not because they've suppressed an abusive nature, but because the conditions that produced the reactive behaviour are no longer present. The pattern was situational, not personal.
That is one of the clearest signs of the difference.
Reflection: If the relationship truly were mutual, if you had been equally responsible for the pattern, you would expect to find evidence of similar behaviour on your part in other relationships. Do you? In friendships, with family, in previous relationships, at work, is the person described in your shame about that relationship recognisable in those other contexts? For most survivors of abusive relationships, the answer is no. That absence is significant.
Need Support?
Recognising your own relationship in something like this can stir up a lot: confusion, doubt, grief, anger and sometimes a sense of relief at finally seeing something put into words.
Many people spend months or years trying to make sense of these experiences on their own. Therapy can provide a space to explore what happened, understand its impact, and begin rebuilding trust in yourself and your own perceptions.
You don't have to be ready to make any decisions to begin.
→ Learn more about emotional abuse and relationship trauma
If you're carrying shame about how you behaved in a relationship and trying to understand what was actually happening, I'm here.
kat@SafeSpaceCounsellingServices.com.au
or call me on 0452 285 526
Frequently Asked Questions
Can abuse genuinely be mutual?
Yes, though it's significantly less common than the term implies. Genuine mutual abuse, where both partners independently and systematically use coercive control to dominate the other, does exist and is documented in the research. What is far more common is one person using systematic control tactics and the other person reacting to that system in increasingly dysregulated ways. The distinction matters for understanding what actually happened and what kind of support each person needs.
I hurt my partner, too. Does that mean I'm also abusive?
Not necessarily. The question is whether your behaviour toward them was part of a systematic pattern of control, or a reaction to theirs. Did your behaviour precede theirs or follow it? Does it appear in your other relationships or only in this one? Are you genuinely distressed by your own behaviour and trying to stop it, or do you use it strategically to achieve certain outcomes? Honest answers to those questions tend to reveal whether what you're describing is reactive behaviour or something that warrants a harder look at your own patterns.
My partner says our relationship was mutually abusive and uses my behaviour as evidence. How do I respond?
You don't need to argue the label in the moment; that argument tends to go nowhere and can produce more reactive behaviour that then gets used as further evidence. The more useful frame is to understand, for yourself, the pattern: who drove it, what your behaviour was responding to, and whether the dynamic looks different in the absence of the person who produced it. If you're in legal proceedings, a trauma-informed professional who understands coercive control can help you understand how to present this distinction clearly and accurately.
My therapist seems to think we were equally responsible. How do I address this?
This is more common than it should be. Not all therapists are trained in coercive control dynamics, and couples-framing, which tends to look for both partners' contributions, can misread systematic abuse as mutual dysfunction. It's reasonable to ask your therapist directly whether they have specific training in domestic abuse and coercive control. It's also reasonable to seek a second opinion from a therapist who does. Your experience deserves a framework that can accurately hold what happened, not one that requires it to be equally distributed.
I behaved in ways that I know were harmful. How do I process that without either dismissing it or drowning in it?
Honestly, and with support. The goal is to be able to hold two true things simultaneously: that your behaviour caused real harm in some moments, and that it arose in a specific context of sustained psychological pressure that would have produced reactive behaviour in most people. Neither minimising the harm nor maximising the self-blame serves you or the people who were affected. Working with a trauma-informed therapist who understands coercive control dynamics creates the space to process both sides of this honestly, the shame about your behaviour and the reality of the conditions that produced it.
My ex is telling everyone the relationship was mutually abusive. What do I do about my reputation?
The short answer is: protect your own account carefully and selectively. You don't need to explain yourself to everyone, and attempting to do so often looks defensive in ways that are counterproductive. Choose your battles — the people whose understanding actually matters to your safety and wellbeing (close friends, family, potentially professionals involved in any legal proceedings) and invest your energy there. The people who accept your ex's narrative without question are generally the people your ex has already worked to influence. Their opinion may not be recoverable through argument, and the attempt costs more than it returns.
Related Reading
To understand the broader pattern of what you experienced:
You're Not Imagining It: Emotional Abuse Explained
Gaslighting or Miscommunication? How to Tell the Difference
On the bond that made it hard to see clearly:
Trauma Bonding: Why Letting Go Feels So Hard
Why You Still Love Someone Who Hurts You
On the nervous system responses that reactive behaviour comes from:
When Your World Quietly Shrinks - Understanding Coercive Control
Why You Can't Just Calm Down - Nervous System Regulation Explained
