Kate, 40, a blond, stern-faced quality-control manager for a large corporation, came to see me at the recommendation of her family physician. She had been having panic attacks in her car and in the elevator of the building where she worked. Her physician had prescribed tranquilizers but was concerned about Kate's aversion to leaving her apartment except to go to work. He urged her to seek psychological help.

I find I get angry at myself all the time, and sometimes I cry for no reason at all. It's probably my frustration at myself. I keep thinking how my parents hurt and humiliated me. I don't keep friends for very long. I have a pattern of cutting off whole groups of friends at a time. I guess I don't want them to find out how bad I am.

The first thing I noticed about Kate was that her severe, unhappy expression seemed molded onto her face -- as if she had never learned to smile. It didn't take me long to discover why:

I was raised in an upper-class suburb outside St. Louis. We had everything money could buy. From the outside we looked like this perfect family. But from the inside… my father would go into these crazy rages. They usually came after he had a fight with my mother. He would just turn on whichever of us was closest. He would take off his belt and start strapping me or my sister… across our legs… on our heads… anywhere he could hit us. When he'd start in, I'd always have this fear that he wouldn't stop.

Inside millions of American households, ranging across all social, economic, and educational lines, a terrible crime is being committed every day -- the physical abuse of children.

Kate's depression and fear were the legacy of a battered child.

The All-American Crime

Today our norms have narrowed. The problem of physical child abuse has become so widespread that public recognition has forced our legal system to set limits on physical discipline. In an attempt to clarify what constitutes physical abuse, Congress enacted the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974. This act defined physical abuse as: "the infliction of physical injuries such as bruises, burns, welts, cuts, bone and skull fractures; these are caused by kicking, punching, biting, beating, knifing, strapping, paddling, etc." How this definition translates into law is often a matter of interpretation. Every state has its own child-abuse laws, and most embody definitions similar to the federal one, which is somewhat vague in its scope. A child with a broken bone has clearly been abused, but most prosecutors would be reluctant to press charges against a parent who had bruised a child during a spanking.

There is a great deal of controversy and confusion over the definition of physical abuse. Many people still believe that parents have not only the right but the responsibility to use corporal punishment on their children. The most common parenting motto in the English language is still, "Spare the rod and spoil the child." Until recently, children had virtually no legal rights. They were widely viewed as chattel, pieces of property that were "owned" by their parents. For hundreds of years, parental rights were considered inviolate -- in the name of discipline, parents could do just about anything to their children, short of killing them.

I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a cop, but for more than twenty years I've seen the suffering that "legal" corporal punishment can create. I have my own definition of physical abuse: any behavior that inflicts significant physical pain on a child, regardless of whether it leaves marks.

Most of us who have children have felt the urge to strike them at one time or another. These feelings can be especially strong when a child won't stop crying, nagging, or defying us. Sometimes it has less to do with a child's behavior than with our own exhaustion, stress level, anxiety, or unhappiness. A lot of us manage to resist the impulse to hit our children. Unfortunately, many parents are not so restrained.

We can only speculate why, but physically abusive parents seem to share certain characteristics. First, they have an appalling lack of impulse control. Physically abusive parents will assault their children whenever they have strong negative feelings that they need to discharge. These parents seem to have little, if any, awareness of the consequences of what they are doing to their children. It is almost an automatic reaction to stress. The impulse and the action are one and the same.

WHY DO PARENTS BEAT THEIR KIDS?

Physical abusers themselves often come from families in which abuse was the norm. Much of their adult behavior is a direct repetition of what they experienced and learned in their youth. Their role model was an abuser. Violence was the only tool they learned to use in dealing with problems and feelings -- especially feelings of anger.

Many physically abusive parents enter adulthood with tremendous emotional deficits and unmet needs. Emotionally, they are still children. They often look upon their own children as surrogate parents, to fulfill the emotional needs that their real parents never fulfilled. The abuser becomes enraged when his child can't meet his needs. He lashes out. At that moment, the child is more of a surrogate parent than ever, because it is the abuser's parent at whom the abuser is truly enraged.

Many of these parents also have problems with alcohol or drugs. Substance abuse is a frequent contributor to the breakdown of impulse control, though by no means is it the only one.

There are many types of physical abusers, but at the darkest end of the spectrum are those who have children seemingly for the sole purpose of brutalizing them. Many of these people look, talk, and act just like human beings, but they are monsters -- totally devoid of the feelings and characteristics that give most of us our humanity. These people defy comprehension; there is no logic to their behavior.

Kate's father was a well-respected banker, a churchgoer, a family man -- hardly the type most people would imagine when they hear the phrase child abuser. But Kate didn't live in an imagined reality, she lived in a real nightmare.

The Private Holocaust -- There's No Escape

My sister and I started locking our door at night because we were so scared. I'll never forget this one time when I was eleven… she was nine. We were hiding under our beds and he kept banging on the door. I've never been so scared in my life. Then, all of a sudden he came crashing through the door like in the movies. It was terrifying. The door just flew into the room. We tried to run, but he grabbed us both and threw us in the corner and started beating at us with his belt. He kept shouting, "I'll kill you if you ever lock me out again!" I thought he was going to kill us right then and there.

The climate of terror that Kate described permeates the homes of physically abused children. Even in quiet moments, these children live in fear that the volcano of rage will erupt at any moment. And when it does, anything the victim does to fend off the blows only outrages the abuser more. Kate's desperate attempts to protect herself by hiding under her bed and locking the door only intensified her father's irrational behavior. There is no safe place to hide, no escape from the abuser, no protector to run to.

I was always getting knocked around in my bedroom, I don't even remember what for. I could be doing anything and my father would burst in and start screaming and yelling at the top of his lungs. The next thing I knew, he'd start punching me until he'd have me up against the wall. He'd keep pounding me so hard that I'd be dazed and didn't know what the hell was going on anymore. The scariest part of it was not ever knowing what would provoke his outbursts!

I first met Joe, 27, at a seminar I was conducting at a graduate school of psychology where he was studying for his master's degree. I mentioned in my presentation that I was writing a book on toxic parents. Joe sought me out at the lunch break and volunteered to be a case study for my book. I had more than enough material from my practice, but something in this young man's voice told me he needed to talk to someone. We met the following day and talked for several hours. I was impressed not only by his openness and candor but by the sincerity of his desire to use his painful experiences to help others.

YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN

It just doesn't go away because you move out or get married. I'm always afraid of something, and I hate myself for it. But if your father, who is supposed to love you and take care of you, treated you this way, then what the hell is going to happen to you in the real world. I've screwed up a lot of relationships because I can't let anyone get too close. I'm so ashamed of myself for that, and I'm so ashamed of myself for being so damn frightened all the time. But life just scares the hell out of me. I'm really working hard in my own therapy to get on top of this stuff because I know I'm not going to be of much use to myself or anybody else until I do. But, holy Christ, it's a struggle.

Joe spent much of his childhood waiting for the tidal wave of his father's rage and knowing there was no way to avoid it. The experience generated powerful, lifelong fears of being hurt and betrayed. Two marriages ended in divorce because he couldn't learn to trust.

It is tremendously difficult to regain feelings of trust and safety once they have been trampled by parents. All of us develop our expectations about how people will treat us based on our relationships with our parents. If those relationships are, for the most part, emotionally nourishing, respectful of our rights and feelings, we'll grow up expecting others to treat us in much the same way. These positive expectations allow us to be relatively vulnerable and open in our adult relationships. But if, as in Joe's case, childhood is a time of unrelenting anxiety, tension, and pain, then we develop negative expectations and rigid defenses.

I remember one particularly terrible evening after dinner when my mother was out shopping. My father was really giving it to me with that damned belt. I was screaming so loud that one of our neighbors called the police, but my father managed to convince them that everything was fine. He told the cops that the noise was coming from the TV, and they bought it. I'm standing there with tears streaming down my face and welts on my arms, but they still bought it. Why shouldn't they? My father was one of the most powerful men in the city. But at least they calmed him down. After they left, he told me he'd been under a lot of stress lately. I didn't even know what stress meant, but he really wanted me to understand what he was going through. He told me that my mother wasn't nice to him anymore… that she wouldn't sleep with him and it wasn't right for a wife not to sleep with her husband. That was why he was so upset all the time.

"I'VE GOT SO MANY PROBLEMS -- NO WONDER I LET YOU HAVE IT"

Joe never understood what set his father off. Other abusers have a need to be understood. They beat their children, then beg them to understand, even ask for their forgiveness. That's how it was for Kate:

Joe expected the worst of others. He expected to be hurt and mistreated as he was in his childhood. So he encased himself in a suit of emotional armor. He wouldn't let anyone get close to him. Unfortunately, that suit of armor proved to be more of an emotional prison than a protection.

Kate's father revealed inappropriate, intimate information to a child who was too young to understand. Yet, he expected her to nurture him emotionally. This role reversal confused and bewildered Kate, but it is common among abusive parents. They want their children to give them both relief and absolution; they batter them, then they blame their behavior on someone else.

Instead of dealing directly with his marital problems, Kate's father displaced his fury and sexual frustration onto his daughters, then rationalized his violence by blaming his wife. Physical violence against children is often a reaction to stress at work, conflict with another family member or friend, or general tension over an unsatisfying life. Children are easy targets: they can't fight back, and they can be intimidated into silence. Unfortunately for both the abuser and the victim, displacing anger gives the abuser only temporary relief. The true source of his rage remains, unchanged and destined to build up again. And, sadly, the helpless target of his rage remains as well, destined to soak up that rage and carry it into adulthood.

Other abusers, instead of blaming someone else for their behavior, will try to justify it as being in the child's best interests. Many parents still believe that physical punishment is the only effective way to drive home a moral or behavioral point. Many of these "lessons" are delivered in the name of religion. Never has a book been as sorely misused as the Bible to justify beatings.

I was disappointed in your response to the girl whose mother used to strap her. The gym teacher noticed the bruises on her legs and backside and called it "child abuse." Why are you against strapping a child when the Bible tells us in plain language that this is what parents should do? Proverbs 23:13 says: "Withhold not correction from the child for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die." Proverbs 23:14 says: "Thou shalt beat him with the rod and shalt deliver his soul from death."

"I'M DOING THIS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD"

Dear Ann Landers,

I was appalled by a letter that appeared in Ann Landers's syndicated column:

These same parents often believe in the inherent malevolence of children. They believe that a harsh beating will keep a child from going bad. They say things such as: "I was raised with the hickory switch; a licking now and then didn't do me any harm," or, "I need to put the fear of God in him," or, "She's got to know who's boss," or, "He's got to know what he's in for so he'll toe the line."

My dad's mother died when my dad was fourteen. He never got over it. He's still not over it, and he's going on sixty-four. He recently told me that he was tough on me because he didn't want me to feel. Sick as it was, he theorized that if you don't feel, you won't have to go through the pain of life. I honest-to-God believe he thought he was protecting me from being hurt. He didn't want me to experience the kind of pain he'd gone through with his mother's death.

Instead of making Joe tougher or less vulnerable, the beatings left him fearful and mistrustful, far less equipped to make it in the world. It's absurd to believe that severe physical punishment will have any positive effects on a child.

In fact, research indicates that physical discipline is not particularly effective as a punishment even for specific undesirable behaviors. Beatings have proved to be only temporary deterrents, and they create in children strong feelings of rage, revenge fantasies, and self-hatred. It's quite clear that the mental, emotional, and often bodily harm caused by physical abuse far outweighs any momentary advantages.

Other parents excuse beatings as necessary rites of passage, ordeals to make a child tougher, braver, or stronger. That was what Joe was led to believe:

So far I have focused almost entirely on the actively abusive parent. But there's another player in the family drama who must share some of the responsibility. This is the parent who permits the abuse to happen out of his or her own fears, dependency, or need to maintain the family's status quo. This parent is the passive abuser.

Joe's mother did not beat her children herself, but because she did not protect them from her husband's brutality she became a partner in their abuse. Instead of taking steps to defend her children, she became a frightened child herself, helpless and passive in the face of her husband's violence. In effect, she abandoned her son.

The Passive Abuser

She wasn't doing much of anything. Sometimes she'd lock herself in the bathroom. I always wondered why she didn't stop this crazy bastard from knocking the hell out of me all the time. But I guess she was just too scared herself. It just wasn't in her nature to confront him. See, my dad is Christian, and my mom is Jewish. She was raised in a very poor, orthodox family, and where she came from, women don't tell their men what to do. I guess she was thankful that she had a roof over her head and that her husband made a nice living.

I asked Joe what his mother was doing while he was being battered.

I remember when I was about ten years old, and my dad had beaten the hell out of my mother one night. I got up real early the next morning and I was waiting in the kitchen when he came down in his bathrobe. He asked me what I was doing up so early. I was scared shitless, but I said, "If you ever beat up on Mom again, I'm going to come after you with a baseball bat." He just looked at me and laughed. Then he went upstairs to take a shower and go to work.

In addition to feeling isolated and unprotected, Joe found himself saddled with an overwhelming responsibility:

Joe had made a classic abused-child role reversal, assuming responsibility for protecting his mother as if he were the parent and she were the child.

By allowing herself (or himself) to be overwhelmed by helplessness, the inactive parent can more easily deny her silent complicity in the abuse. And by becoming protective, or by rationalizing the silent parent's inactivity, the abused child can more easily deny the fact that both parents have failed him.

Kate is a case in point:

When my father first started beating us, my sister and I would always scream for Mom to help. But she never came. She just sat downstairs and listened to us screaming for her. It didn't take us long to realize she wasn't coming. She never stood up to my father. I guess she couldn't help it.

In both Kate's and Joe's cases, the father was the active abuser and the mother was the silent partner. However, this is by no means the only family scenario. In some families, the mother is the active abuser and the father is the passive one. The sexes may change, but the dynamics of passive abuse remain the same. I have had clients where both parents were abusive, but the abusive/passive parent combination is far more common.

No matter how many times I hear statements like, "I guess she couldn't help it," they still upset me. Kate's mother could have helped it. I told Kate that it was important for her to start looking at her mother's role realistically. Her mother should have stood up to Kate's father, or, if she was afraid of him, she should have called the police. There is no excuse for a parent to stand by and allow his or her children to be brutalized.

I asked Terry what his father was doing while his mother was terrorizing him.

For Terry, a 43-year-old marketing rep, the situation was further confused when his passive parent became the sympathetic comforter. Terry, who had been physically abused by his mother through most of his childhood, idolized his ineffectual father.

I was a very sensitive kid, more into art and music than sports. My mother always called me a sissy. She got angry with me a lot and would beat me with anything she could find. It seems like I spent most of my childhood hiding in closets. I was never sure why she beat me so much, but everything I did seemed to piss her off. I feel like she wiped out my whole childhood.

Many adult children excuse the passive parent because they see that parent as a co-victim. In Joe's case, this view was intensified because he was in a role reversal in which he felt protective of his passive mother.

Lots of times, my dad would hold me while I was sobbing, and he'd tell me how sorry he was about my mother's fits. He always said there was nothing he could do about it, and that if I tried harder, things might go better for me. My dad was really a nice guy. He worked very hard so his family could live well. He gave me the only real consistent love I got when I was little.

I asked Terry if, since he has become an adult, he has talked to his father about his childhood.

I've tried a couple times, but he always says "let bygones be bygones." Anyway, what's the point of upsetting him? My problems are with my mother, not with him.

Learning to Hate Yourself: "It's All My Fault"

Terry denied his father's complicity because he wanted to protect the only good childhood memories he had -- those loving moments with his father. Just as he clung to his father's tenderness as a frightened child, so was he clinging to it today as a frightened adult. In trading a dark closet for a false reality, he had done nothing to face the truth.

Terry was aware of how much his mother's abuse had colored his life but far less aware of how much repressed rage he carried toward his father. Terry had spent years denying that his father had failed him. To make matters worse, his father had put much of the responsibility on Terry's head by suggesting that if Terry "tried harder," he could avoid the beatings.

My father always told me that I wasn't worth shit. If there was some way he could hook my name to a swear word while he was beating me, he would do it. By the time he got through, I honestly believed that I was the worst thing that ever lived. And that I was only getting knocked around because I deserved it.

As difficult as it may be to believe, battered children accept the blame for the crimes perpetrated against them just as surely as verbally abused children do. Joe recalled:

The seeds of self-blame were planted early in Joe. How could a small child withstand this powerful propaganda about his worth? Like all abused children, Joe believed two lies: that he was bad, and that he was getting beaten only because he was bad.

Since these lies came from his powerful, all-knowing father, they had to be true. These lies remain unchallenged for most adults who were battered as children, including Joe. As he describes it:

I'm so down on myself… I can't seem to have a good relationship with anybody. It's hard for me to believe that anybody could really care for me.

Kate summed it up:

All my life, it's been going through my mind that I don't deserve to be happy. I think that's why I never got married… never had a good relationship… never allowed myself any real success.

Kate expressed a similar theme when she didn't want people to find out how "bad" she was. These pervasive feelings of low self-esteem evolve into self-loathing and create life patterns of damaged relationships, loss of confidence, feelings of inadequacy, paralyzing fears, and unfocused rage.

Abuse and Love -- A Bewildering Combination

When Kate grew up, the physical abuse ended. But through self-loathing, the emotional abuse continued. Except that now, she had become her own abuser.

At times my father could be funny, and sometimes, I swear, he was even gentle. Like this one time I was signed up for this big skiing competition and he got really into it. So he drove me all the way to Jackson, Wyoming, which took ten hours, just so I could practice on good snow. On the way home, Dad told me I was really special. Of course, while he's saying it, I'm thinking, "If I'm so special, why do I feel so lousy about myself?" But he said it. That's what counts. I'm still trying to recapture with him what we had that day.

Abused children are often exposed to a bizarre mixture of pleasure and pain. Joe described intermittent terror coexisting with tender moments:

The mixed messages only added to Joe's confusion, and they made it more difficult for him to face the truth about his father. I explained to Joe that an incredibly strong, perverse parent/child fusion occurs when a parent holds out a promise of love while at the same time mistreating that child. A child's world is very narrow, and no matter how abusive, the parents still represent the only available source of love and comfort. The battered child spends his entire childhood searching for the Holy Grail of parental love. That search continues into adulthood.

Kate, too, remembered:

The Keeper of the Family Secret

When I was a baby, my father would hold me, love me, and rock me. And when I was a little older, he was always there taking me to dance classes on the weekend or to the movies. He really loved me at one point in his life. I guess my greatest wish is for him to love me again the way he used to.

Her father's sporadic benevolence kept Kate yearning for his love, hoping for a turnaround. This hope kept her bonded to him long after she reached adulthood. As part of that bonding, she believed she had to keep secret the truth of her father's behavior. A "good" girl would never betray her family.

All my life I felt like I've been living a lie. It's horrible not being able to talk freely about something that affected my life so strongly. How do you get over the pain of something if you can't talk about it? Sure, I can talk about it in therapy, but I still can't talk about it to the people who held all this power over me all those years. The only person I could ever talk about it with was the maid. I felt she was the only person in the world I could trust. Once, after my dad beat me, she said, "Honey, your dad's very sick." I never understood why he didn't go to the hospital if he was so sick.

The "family secret" is a further burden for abused children. By not talking about the abuse, the battered child cuts off any hope of emotional help. Here's Kate:

I asked Kate what she thought would happen if she confronted her father and mother about her childhood. She stared at me for a few moments before replying:

As for my father, I'm sure he'd fall apart… and then we'd be in big trouble. My mother would probably get hysterical. And my sister would be furious with me for dredging up the past. She won't even talk to me about it!

Kate's allegiance to the "family secret" was the glue that was holding the family together. If she broke the bond of silence, the family would fall apart.

The adult in Kate was crying out to confront her parents with the truth, but the battered, frightened child in Kate was too terrified of the consequences. She was convinced that everyone would hate her for letting the cat out of the bag. She believed the entire fabric of her family would unravel. As a result, her relationship with her parents had become a charade. Everyone pretended that nothing bad had ever happened.

All of this is just welling up inside me. Every time I'm with them… I mean nothing ever changes. My father still gets very nasty with me. I feel like exploding and telling them how angry I am, but I sit there and bite my lip. When my father gets mad at me today, my mother pretends she doesn't hear what's going on. I was at my high school reunion a few years ago and I felt so hypocritical. My classmates all thought I had such a great family. I thought, "If they only knew." I wish I could tell my parents how they ruined my high school years. I want to scream at them that they hurt me so much I can't love anyone. I can't have a loving relationship with a man. They've paralyzed me emotionally. They still do. But I'm too scared to say anything to them.

KEEPING THE MYTH ALIVE

I was not surprised when Kate told me that her high school classmates thought she had a great family. Many abusive families are able to present a very "normal" facade to the rest of the world. This apparent respectability is in direct opposition to the family's reality. It forms the basis of a "family myth." Joe's family myth was typical:

It's such a goddamned farce whenever I get together with my family. Nothing's changed. My father still drinks, and I'm sure he's still hitting my mother. But from the way we all act and talk, you'd think we were Leave It to Beaver. Am I the only one who remembers what it was like? Am I the only one who knows the truth? It doesn't really matter because I never say anything anyway. I'm just as phony as the rest of them. I guess I can't let go of the hope that maybe someday things will be different. Maybe if we pretend hard enough, we will be a normal family.

Joe was caught in the same terrible conflict between wanting to confront his parents and fearing that he'd rip the family apart. When he was in high school he had written letters about how he really felt:

It was not fear of another beating that prevented Joe from asking his parents about the diary or the letters. By high school, he was too grown-up for that. But if they had read his pleas and hadn't responded emotionally, he would had to have given up his fantasy that some miracle might someday give him the key to their love. After so many years, he was still afraid to find out whether they had invalidated him yet one more time.

At an Emotional Crossroads

I really poured my heart out in those letters, stuff about being beaten and ignored. Then I'd leave them out on my dresser, hoping my folks would read them. But I never knew if anyone did. No one ever said a word about them. I tried a diary for a while when I was in my late teens. I left that lying around, too. To this day, I don't know if my folks ever read any of it, and honest to God, I'm still too terrified to ask them.

Abused children have a caldron of rage bubbling inside them. You can't be battered, humiliated, terrified, denigrated, and blamed for your own pain without getting angry. But a battered child has no way to release this anger. In adulthood, that anger has to find an outlet.

Holly, 41, a stocky, stern-faced housewife with short, prematurely gray hair, was referred to me after being reported to the Department of Social Services by a school counselor for abusing her 10-year-old son. Her son was living temporarily with her husband's parents. Even though her therapy was court-mandated, she proved to be a highly motivated client.

I'm so ashamed of myself. I've slapped him in the past, but this time I really went berserk. That kid makes me so damned angry… You know, I always promised myself that if I had kids, I'd never raise a hand to them. Christ, I know what that's like. It's horrible. But without even realizing it, I'm turning into that crazy mother of mine. I mean, both my folks hit me, but she was the worst. I remember one time she chased me around the kitchen with a butcher knife!

Holly had a long history of acting out -- that is, translating strong emotional impulses into aggressive action. As a teenager, she was in constant trouble and several times was suspended from school. As an adult, she described herself as a walking powder keg:

Sometimes I have to just leave the house because I'm afraid of what I'll do to my kid. I feel like I can't control myself.

Holly's anger exploded onto her young son. In other extreme cases, repressed anger can express itself as violent criminal behavior, ranging from wife beating to rape to murder. Our jails are filled with adults who were physically abused as children and never learned to express their anger appropriately.

Kate learned to be a victim early in her life and never stopped. She had no idea how to protect herself from being used or victimized by others. In this way she perpetuated the pain she had experienced as a child. Not unexpectedly, her enormous accumulated rage had to find a way out, but since she was afraid to express it directly, her body and her moods expressed it for her: in the form of headaches, a knotted-up stomach, and depression.

Kate, on the other hand, turned her anger inward. It found physical ways to express itself:

No matter what anybody says or does to me, I can't ever stand up for myself. I just never feel up to it. I get headaches. I feel lousy most of the time. Everyone walks all over me, and I don't know how to stop them. Last year, I was sure I had an ulcer. I had stomachaches all the time.

In some cases, the abused child unconsciously identifies with his abusive parent. After all, the abuser looks powerful and invulnerable. Victimized children fantasize that if they possessed these qualities, they would be able to protect themselves. So, as an unconscious defense, they develop some of the very personality traits that they most hate in their toxic parent. Despite fervent promises to themselves to be different, under stress they may behave exactly like their abusers. But this syndrome is not as widespread as most people assume.

For many years it was commonly believed that almost all battered children became battering parents. After all, this was the only role model they'd had. But current studies challenge these assumptions. In fact, not only have a good many formerly abused children grown into nonabusing adults, but a number of these parents have great difficulty with even modest, nonphysical methods of disciplining their children. In rebellion against the pain of their own childhoods, these parents shy away both from setting limits and from enforcing them. This, too, can have a negative impact on a child's development, because children need the security of boundaries. But the harm done by overpermissiveness is usually far less significant than the damage done by a batterer.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON?

The good news is that the adult victims of abusive parents can overcome their self-loathing, fusion to their parents, unresolved anger, overwhelming fears, and inability to trust or to feel safe.