Here’s why even when you realize your parents are abusive you’ll still feel some amount of affection, bond and even love towards them, or at least feel like you owe them a whole lot and it would be insanely ungrateful for you to turn your back on them or have any unpleasant thoughts or feelings towards them.
Abuse starts when you’re still a baby, and even if you did have the ability to detect you are being treated with cruelty and wanted to get away – you can’t. You can’t just go “well fuck this” and crawl away, your entire survival depends on these people being willing to feed you, to shelter you, to accept you as a part of their community and deem your worthy of survival. So you have no choice but to offer them whatever they demand of you as a child, your survival is at stake and there is no question of choice, if they’re asking for obedience, you’re helpless but to grant it to them, if they’re asking for comfort, validation of their actions, forgiveness, affection, to forget things they did, to not hold them responsible for anything – you just can’t decide to not give it to them, you have no choice.
And since you’re a small child with no experience of the world, this is the only life you know, sacrifice and giving and feeling not good enough and scared and having this sense of unfairness and anger building up deep inside of you, but you’re helpless to do anything about it, you’ve already learned to accept that a lot will be demanded of you if you want to keep living. And your abusive parents will be very careful to not let you know that this is in any way unfair, quite the contrary, they’ll let you know you’re having it easy! They’ll tell you stories about people who do ten times worse to their children, who torture and starve and strangle and lock their children up and use them as slaves and footstools! They’ll remind you how grateful you should be and how you don’t even know how lucky you are, they’ll burst with anger if you complain because how can you, there are people out there having it worse and you’re ungrateful little monster! You should appreciate they tolerate you at all! And you should be grateful, because if they didn’t treat you this way, then you would have turned into a monster!
And most often they’ll make sure you have no way of knowing if this is true, if all other children truly have it the same or worse. You don’t know if it’s true that you would turn out a worse person if not abused. You can’t go and check every single place in the world to see what the standard is. You can’t check how abuse will affect you 10 or 20 years in the future. You assume they might be right. Surely they wouldn’t just irresponsibly said all those things if they didn’t know it was true, right? You feel the threat in their words and their stories “if you don’t act more grateful then I too will treat you as bad as the people in my stories would”. You look at what little you have and try your best to be grateful. Grateful you’re not beaten to death. Grateful you’re not being starved to death. Grateful you’re allowed to sleep in a bed. Grateful that sometimes, it doesn’t hurt that much.
You are reminded over and over again about how much they’re doing for you, and how much you owe them, how much they’re sacrificing for you and how much you wouldn’t have without them, and this is not a coincidence. They’re making sure that you believe from the second you’re born, you were in a debt. Listening to that since you were a small child will ensure that it’s craved deep inside your brain, you are in a debt, every second of your existence is making that debt larger, every meal, every moment you’re in their home, the amount you owe is piling up. Are you truly indebted to people who decided to have a child and then had to feed it and keep it alive? Of course not. Do you feel like you are tho? You do. Nothing anyone says will make you feel free of the debt, even though it’s a lie. They’re not making you pay a debt, they’re making sure that having a child was a profitable decision, like starting a slave factory would be.
And in the end, even though abusive, these people set standard to how you experience your first years of life, they set standards for “good” and “evil”, they decide what’s right and what’s wrong, they decided who you are and what you’re worth, they decide what is love and how it feels like, and they decide what you deserve. They’re people who know you the best, who tell you all about you, who shape and generate your life experiences. No matter if it’s good or bad, you share a bond with them, and it’s hard to walk away from something like that no matter what’s the stakes.
And, you feel that it should be just as hard for them too, to walk away from such bond, to miss out having a relationship with their child, to not take your existence in their life seriously, to not care about what happens to you next. You feel that if you walked out on them, it would hurt them, betray them, it would make them feel abandoned, or lonely, or angry. You don’t wish to cause them pain, you’re not cruel like that.
But, at this point, they’ve already done it. They’ve already emotionally walked away from you. They’ve already proved it wasn’t a problem for them to betray their own kin, to disregard their own flesh and blood and treat it like trash. How could they have done it? The concept of it feels unbearable and impossible to understand, who uses their own child as an outlet for cruelty and hatred? Who betrays their own child and looks at them as a way of profit, and disregards their safety and happiness? They could have been decent human beings and value the bond they had with your life, they could have kept you safe and protected from abuse, they could have made sure you weren’t being hurt, They could have stopped hurting you anytime and they didn’t. They could have had something fucking special in their life and they walked away from it. How could they not even feel guilty for lying to you?
These are not easy questions to answer, and even when you do get answers, they’re hard to accept, hard to deal with, hard to acknowledge as the truth. Only monsters could act this way towards their own child. But then, your entire life was shaped by monsters. Then, everything you know is a lie. Then, you haven’t experienced parental love at all. Your entire reality breaks down. It’s painful. It’s filled with grief and despair and anger and fear. Nobody rushes into that. Nobody wants to put themselves thru that. That’s why minimizing and holding on to hope that your parents just “didn’t know” or “didn’t mean it” is comforting for a while. It’s okay to be there until you can deal with what’s coming next.