LIGHT THE WAY

By Lyndsay LaBrier | The Merchant Ship Collective

Some of the most destructive abuse doesn’t happen behind bars—it happens behind closed doors that look picture-perfect from the outside.
In many families, a mother’s emotional, psychological, or physical cruelty is tolerated, minimized, or even defended by a father more concerned with image than integrity.
The result? Children who learn that silence is safer than truth and appearances matter more than love.

This is not about vilifying women or men—it’s about exposing patterns that cause long-term emotional and spiritual damage when empathy, accountability, and honesty are replaced with fear and facade.

A hallmark of abusive mothers is a lack of empathy for their own children. They are often more concerned with how things look than how people feel.
They can watch a child suffer and rationalize it away, or worse—deny it happened to protect their image.

Examples include:

When fathers or partners enable this—by dismissing their children’s reality, excusing cruelty, or prioritizing social image—they become complicit in the harm.
Enablers often say things like “Don’t air family business,” “She didn’t mean it,” or “We need to keep the family together.”
But the truth is: keeping up appearances destroys families from the inside out.

Abuse can be overt or invisible:

Enablers maintain control by defending these actions as normal, reinforcing the illusion of a perfect family, or punishing the truth-teller who dares to speak out.

I have so much love for the men in my life — men who carry more than they’ll ever admit.
Men trapped in unhappy marriages with women who no longer see them, who take their steadiness for granted, who forget they were once boys too — boys who needed gentleness and safety, not shame.

I watch as some of them are blamed for things they haven’t done, manipulated by guilt or fear, and made to believe that love is earned through suffering. They stay because they think endurance equals virtue. They stay because they were taught that real men never leave.

But what breaks my heart most is when these same men let their partners hurt their children — not because they don’t love them, but because the shame someone planted in them years ago has begun to bloom. Shame grows in the dark; it feeds on silence and watered-down self-worth. Over time, the words that belittle them become the only truth they recognize. The sunlight of love and appreciation fades, and they start to wilt under the weight of someone else’s control.

I don’t see broken men — I see men who were never allowed to heal.
And I ache for a world that teaches them they deserve tenderness too.

Sometimes I worry if my own pain, my shortcomings, or the parts of me still learning how to love without fear could ever wilt the men I’m raising. I try to find new ways to heal myself — to water what is growing instead of what is broken. Because I’ve learned that healing doesn’t only come from books, prayer, or therapy. So much of what I’ve learned has come from these great men — the ones who lift me up on my worst days and remind me that strength and softness can coexist.

They are proof that healing doesn’t belong to one gender. It belongs to all of us brave enough to face our wounds and love better because of them.

Healing is always possible.
It doesn’t matter how long the pattern has existed — you can start today. Change begins in three steps: awareness, accountability, and action.

Boundaries aren’t walls; they’re doors with locks and keys.
They tell others how to treat you while teaching you how to protect your peace.

Healthy boundaries sound like:

Walking away is not punishment — it’s preservation.
Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is stop participating in your own harm.

In the age of curated lives, many abusive parents—especially narcissistic mothers—use social media to craft a flawless public narrative: charity events, holiday photos, humble-brag posts about parenting “sacrifices.”
These online façades confuse friends, family, and even courts, making it harder for victims to be believed.

The truth, however, is never found in a filtered post. It’s found in actions.
Look beyond the pictures:

Social media can hide the truth, but behavior always reveals it.

Children raised in these families grow up internalizing confusion, guilt, and self-doubt.
They often struggle to:

This is generational trauma—the passing down of pain disguised as protection (APA, 2023).

True masculinity and femininity are not in competition—they are complementary forces meant to bring peace and stability.

Healthy masculinity: Protects without control, provides safety through integrity and empathy, and values truth over image.
Healthy femininity: Nurtures without manipulation, loves without condition, and values connection over performance.

When both exist in balance, children grow up understanding that love is honest, not performative—and that empathy is a strength, not a weakness.

Leaving an abusive or image-obsessed family dynamic is not an act of failure—it’s an act of freedom.
You are teaching your children that pretending everything is okay when it’s not is not love.
You’re showing them that marriage is not more important than the mental, emotional, or spiritual health of a person.

Marriage is a legal contract. It was created by governments, not by God.
God calls us to protect the innocent, to heal the brokenhearted, and to tell the truth—not to idolize the institution of marriage at the expense of humanity.

If you grew up or are living in a home where image mattered more than honesty—document the truth.
Speak it safely.
Seek support that values transparency over tradition.
Protect your peace and your children’s future by refusing to normalize harm disguised as love.
Healing begins when you stop playing a role and start living in truth.

Lyndsay LaBrier
The Merchant Ship Collective — Light the Way

American Psychological Association. (2023). Childhood psychological maltreatment and intergenerational trauma: Summary of empirical research. Washington, DC: Author.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022). National intimate partner and sexual violence survey (NISVS): 2016/2017 report on intimate partner violence. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.cdc.gov

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2024). Child maltreatment 2022: Summary of key findings. Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau.

Weiser, D. A., & Weigel, D. J. (2024). The performance of family life: Impression management and authenticity in social media parenting. Journal of Family Communication, 24(1), 45–61.

Zhu, H., Li, J., & Kline, T. (2025). Verbal abuse in childhood and adult mental health outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ Open, 15(2), e055612. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2024-055612

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